Positive vs Negative Self-Talk: What’s Better?
How the little voice in your head can change your worldview and impact your decision-making.
The only person you spend every waking moment with is yourself. Only you both see and experience every up and every down. You know yourself best and you are your chief advisor. That’s why self-talk is so important. How you speak to yourself matters just as much as what is said.
What is Self-Talk?
Self-talk is that voice, the inner dialogue, that vocalizes your thoughts, helps you make decisions and guides you through life. It’s the commentary that springs up when you go back to the past, analyze the present, or look toward the future. The inner voice runs through scenarios and then articulates a conclusion. That conclusion can be positive or negative.
Negative Self-Talk
Negative self-talk is the default for most of us. We only see the flaws in what we’ve done, even if what we did turned out okay. Whatever happened, we could’ve done better and reacted differently. It puts a dampener on good times and drags bad times even lower. Inwardly, you turn pessimistic, even if outwardly you display something different.
Examples of negative self-talk:
“You’re not good enough”
“That was bad”
“Work harder, you’ve not done enough”
“You don’t deserve it”
“What makes you think you can do that?”
“There’s no point in you trying”
You can see how negative self-talk sets your perspective of self and the world. It can cause you to close yourself off from new experiences and opportunities. Everything you do is weighed down by the weight of self-doubt. But it can also be extremely motivating.
One root cause of negative self-talk is holding high expectations for yourself. You’ve visualized ambitions you want to achieve. Since you haven’t met that mark yet, you feel as though you’re letting yourself down or you’re doing something wrong, and speaking to yourself negatively is a means to help you focus on areas that need improvement.
The issue isn’t the fact that it doesn’t work, because it can. The issue is that goals change and your expectations expand. It’s like making a sandcastle with sand from under your own feet. The castle grows and you sink. However, what you were hoping for was to grow alongside the castle. That’s where positive self-talk comes in.
Positive Self-Talk
This will feel very alien to most of us, maybe even silly. Have you ever met someone optimistic and thought they were a little innocent? They’re like that because their worldview is completely different. They see blue skies where you see clouds, and that’s the key. Positive self-talk uplifts soothes, and opens your eyes to potential routes through the obstacles.
Examples of positive self-talk:
“You’re capable”
“There’s room for improvement, you’ll learn and grow”
“You did well”
“You’re worthy”
“Believe in yourself”
“You’re persistent, keep trying”
Once your self-talk shifts, so does your outlook on the world. Self-limiting beliefs no longer hold. Doors appear where there were only walls before. You’re no longer fighting against the current, the current is now flowing with you.
Positive self-talk is a learned behavior. It’ll feel unnatural and forced at first. Eventually, though, it’ll begin to overwrite the negativity, slowly becoming the norm. You’ll find that you can still hold high expectations for yourself and analyze situations to find areas for improvement, but you do so without punishing yourself.
You become the school teacher who’s always happy to help rather than the teacher who gets angry when you don’t understand. A question to ask yourself now is: which teacher did you learn better from?
What’s the better option?
Well, it depends. When looking through the lens of mental health, positive self-talk is the clear winner. It lightens the load and puts a bright filter over the world. When looking through the lens of ambition and success, it isn’t as clear-cut. In this context, self-talk can be viewed as fire. Negative self-talk is chasing you from behind, forcing you to move forward. Positive self-talk is warmth, drawing you towards it. Which do you think is the more powerful stimulus that will push you toward success?
Conclusion
Rather than leaning towards one side or the other, opt for the middle ground. In other words, realism. Try to see events as they are, aside from emotions and ambitions. If you know you could’ve done better, understand that. If you know you tried your hardest, say that. Learn to speak to yourself as a family member or a friend, because at the end of the day, you are.
You May Also Like:
