It takes very little time to find posts that will tell you about mindfulness, the power of positive thinking and/or the motivational mantras of highly successful people.
Truth: They only tell half of the story.
What happens to the many people who read those stories and instead of being inspired, they come away feeling even worse than they did before?
The conversation in their head immediately shifts to ‘Why me?, I’ll never be like that. I don’t have the money those people do. They’re way more invested than I am.’
That has a name. It’s called negative self-talk and we are all guilty of it.
There are 4 different types of negative self-talk: filtering, personalizing, catastrophizing and polarizing.
- Filtering is when you take out anything positive about a situation and magnify only the negative.
- Personalizing is when you make a situation all about yourself or another specific person even when it has nothing to do with either. Here’s something to think about: most people you come across really don’t have the time or the desire to go out of their way to make you their target or your day miserable.
- Catastrophizing is taking one negative situation and exaggerating its effects on the big picture.
- Polarizing is when a person sees only bad or good and no middle ground in any situation.
So how do you stop this cycle?
One of the best books I’ve read is “The Four Agreements ” by Don Miguel Ruiz. He explains the first agreement as being the most powerful one and the most difficult to honor, “Be Impeccable with Your Word.”
Simple, yet so difficult to do.
Your word is the power you have to create. Through your word you manifest everything. Words can set you free or ensalve you. Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of your energy; it means to use your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself.
We have learned to lie as a habit of communication with others and more importantly with ourselves.
Negative self-talk gets in our way. It latches on and can and distract us from our goals. Negative self-talk can convince us that there’s no point in trying, because we’ll probably fail anyway.
Negativity can only grow in your mind, if it finds fertile ground to do so.
You have the power to change how you speak to yourself and exactly what you say. You can transcend negative self-talk by simply saying that you will do so, right now!
Seeing the positive in any situation comes in equal proportion to the amount of love you have for yourself.
Here’s to living fabulously Chica!
Do you have a question? PLEASE, let’s connect HERE or leave me a comment below!