What To Say When You Talk To Your Self

by Shad Helmstetter

We are too busy fixing the train to realize that we are on the wrong track. We are too busy staying alive to figure out how to live.

Awesome quote!

Those who wanted to achieve but did not, or could not, had somewhere inside themselves, wanted to achieve just as much as those who did. They just didn’t have the right programs in place to get the job done. They wanted to achieve, and if they had first rewired some of their programs, they would have.

For any personal growth concept to be successful, it has to be simple. It has to be easy to use. It has to be easy to put into practice. And it has to work.

Remember, too, that your old self-talk is a habit. It feels natural and it feels comfortable, even if it is negative. By knowing what to expect, you will be ready to meet that old self-talk head on, override it, and begin building a new habit.

How we “feel”––tired or energetic, listless or enthusiastic--is mental and chemical; it is physiological.

By replacing your earlier negative or neutral self-talk with new commands, you are activating healthy, productive chemical and electrical control centers in your brain which will automatically work for you instead of against you.

Your self-speak and other forms of self-talk are the determining factors in whether the real you, the inside you, wins or loses.

The easiest way to determine which of the people around you are the real winners at life and which are not, is to listen to their self-speak––what they say when they talk about anything. Winners use self-speak to build an attitude that produces winning results.

Learning to build the best in yourself—by learning to give yourself a refreshing new program of self-speak––is one of the greatest gifts you will ever give to yourself. Once mastered, it is a treasure you will never lose.

Although you can carry on a self-conversation silently, you will find that when you talk to yourself out loud you are forcing yourself to put your thoughts into words. That helps you clarify your thinking on the subject and become much more specific than you are when you’re just letting thoughts drift through your mind.

Self-write is the kind of self-talk that you write out, word for word, for yourself. It is self-talk that is phrased in specific self-talk statements which deal directly with the most important new instructions you want to deliver to your subconscious mind––the new programming you want to work on most.

self-write is an effective way to reinforce the other tools you use to reprogram. It focuses your attention, makes you think, and gets you actively involved in the process of erasing the old negative programming and actively participating in the process of replacing the old with the new. That kind of focus––that amount of involvement––fine-tunes your initiative and adds energy to your determination.

When you want to fix a problem, you have to fix more than the symptoms—you have to give yourself a complete diet of self-talk covering every facet and every phase of your life that created the problem, or every area of your thinking that was tying you to the old mental programs.

“Don’t worry too much about what the other people around you think about your self-talk. Just keep doing it.”

The end result was that both of them began to talk more, started making some new plans, and started working together again. Her self-talk had the same effect on him as it did on her! It made no difference whether he believed in the self-talk or not. His subconscious mind didn’t care; it simply acted on the new information he was unconsciously programming in. He was, without even thinking about it, accepting the new, more positive programming which was being played as a background to their daily lives. Initially, one of them “believed,” and the other did not. It didn’t make any difference.

In your own personal practice of self-talk, the most immediately helpful thing you can do is to listen to self-talk.

Listening to recorded self-talk sessions has some advantages going for it which are as yet unrivaled in the self-development field. The first and most important advantage is that you can listen to positive self-talk that is wiring your brain and improving your life, while you’re doing something else. You don’t have to really listen. Your subconscious mind will be busily programming in the positive new information about you whether you are consciously thinking about it or not.

At the same time, it programs our subconscious minds with a winning script of internal motivation to give us lasting results.

One of my favorite self-talk sessions is entitled “Believing in Incredible You.”

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.”

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.

(Self-talk is going on in our brains all of the time, although we’re aware of less than ten percent of it.)

When you hear yourself using the wrong kind of self-talk, either thinking or saying the wrong thing, immediately edit the message. Change it. In that moment, turn it around and rephrase it in the positive. “I just can’t seem to get organized today” immediately becomes “I am organized and in control, today especially.”

