What to Say When You Talk to Your Self! Part 4

Part Four- We Can Begin Right Now

   

         Let’s begin listening to everything we say about ourselves right now. Let’s erase what’s not working and replace it with what does work. Here’s the tricky part though. We need something to fill the void once we start erasing or we’ll just eventually fall back into that abyss of our old way of talking to ourselves and our old ways of behaving. We need to have a word-for-word vocabulary to replace the old with or our new and improved life won’t last.

            You see, wanting it is not enough. Deciding to do it is not enough either. According to Dr. Helmstetter, the human brain says, “Give me more. Give me the words. Give me the directions, the commands, the picture, the schedule and the results that you want. Then I will do it for you. Give me the words!”

            Dr. Helmstetter believes many times good self-improvement does fall short of self-talk because many of the self-improvement techniques out there are lacking some of the basic things that make up self-talk and make self-talk so powerful and enduring. These simple but powerfully effective things that self-talk has that many other self-improvement strategies lack is that self-talk is simple, easy to use, and it works.

            Now, don’t laugh yet at the simplicity of it all yet. Often, it is in the simplicity that the genius lies. Most self-improvement strategies can help us improve our lives for a while, but the bottom line is that if it isn’t simple, then eventually we’ll stop doing it. Next, if it’s not easy we’ll also stop doing it. For example, most of us probably don’t mind expending a few seconds of energy here and there for self-talk. But, how many of us will spend one hour every day improving ourselves? Not many. Lastly, it has to also work. If our thought patterns don’t change, something that self-talk does do, well then, we can keep on beating ourselves over the head with these other methods of self-improvement all we want, but sadly, they will eventually fail us because we still have the old crappy programming.

Dan Blanchard is an award-winning author, speaker and educator. Learn more about Dan at: www.DanBlanchard.net. Check out Dan’s teen leadership book at: http://tinyurl.com/glxzjaf