How To Talk Positively To Yourself

It's very easy to talk negatively to ourselves when looking at our actions, situations and how we've effected others. Today, we're going to look at how to talk positively to yourself instead. 

The longer you talk yourself down, the more that well become your internal opinion of yourself and the more you will listen to that voice.

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Transcript

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Got you here.

Thanks for listening.

Hello.

Welcome back to the therapy guy.

My name is Alan and today we're going to be talking

about change, adapting and how our thoughts and feelings can affect

what we do and how we think and feel.

I hope you're all keeping well and staying

safe in all these circumstances and ever changing

situation and being as careful as you can

be with yourself and obviously for other people.

So just a quick catch up to where we are

for those of you who've listened in before, you realise

that I give you advice and guidance over things you

can do for improving your mental health.

I also tell you some of my life experiences,

some things that have gone on for myself and

today we're going to be talking about some changes

that have happened to myself, how I've managed with

those and hopefully then that would encourage you to

maybe start doing some different things and thinking about

things in a slightly different way.

We're going to be talking about how I adapted my

thinking, how I have to continually work at it.

It's a bit like going to the gym.

If I went to the gym for six months and then

stopped, some of the skills, some of the strength that I'd

learned in that six months would gradually begin to stop.

What I'd like to talk about today is

obviously the fact that how COVID and everything

else has affected myself and my businesses.

Now, I run two businesses and

they're all designed around mental health.

One of them is Horizon Counselling and

that supports people through their mental health

and any issues and experiences that they

may be having in their present moment.

And then I had another business called Mindset

Training and that was based around educating people,

running courses, trying to obviously allow companies and

things like that to facilitate training for their

staff and help people prevent mental health issues

and experiences, negative experiences from happening.

Unfortunately, because it's a relatively new business, the

cover would come along and really a bit

of a spanner in my plans.

Now I recognise that I haven't got much control.

I've always abdicated in my life that

I have no control over the future.

I can only control how I think and feel about

things right now and I encourage people to think about

that and actually say, if I am as confident and

as comfortable as I can be in this moment, then

that will hopefully change how I react to different experiences

and circumstances that present themselves.

My business mindset.

Unfortunately, I've had to make the

difficult decision to close mindset down.

Now, obviously it's upsetting when you put all

this effort and energy into building something into

creating something, into making it mine for them

to turn around and not work.

So over the past month, which is one of the

reasons why I haven't really been on, I've been obviously

trying to sort out all the logistics, all the staff

and my lovely colleagues, my fantastic people that were working

me, I've actually had to adapt to this new way

that we're going to be working in the future.

Now, one of the things that I find is our

thoughts can control how we think and feel about ourselves

and the world that we are around us.

Positive thoughts can lead us to feeling good and

negative thoughts can impact how we think and feel.

And sometimes our thoughts can happen really

quickly that we fail to notice them,

but they can still affect our mood.

And if you notice other people around you,

you might see them saying things, I always

do this, this always happens to me.

Bad luck comes in threes these sort of comments.

And you can also do it with things like if

you see something you don't like, automatically you have this

talk about that person and you think about all the

reasons why you don't like them, vice versa.

If you see someone you do like,

of course you have the positive feelings.

Now, often at times, these automatic thoughts

can be quite negative and irrational.

Identifying these thoughts and replacing them with

new rational thoughts can help you deal

with a situation, deal with how you're

thinking and feeling in a different way.

I'm not asking you to go super positive, I'm

not asking you to say, oh no, I really

like this person, when you honestly don't.

What I'm talking about is just us changing

to a more rational statement and allowing yourself

to feel differently at the moment.

So I use that example.

If I see someone I don't like and obviously there

are these people around, we can't get on with everybody.

I might think, oh, here they are again, what they're

going to be like now, all this sort of thing.

Here we go.

Yes, there'd be lots of net

thoughts going through my head.

Depending on how that person is and how they affect

me, my new rational thought may be, well, today, I'm

not going to let that person upset me.

So what I've done is just allowing myself to

take control of how I think and feel.

But also I've removed any pressure and any

negative feelings that I have for that person.

