What To Say When You Talk To Your Self by Shad Helmstetter

What To Say When You Talk To Your Self by Shad Helmstetter

Author:Shad Helmstetter [Helmstetter, Shad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Park Avenue Press
Published: 2011-06-09T00:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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Getting Started

Now let’s review what we’ve learned about self-talk, and how you can best get started using it.

Since I first started researching and writing about self-talk in the 1980s, we’ve learned a great deal about it, and how to change it. Today, people all over the world have become “positive self-talkers,” and the interest in self-talk continues to grow dramatically. While the inaugural edition of this book was first published in 1986, its readership never stopped expanding, and today, editions are published in over seventy countries, and still growing.

As the popularity of self-talk has grown, there has been an increasing torrent of people who want to change their programs and rewire their brains by practicing positive self-talk. As we just saw, recorded self-talk sessions with specially-worded, repeated self-talk phrases have been listened to in every format from early cassette tapes to compact disks to today’s self-talk sessions that are now instantly streamed on the Internet. People read self-talk from daily inspirational calendar books in the series entitled 365 Days of Positive Self-Talk, and thousands of followers read my self-talk posts each day on Facebook.

The reason positive self-talk has grown so broadly in popularity is due to research in the field of neuroscience that has shown, scientifically, the major role self-talk plays in our attitudes, our health, our well-being, and in our overall success throughout our entire lives. And people get it. In our computer-driven age, people quickly understand the basics of self-talk and programming, and they want to know how to use the science of self-talk to make their own lives better.

Fortunately, we’ve learned how to do that. The three-step process I’ve taught for many years includes Monitor, Edit, and Listen.

MONITOR

The best way to monitor your self-talk is to practice mindfulness. As we’re using it here, mindfulness is “being aware of being aware.” The concept comes to us from the practice of meditation, and it has proved to be a major player in the science of well-being. Mindfulness not only helps you become aware of what you’re thinking at all times, it also creates balance, reduces stress, and lowers the volume of the amygdala’s fight or flight alarm signals in your brain.

The reason mindfulness is so important to self-talk is that in order to change it, you have to start by being aware of what your self-talk is now, and you can do this by creating the habit of monitoring your self-talk at all times. Listen for any message you give to yourself that could wire your brain to work against you. Listen to both the words you say out loud, and also to the words that you think or say silently, to yourself. (Self-talk is going on in our brains all of the time, although we’re aware of less than ten percent of it.) Your self-talk can be either a conscious or an unconscious dialogue, and it includes everything you think about yourself or anything else.

When you start monitoring your self-talk, you’ll be listening carefully, so you’ll start to notice things you’ve been saying to yourself that could be working against you.



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