When you hear yourself say something like “I’ve really got a problem with this...” turn it around and say “I can handle this. I’m a capable person and I handle problems well.”

THE KEY IS REPETITION It was the experience of losing weight that first made me aware that anyone who wanted to change their self-talk, no matter what they wanted to improve in their life, could do so by listening to repeated self-talk each day, as I had.

Listening to self-talk is the most effective means I’ve ever found for changing our programs. After years of seeing so many people change their lives by listening, I have come to the conclusion that self-talk should be listened to in every home, everywhere (and I’ve been working on that). It would change the world.

The reason listening to self-talk is so effective is that it gives you the repetition that is required to rewire your brain. And it does so without you having to take any extra time, or consciously work at it. As we’ve seen, the more often the same messages are repeated, the stronger the brain wires them in. Listening to self-talk each day while you’re getting ready in the morning, driving in the car, going about your day, or listening when you’re going to sleep at night, creates that repetition.

Note: For information on available self-talk audio sessions go to www.selftalkstore.com or www.selftalkplus.com.

Setting goals, and working at reaching them, is part and parcel to becoming healthy, wealthy, and wise; worthy goals are essential to true and lasting self-fulfillment.

Talk to yourself about your work and the people you work with in a way which makes your work work for you.

Your success will always depend on what you think, what you tell yourself most. Expect the best, and then tell yourself the best. If you do, there is a good chance that is what you will get.

True leaders have their own selves firmly in control; they are in command of their actions, their feelings, their attitudes, and their perspective.

The limits of our income are set by our own internal beliefs.

If you want to earn more, you have to start by seeing yourself as worthy, deserving, capable, and willing––and by redirecting yourself to do so.

is our choice to see things any way we want to see them. If we want to view our circumstances as dark and discouraging, we can. If we would rather view our circumstances as acceptable, hopeful, changeable, and positively possible, we can. But it takes more than just wanting things to work out right. That’s why things didn’t work out right in the first place––we hadn’t given ourselves the right pictures, the right input to create the right output. And that’s something any of us can do something about.

your own self-programmed self-talk lies at the root of your success.

All habits are the result of our previous conditioning––things we learned to do, and then practiced them until they became what seems like a natural way to behave.

only when you paint an entirely new picture for your subconscious mind that you will derive the full benefit from your self-talk.

talk looks at the “whole being” (all of the furniture in our mental apartments) from a holistic point of view. It doesn’t just cure the symptom; it changes the problems that caused the symptoms in the first place.

Programming creates beliefs, beliefs create attitudes, attitudes create feelings, feelings determine actions, and actions create results.

the attitudes you have about yourself determine the attitudes you will have about everything else around you.

For a moment, replace the word “problem” with the word “challenge.” Goals create challenges––and challenges create goals.

The more programming it receives to help you reach the objective you present it with, the more it will move in that direction.

People who are the most successful at whatever they do are those who are their own best motivators. They stand on their own feet, get themselves moving, and put themselves in charge of their own success.

Being told “no” never bothers me. Instead, hearing the word “no” doubles my determination and adds to my positive enthusiasm.

If you have made the decision to be in control of yourself, you will talk to yourself in the right way—immediately, directly, realistically, and positively.

Don’t waste the power of your mind giving in to the petty inconveniences of life. Use that energy for something good.

Keep in mind that the secret to programming the brain is repetition, and that the part of the brain that stores all of our programs doesn’t know the difference between something that’s true, and something that’s false.

The more of your old self-talk you change, and the more often you use the new self-talk when you talk to yourself about the subject, the better you’ll do at making the change and making it permanent.

Stasis, in personal growth, happens when you stay in one place, and live between two opposing positions. In this case, the two opposing positions are 1) Where you’ve been up to now, and 2) Your unlimited future and where you’d like your life to go next. It’s like you’re standing in the middle between your past and your future, not wanting to stay where you are, but not able to put yourself into action and launch forward with enough enthusiasm and belief to get you moving.