The Importance of Learning to Manage Your Inner Dialogue
Your inner critic can really hold you back. Once you start to internalize the messages your fear and doubt give you, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of avoiding anything that seems too difficult or scary. You truly can break this pattern. The key lies in learning to manage your inner dialogue. Keep reading to learn more about the connection between what you think and what you feel. You’ll discover tips for taking control of conversation and turning the dialogue around in your favor.
What You Tell Yourself Matters
The words you tell yourself really can have an influence on how you feel and behave. This internal dialogue can spiral into an incessant pattern of negative messages if you’re not careful. These words feed upon each other, and you end up telling yourself things that make you feel bad. While it’s true this can hold you back from trying new things or reaching specific goals, it can also have a negative effect on your daily mood. When you tell yourself something long enough, you start to believe it. Internal dialogue is powerful. It can lead to stress, anxiety, depression, and more. Often, what you tell yourself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and your words become truth.
Take Control of the Conversation
Once you recognize the negative pattern of words, you can start to turn them around. Just as negative messages can make you feel bad, positive ones can improve your outlook. When you think more positively, you’ll start to feel more optimistic. Your actions will also reflect this positivity. So, take time to listen to the things you’re saying to yourself. Take notes of the common threads. Put a positive spin on things when you catch yourself saying mean things. Look for the reality and find ways to address the problem. Pay attention to how you feel when you turn your negative thoughts into more realistic and positive ones. Chances are you’ll immediately feel a little better. Use that feeling to guide future internal conversations.
Stop, Drop, & Roll – Don’t Allow Your Negative Thoughts to Spiral Out of Control
Once you start telling yourself negative things, it’s hard to stop. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to recognize and counter the mean things you tell yourself. Yes, much like the strategy you learned as a kid to extinguish flames from clothing, this tool works to put out the flame of disruptive thoughts that can threaten to keep you off course.
· Stop
The first step is to stop. That seems pretty straight forward and obvious. Stopping can be difficult, though, until you learn to be aware of the thoughts that erode your confidence. Hopefully, you’ve had time along our journey to assess your own negative self-talk and to practice turning it around. With this technique, stop and address the mean words that are playing in your head the minute you notice they’ve invaded. Tell yourself that you’re in charge of your thinking and that you’re going to change this unhealthy pattern right now.
· Drop
Next, you’ll drop that thought. Recognize that it’s unhealthy and isn’t helping you in any way. Understand that you have the power to change your thinking and to frame it in a way that benefits you. If you’re having trouble discarding it, you can try a couple different tactics to refocus yourself. Take a deep breath, inhale slowly, and then let it out. You can even imagine you’re blowing away the awful thought and letting it go. Counting to 10 also works wonders when you need to re-center and get control of your emotions. Once your head is clear, it will be easier to move onto the next step.
· Roll
Now it’s time to roll with some new, positive, and helpful thinking. Instead of holding onto the old thought that tears you down, drop it and roll on with a new version that has the potential to truly motivate you. Self-criticism isn’t meant to build you up. This “tough love” approach rarely works, with others or with ourselves. So, take the last step of this process and come up with a better thought. This can be hard to do on the run. That’s why you took the time with the drop to breathe and relax. Now that your mind is clear, you can find a more positive take on negative self-talk your inner critic was dishing out.
The stop, drop, and roll method to manage your inner dialogue is merely a way to force you to slow down so that you don’t keep fanning the flames that are harming you. You’re able to catch your breath and make decisions to stop your own mean voices from taking over and spiraling out of control.
Learning New Patterns Takes Time
Affirmations can be powerful. Once you start giving yourself pep talks and turning things around, it’s likely things will get better. You know the real person you are. Reminding yourself of your strengths can make it easier to shut your inner dialogue up. However, these things can take time. You’ve probably been telling yourself these things and tearing yourself down for a lifetime. Learning new habits requires repetition in order to put them in place. So, be gentle with yourself if you backslide. That’s to be expected. With practice, you’ll get there. Positive self-talk will replace the bad more often than not. You’ll see.
Keep this advice in mind when your inner dialogue gets difficult.
Leave us a comment below about what you notice about your inner dialogue.
P.S. You may also be interested in our popular ebook, Hush Now – Quiet Your Inner Critic, and the accompanying Workbook available on Sale now in our Digital download section or in our YouTube Channel.
