Does your mindset support you or hinder you? Does the self-talk in your head move you positively toward your goals or away from them? Self-talk or intrapersonal communication is the constant feedback that you give yourself throughout the day.

This is a very important question that I ask my clients. It’s truly amazing how many people are unaware of the amount of self-talk that goes on in their head at every moment of every day. Even when you sleep, you are “making movies” about your life! Are you the hero or the villain? Have you ever taken the time to really listen to the “voice inside your head”? I often ask, “If you were to write down all of the feedback that goes on in your head and read it back to yourself out loud; how would it make you feel?” Most people don’t think of it this way, but your subconscious does! Your subconscious mind is sitting in the background, listening to every word and the scary part is that after it hears it enough times, it starts to believe it! So ask yourself again. “Is my self talk supporting me of hindering me?

If you listen closely you may be very surprised at the amount of times you harshly judge yourself and put yourself down. Now if listen even closer, you may find that it’s not even you talking…it’s a replay of what others have said to you and you believed. A lot of the standards that we judge ourselves by are actually opinions from other people in our past that we listened to and then chose to agree with. Notice that I used the word chose. It is always your choice whether to believe or not believe someone’s opinion of you. As soon as you agree with them you have made the choice to take on that belief system and make it yours. This is not uncommon when you make a choice to change your life for the better and someone else is jealous of you… It is very important to remember: “Those that have abandoned their dreams will tend to discourage yours.”

Even advertising has a tremendous effect on our choices. The first goal of advertising is to make you feel a sense of lack or fear and a need to have that product or service. Remember that you have the choice to either accept and agree or disagree and move on and this choice will profoundly affect your inner happiness.

Often, if we listen close enough we will hear things that our parents, siblings or friends said many years ago when we were a child and as a child we chose to believe it. It doesn’t matter that they may have been mad and didn’t even mean what they said; we chose at that time to believe it and agree with it and it became a truth to our subconscious mind. It is amazing how many things we “say” to ourselves every day in our self talk and don’t even stop to realize that it is old, out of date and not even true. The challenge is that we have been doing this so long that it is just habit and we don’t even know we are doing it!

The most important thing to remember is that you can start changing all of this today! You can make the choice to erase the old “recordings” and begin to reprogram your subconscious mind to a new and better soundtrack! It takes time, but if you truly concentrate and want to change, you can do it. At first you will need to identify all of the times that your thoughts do not support you and consciously make the effort to rephrase the thought in your mind. It will take time and practice and you must not get discouraged because in due time you will become your own best cheerleader! Supportive and encouraging self-talk will become so natural to you to that it will actually start to feel unnatural to say anything negative about yourself. You will be amazed at how, instead of putting yourself down for a “mistake”, you will actually start to learn from the “life lessons”!

As with anything good in life, it takes practice but anyone can do it! So don’t be afraid to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, pat yourself on the back and say “Great Effort”!

Here’s to your success!!!