How to Use Your Self-Talk For A Positive Outcome

Why Should You Use Your Self-Talk For A Positive Outcome?

On any given day, tens of thousands of thoughts race through our minds. To be more exact around 48.6 thoughts per minute or 70,000 per day. The exact number may vary from day-to-day.  Leading behavioral researchers have told us that as much as seventy-seven percent of everything we think is negative. What if you used your self-talk for a positive outcome?

Daily, we have so many opportunities to make decisions to make life better. We if we would make choices that contribute to our growth and success?  Since our words have a supernatural component, they do much more than communicate. They contain vitality with frequencies and vibrations that can be scientifically measured.  Think about that for a minute.

Our words are one of the most powerful spiritual tools available to us.  What we say can promote life and health or depression, and despair.  So, think of your words as invisible containers that can inject meaning, intention, power, boldness, and confidence in your life.

We have the ongoing challenge of using our self-talk for a positive outcome.  When we speak to someone, we impact them at the level of their body, soul, and spirit.  Do you see how our words can powerfully affect ourselves and others?

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.” Proverbs 18:21

Therefore we should be cautious about what we say.  We have the power to spread life, healing, or curses, and death. “You can’t,” “You won’t,” and “You’ll never be” are destructive forces. Our positive self-talk can create positive experiences, and negative thoughts create negative experiences.

Use Your Self Talk Gets Things Done

Developing positive self-talk is a big reason people can stand up to rigorous training, endure deep pain, and overwhelming challenges. It’s the best way to hypnotize ourselves to deal with anything life can throw at us.  That’s also how Marines disassociate from themselves to get things done.

Another way to think of using positive self-talk is to think of like a tomato seed; when planted, it will only grow a tomato plant.  An acorn will only grow into an oak tree.  A baby will grow into an adult.  If we continuously repeat negative statements about ourselves or about life, we only keep producing more negative experiences.  So the moral is only to speak of the good we want in our life.  Then only good will come back to me.

Self-Talk is Powerful For A Positive Outcome

If you think that your self-talk isn’t within your control, then think again. A lot of people falsely believe they can’t fix their thoughts. Yet, you do control your self-talk through the power of your mind.

Self-talk is essentially just the things you tell yourself about yourself. Think of a moment when you have done something silly. How do you react? Do you dismiss yourself for being foolish or stupid or tell yourself you’re a clumsy mess? Your self-talk is powerful and it is a dialogue that follows us around all day.

So, our self-talk matters.

Yet, far too often, that dialogue is a script that prevents us from achieving our potential. We tell ourselves we’re not smart enough, talented enough, attractive enough, or good enough. None of that is true. We will have positive results if we use our self-talk for a positive outcome.

• Defining Your Best

What is our life like when we’re at our best?

Is our thinking more positive when we’re at our best?

How do we feel when we’re at our best?

What does our best look like to us? Create a picture of it in your mind. Now, make it as real as you possibly can. Imagine how you speak, act, feel, and think. What images come to mind? Capture them and write them out, try to do it from the perspective of a third person. Research suggests that doing it in the third person is a more powerful approach.

One of the country’s leading researchers on body image, David Sarwer, is a psychologist and clinical director at the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania. He says that a mirror is one of the first tools he uses with some new patients. He stands them in front of a mirror and coaches them to use gentler, more neutral language to evaluate their bodies.

“Instead of saying, ‘My abdomen is disgusting and grotesque,’ ” Sarwer explains, he’ll prompt a patient to say, ” ‘My abdomen is round, my abdomen is big; it’s bigger than I’d like it to be.’ ”

The goal, he says, is to remove “negative terms” from the patient’s self-talk. The underlying notion is that it’s not enough for a patient to lose physical weight — or gain it, as some women need to — if she doesn’t also change how her body looks in her mind’s eye.

• Repeating Our Best

To max out your self-talk, set a commitment. Make a 90-day commitment to repeat positive specific things to say to yourself. Every day, repeat a positive statement. Rewrite the images in your mind. Capture your words, practice them in your imagination. Commit to doing this daily for three months. It might be a simple sentence that you can repeat as needed and keep handy on a sticky note. The purpose of this is to build neural pathways in your brain that allows both positive self-image and a self-image to form and thrive.

Creating Your Best

To create your best, you have to provide yourself with a positive environment. Essentially, you want to create a spa environment for your brain. So, your favorite photos, books you love, articles you enjoy, anything that you can regularly absorb to provide a healthy escape for your mind. Think of it as creating something to fuel your best self in real-time.

As far back as 1911, Dr. Henry Head and Dr. Gordon Morgan Holmes — two neurologists — published a series of papers exploring the body-brain connection. “They used an example by the kind of hats that were then in vogue, which were these big hats with big feathers at the top,” They noticed that when women who habitually wore the big hats walked through doors, they ducked — “even when not wearing the hat.”  Their mental self was wearing the hat, even if their physical self wasn’t. Neuroscientists are still trying to understand precisely how this works, but it shows you how your mind perceives different things as reality.

Conclusion

You can defeat yourself with negative self-talk. Or, you can use those tens of thousands of daily thoughts to promote positive self-talk.

With some commitment and practice, you can create a more positive influence on your life and your outcomes.  Think of it as reprogramming, or hard reset, or whatever you need to inspire authenticity. It will be worth the time and effort you invest.

I am Shirley Noah, an internationally known stress expert and entrepreneur. I would love to connect further with you to help you improve your health and wellbeing.  If you are interested in learning more about self-talk,  please take a look at my popular Optimize Your Self Talk