I Changed My Negative Self Talk with One Simple Question.

To partake in negative self talk is to be human. I’m quite sure my local squirrel, the one in my front yard, doesn’t concern herself with mistakes or berate herself.

It occurred to me a while ago that I participated too often in negative self talk. I actually started to feel sorry for myself. As if I was being bullied. By you know who; me.

On any given day I might have said to myself, “OMG that was so stupid.” Or, “You’re a complete failure.” Or, “That was the dumbest thing you’ve ever done.” Or, “How could you make a mistake like that?” And, “You’re a terrible [fill in the blank] or terrible at [fill in the blank].” Trust me, there were endless variations and I used to get pretty creative with the insults.

I started catching myself doing this and one day thought,?you would never speak to your kids like that, why would you speak to yourself that way?

It was an epiphany: I would never, ever speak to my children the way I spoke to myself. I would never say to one of my kids, “You’re such a failure.” That would put me right up there with the worst parents, the Mommie Dearest crowd. I know intellectually that a screw up one day can result in a lesson learned the next. Everyone makes mistakes, and any particular error does not define you.

The worst thing is that labels can stick with a child for their entire lives. I have a friend with three sisters who still says, this one was the smart one, and the other was the pretty one and so and so was the rebel and I was always the artistic one. That’s why I’m terrible at math. Well, if you look at all of them, they are still that thing. Probably because their parents labeled them and that stuck. I cringe when I hear of these things. Because the “artistic one” never gave herself a chance to be good at math or science, which I’m sure she would have been successful with because she’s highly intelligent in more ways than one.

According to?Mayo Clinic, some common forms of negative self talk include:

• Filtering.
• You magnify the negative aspects of a situation and filter out all of the positive ones.
• Personalizing.
• When something bad occurs, you automatically blame yourself.
• Catastrophizing.
• You automatically anticipate the worst.
• Polarizing.
• You see things only as either good or bad. There is no middle ground.

Yeah, I’m the poster child for personalizing. But I have come to believe that negative self talk is a bad habit and like all bad habits, it can be broken. A good mantra I now use is: “This is just where I am right now and I’m doing the best I can.” Positive affirmations in the morning can be effective, too.

There are other proven ways that you can help yourself overcome negative thinking but the first step, like the first step in dealing with any challenge, is awareness. When I caught myself doing negative self talk I asked myself:

“Would you say that to your children?”

The answer was always a resounding, no. Then I turned it around and approached myself with more understanding. It worked remarkably well.

It is also amazing the positive result this had on my general level of happiness. If you participate in this kind of thinking, I suggest you rethink it.