DanaAtkin

It’s so easy to dish out the negative self talk. It’s easy to have a go at ourselves for our short comings, our didn’t do’s, our “should have done”s. Yes, it is good to know where we might have improved. But it doesn’t do us good to beat ourselves up about it. If we do, we wear ourselves down. We get tired, we get emotional and we set that negative self talk into a self perpetuating cycle of self belief that we’re never good enough, or we never get it right or the classic “I always….” (insert your always, go to stance, reaction or way of being).

The fact is that to change this, we need to recognise that we’re sometimes going to get things wrong. We need to take from that any lessons we can in order to move forward and upward. And then we need to turn the perspective around and realise that more often than not, we did the best we could with the facts and details we had at the time. It’s about accepting where we were at, what we did or said and then choosing to learn from it. From there, it’s easier to begin to talk nice to yourself again.

Create yourself a gratitude jar or journal but make the topic specifically about you, yourself, your abilities, your qualities, what it is you bring into the world. That is, write something nice about yourself. You can even ask friends to contribute some nice thoughts about you too. This will be your “medicine” for self talk.

When you find yourself in a perpetual downward negative self talk cycle, prescribe yourself a daily dose of love.

Then, when you’re having a particularly down day, do a lucky dip into the jar or a random page open in a journal and see what all the lovely things are about you and allow that to begin to lift your mood and set you on the upward cycle again.

Remember, create your little jar of love notes to yourself, when you feel down, take a daily dose of love and allow it fuel your positive self talk.

As always, download and save to your desktop or phone or print it and pin it somewhere you’ll see it. When you see it, say it. And if you know someone who would also benefit from this mantra, share it.