June 7, 2021 by Dymphna

T-Bomb: How to conquer negative self-talk

Truth Bomb Tuesday: There are two places negative self-talk comes from. One is bad. The other is a disaster.

Where does negative self-talk come from?

Your self-talk is important. These are the things you tell yourself about yourself. They give you an insight into your beliefs and attitudes about your most important asset:

Your self.

Some people come with great self talk. They’re encouraging and supportive. They reflect a belief in a person’s abilities and intrinsic self-worth.

These people are the lucky ones.

The rest of us – and probably the majority of us really – have to live with negative self-talk. We have to endure an inner monologue that puts us down – that always throws doubt on to our abilities and our fundamental loveabilityaness.

(Yes it’s a word. My inner monologue says so.)

And so it’s one of the things we have to work on. If you’re constantly telling yourself that you’re not good at something and that you’re going to fail, guess what! You’re probably going to fail.

So we’ve got to turn that around.

Now, in my experience, there are two types of negative self-talk.

The first genuinely reflects a negative perception of ourselves. For whatever reason, we’ve come to believe that we’re not good with money, or we’re not good with numbers, or we don’t deserve to be wealthy or whatever it is.

The antidote to that kind of self-talk is shifting the underlying beliefs. Maybe affirmations might do it. Change the talk, change the belief.

This is actually a reasonably straight forward fix.

But there’s a trickier self-talk that’s much harder to defuse.

This is self-talk that comes from laziness.

This is self-talk that is willing to throw the self under the bus, just to avoid doing something difficult.

It’s the person who has to do a study module on feasibility studies, who throws up their hands and says “Oh, I’ve never been good with numbers. I can’t do this.”

It’s the person who’s about to sign up for a financial training program, who declares, “I’m not good with money, I’ll always be poor.”

It’s the person faced with finding time in the week to study the course materials who just says, “I can’t do this. I’m dumb.”

The negative self-talk is a justification for the person’s laziness. Sorry to be blunt, but it’s their refusal to take responsibility for themselves.

Their negative self-talk is just an excuse.

Now, you can have results or you can have excuses, as I always say. So excuses are bad enough on their own.

But this is doubly bad because you’re reinforcing a negative perception of yourself. You’re talking down your skills and abilities.

And that has consequences.

The more you say it, the more you come to believe it’s true.

And once you believe it’s true, it comes true.

And what’s happened? You have actually made yourself “dumb” or “bad with money”, just to avoid doing some work!

What a disaster.

So watch out for this.

Negative self-talk is a weed that needs to be pulled out at every opportunity.

But watch where that self-talk is coming from.

And whatever you do, don’t let your laziness feed you negative lies.

DB.