So I'm going to interact

with that person slightly differently.

This can work with things like going to the gym

or doing things we don't really want to do.

We can encourage ourselves to say, right, I'm just going to

do this for today and then see how I feel.

So we're making it slightly smaller now with mindset.

Like I said, I've had these thoughts about

negative thoughts about myself and how I've handled

things what things I could have done better.

And if I allowed those automatic thoughts to continue,

it could have spiralled into me, criticising myself, into

me, placing myself into a lower mood.

What I've actually tried to do is rationalise

the things that I've done and then looked

at what I can improve for next time.

Now, I know I've made mistakes, I know

other people have made mistakes as external circumstances

and situations that were beyond everybody's control.

I've had to learn from it.

I've had to look at how I think and feel each

and every day and say, right, what am I going to

do today to take control back from these negative thoughts?

Now, some of the ways I do that is I change the

story, I change the words that I use to describe myself.

So I'm going to give you a way of doing that.

What I'd like you to do is just write down on

a piece of paper or think about what you feel.

Your maybe five biggest weaknesses, flaws or

faults as you see them are.

For example, I could put down I have no confidence.

Then I'd like you to look at each one of those

statements and try to think of a time that you may

have used some of that confidence or used some of the

things that you feel are your flaws or weaknesses.

So for myself, I might have thought,

well, I feel I have no confidence.

Well, I've started my own business,

I spoke up for myself.

I try new things and talk to

new people all of the time.

Maybe then we can rewrite some of those statements

and I can change the words I used, not

to super positive and super upbeat for different things,

for different statements like, I'm more confident than I

think, I can do things that scare me, or

I have all the confidence I need.

It can be quite an easy exercise to do.

It's about breaking things down, allowing yourself to

see at different times you have had what

you need to get through these circumstances.

We've had negative experiences.

You're here, you had the strength to get through them.

And you can use that strength that you used before.

If you use change the words that are going around

in your mind and change the words that you use

to describe yourself, give yourself at least a 50% chance.

If you say, what if this is going to go wrong?

Why don't you say, what if it goes right?

What if I fail?

Or what if I succeed?

What if I pass?

What if someone says no?

What if someone says yes?

Those are just basic examples.

And then another thing that I try to do,

and it's quite a big thing lots of people

do there's things for the Gratitude Journal.

Now, for me, writing down things every

day is a bit of a struggle.

I don't tend to engage with that, but I do try

to acknowledge some of the things that I do each day.

And it's just the way that I've

adapted the Gratitude Journal sort of philosophy,

really, where you write down things.

Every day I think about what I've done.

So, for example, I could put

down, what have I accomplished today?

How was today different?

What have I achieved?

A positive experience.

I've had positive things.

I saw, I felt good when and

maybe something I did for someone else.

They're just basic examples of how I might think

and how I might use that to change my

day, change the way that I think.

I would also encourage you to break things down.

So what we can do and we do this,

we catastrophize, we say things big statements like, that

ruined my day, I had a really bad week.

We start to join all of these bad experiences, all

of these negative thoughts together, and it becomes bigger and

it becomes this big cloud that hangs over us.

What I try to do, and I say try because

obviously at different days, it works better than others.

It depends on the circumstances.

It depends what's happening to me.

I'm no different from yourself.

I have to adapt every day to what's going

on and how I think and feel about that.

I use this example with a lot of my clients, and

I sort of say, if you go to a theme park

and you have a lot of fun, you're there for 8

hours and it's great and you're really enjoying yourself and have

a fantastic time with whoever it is you're with on the

way home, you may break down.

So there you are, you're stuck on

the motorway, you're stuck on this road.

You might have to wait for a

while for the breakdown, truth, et cetera.

What's going to happen the following day?

You're going to focus on that breakdown.

You're going to be telling people, it ruined my day.

It's going to cost me a fortune to get the car fixed.

I had to wait ages for the tow truck to turn up.

The person I was with was moaning and whinging

because they were hungry or tired or thirsty.

What we've done is we've dismissed all the

fun that we've had at the theme park.

We haven't allowed people to know about that.

We haven't given any details.

What I try to do for myself

is break my day down into okay.

This morning was great.

This afternoon I struggled a bit.

We had a lot going on.

But overall, the day has been okay.

So I'm not dwelling, I'm not adding things in.

I'm taking the day as we come.

I know that over a certain few days I might have

a continued amount of stress and anxiety in my life.

And obviously, if you think about me closing a

business, the past month has been a struggle.

What I've done is each day I've just started a

new day I haven't really dragged the previous day on.

I haven't allowed it to come in and cloud my judgement.

At least that's what I hope.

It can be difficult to make these changes.

It can be difficult sometimes for us

to change how we think and feel.

We are sort of almost educated throughout

our lives to feel the worst.

Our brain naturally scan our environment for

the worst thing that's going to happen.

It does that to protect us, to keep us safe,

so we don't do things that are endangered our lives.

So what I want to do is try

to change that over a period of time.

And it is like I said, going back to the gym.

You can't expect to go to the gym once

and become out this fitness fanatic or a big

body builder, loads of muscles or anything else.

You have to work at it.

You have to keep going.

You have to exercise and do those things regularly.

Your brain is no different.

How you think and feel is no different.

You will have days where you'll

struggle more, same as you do.

Maybe you're in the gym where you don't want to

go, but you're going to force your way through it.

The more you do it, the easier it becomes.

No different to getting skillful at sport

or skill for art or anything else.

It can take practise.

It doesn't happen overnight.

Use your brain like a muscle.

Just exercise and find things that work for you.

Find things that challenge how you

think and then keep going.

Try and do some spend some time every day

thinking about your day and trying to rationalise things.

Try not to go super positive.

Can be really difficult to feel positive

if you've had a bad day.

But try to go rational.

It will be okay.

Just give yourself a 50 50

chance of everything working out.

Now, as always, if you want some help and

advice or more guidance or more details about some

of the things and some of the exercises that

I've been talking about and suggesting to you today,

please contact me, drop us an email.

I'll be more than happy to send you some

exercises through the post or through email, whatever way

works for yourself, so that you can actually start

to practise some of these things each day for

yourself and help other people as well.

I like to use other people.

I like to sort of say Practise on them. Really.

If someone says me, what if this goes wrong I have

in my brain, I think, okay, what if it goes right?

I don't necessarily say that, but what I'm

doing is just allowing myself to get into

that thought process, that thought pattern.

You can do this too, but it takes a

bit of time, it takes a bit of practise.

You will make mistakes the same as

what I do every day now.

Yes, I have to learn and adjust and adapt to

the things that are going on in my life.

But fortunately for me, because of the

practise that I've had, I have this

baseline, this foundation where I start from.

And in a couple of the other podcasts

I'm going to be following this one.

We're going to be talking about some techniques

to help with anxiety, techniques to help with

sort of controlling your stress and no mood.

We're also going to be talking about how

you can listen to a meditation which will

help you with some mindfulness and all of

that, which should be about ten minutes long.

That's all.

And then we're going to be talking about

possibly make some tinnitus, how tinnitus affects us,

how tinnitus can cause some stress and anxiety.

Today, what I want you to remember is

just take one day at a time.

Try to focus on some of the things

you're getting right just as much as you

focus on the things you're getting wrong too.

They're there.

If you look for them, your brain instantly

looks for the things you get wrong.

All we do is encourage you to use your

brain to exercise that muscle and look for the

things that you do get right for the people

that are there to support you and encourage you.

Any questions or you need any advice, or

you'd like to come and speak to me

personally, please just let me know.

I'll give anyone some advice in the guidance.

We're here to help everybody.

We want everybody to look after each other.

That way, we all have the best sort

of way of getting through this and living

a healthy and happy life for ourselves.

For today, I'm going to sign off.

I want you to take care, I want you

to stay safe, enjoy yourself, and above all, smile.

But for now, thanks for listening.

This has been the therapy guy.

Thanks for listening to the therapy guy.

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people about our great podcasts, Horizon.

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health and wellbeing needs.

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