A Radical Solution for Reprogramming Negative Self-Talk: How to Give the Most Important Speech of Your Life
“Negative self-talk is almost always self-defeating. It sets you up for failure; it anticipates failure; expects failure, like it’s a sure thing. So when you practice negative self-talk – even when you don’t know you’re doing it – you’re literally wiring your brain to fail. And your brain will do just what it is wired to do.” (emphasis in original)
Shad Helmstetter: Negative Self-Talk & How to Change It
In his indispensable book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield describes Resistance as the negative inner force that stops you from taking action toward your most important goals. It is, he says, the mental brick wall that prevents writers from writing, painters from painting, and entrepreneurs from starting their companies. It has, no doubt, prevented you from applying to graduate school, going to the gym, getting yourself out of debt, or pursuing other important goals and dreams. One of the most powerfully paralyzing weapons that Resistance uses to stop you from sitting down at the keyboard, picking up the phone, completing the application, or asking for the sale or the date is negative self-talk.
What you say to yourself is the most important speech you ever give, and you give it to yourself all day every day. Unfortunately, while many of us have taken classes and worked with coaches on how to give a speech to others, we’ve never taken a class on how to give a speech to ourselves. And it’s a sure bet that if you’re a parent, your kids aren’t being taught the skill in school.
Psychologist like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (in his book The Evolving Self) have shown that for a variety of biological, social, and evolutionary reasons the human mind, unless consciously directed toward positive thinking, will automatically gravitate toward negative, frightening, and depressing thought patterns. This was a survival mechanism 10,000 years ago when there were existential threats on the other side of every hill. But in today’s world negative self-talk is the source of self-sabotage, failed potential, and personal pain.
And here’s the real tragedy: negative self-talk is almost never telling you the truth. It’s you telling yourself lies about yourself with such frequency and intensity that you begin to believe the lies to be true. And as you embrace the notion that you’re not good enough, not smart enough, not pretty enough, you begin to behave in ways that cause you to bring about self-fulfilling prophecies of rejection and failure. And gradually, the lies become your self-embraced truth.
The ultimate irony is that when you listen to negative self-talk, it’s not even the real you talking! A long time ago people said things to you that hurt. Those things are still up there bouncing around in the attic of your mind. That’s all negative self-talk is: a malignant echo of past pain.
If you pay attention, you will recognize that negative self-talk is always in the second person. You will never hear that voice say I’m not good enough. It will always be you’re not good enough. It sounds like someone else is talking to you because that is exactly what is happening.
Some of those voices echoing around up there in the attic were initially well intended. Don’t play in the street is great advice for a 3-year-old. But all too often that initial good intention metastasizes (that’s what cancer does) into the negative self-talk of Resistance. Don’t play in the street morphs into Don’t ask for the date because you might be rejected and Don’t start the business because you might fail.
Almost everyone experiences negative self-talk – many of us to a degree that is downright debilitating. Last year I keynoted the annual conference of the Association of Clinical Documentation Integrity Specialists. Using live polling technology, I asked the 2,000+ attendees about their own self-talk patterns. As you can see from this chart, most of these very bright healthcare professionals are plagued with various degrees of negative self-talk. So am I, and I’m pretty sure, so are you.
Seven conventional solutions
There are many remedies that experts recommend for reprogramming negative self-talk, and they all can work, either alone or (preferably) in combination. So before I show you my radical solution, here are seven more conventional approaches.
Remedy #1: Don’t listen to yourself, talk to yourself. Whenever negative self-talk starts in, take control of the conversation by talking back to that invisible voice. I got this idea from a blog post by John Gordon.
Remedy #2: Listen to subliminal recordings of positive self-talk. There are hundreds, probably thousands, available on the Internet and there are also companies, including one started by Shad Helmstetter (quoted above) that sell systems. As I’m writing this, I have on my headphones playing an audio called Intense Concentration. It is boringly insipid music that purportedly has an inaudible little voice telling me that I can focus and get my work done. As a big believer in the power of the placebo effect, I’m sure it is helping.
Remedy #3: Practice mindfulness meditation. In his book Tribe of Mentors, Timothy Ferriss asked more than 300 very successful people what one thing they have taken up in the past five years that has been very helpful to them. A surprising number responded that it was a meditation practice. One of the signal benefits of meditation is that it helps you sort out the voices in your head and to see negative self-talk for what it really is: the malignant echo of past pain, and not the real you.
Remedy #4: Do something that requires intense concentration. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince) said that he took up flying because the discipline helped him liberate his mind from the tyranny of petty thoughts. When you’re trying to land an airplane, the last thing you want up there in the attic of your mind is a malignant echo telling you that you fail at everything you do.
Remedy #5: Change your reference group. Sociologist tell us that we are far more profoundly influenced by the people we associate with than we care to admit. No matter how positive and optimistic you think you are, if you’re hanging around with people who are cynical, sarcastic, and pessimistic it will ineluctably influence what you say when you talk to yourself.
Remedy #6: Focus forward. One way or another, negative self-talk is always rooted in painful memories of past rejection and failure. When you forcefully direct your thought patterns toward future goals, you crowd out this negative self-talk. Download my Memories of the Future Guidebook for a practical 10-step guide for doing this.
Remedy #7: Stop complaining. Anytime you complain, about anything at all, it is an outward projection of inner negative self-talk. By definition, you do not complain about things that are positive. When you complain you reinforce and affirm what the voice of negative self-talk is saying to you. In our book Building a Culture of Ownership in Healthcare (AJN #1 Book of the Year in 2017), Bob Dent and I wrote about 20 ways that complaining can diminish your life. You can download the poster here.
My Radical Solution: The Janitor in Your Attic
Why is it so hard to talk back to the malignant echo of negative self-talk? Because you can’t see who’s talking (remember, it’s not the real you). How does one talk back to a disembodied voice?
That is where The Janitor in Your Attic comes in. I call the process Metaphorical Visualization. Metaphors are the most powerful form of human communication because a (mental) picture really is worth a thousand words. If I tell you that the football team’s new running back is a tank you get a very different mental picture than if I tell you he’s a marshmallow. Of course, he is not literally a tank or a marshmallow, but that one word will have created an indelible mental image. That is the power of the metaphor.
So here’s a 3-step process for using Metaphorical Visualization to reprogram negative self-talk. Now, before I share this let me acknowledge that it might sound silly. But ask yourself this – is what you are doing now working? And if it’s not, remember that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.
Step #1: Visualize negative self-talk as mental graffiti
Negative self-talk is nothing more than mental graffiti. So the first step is to search google images for spray can graffiti artist. Pick an image that resonates – one that you could imagine being the mental jerk that keeps reminding you of all your past failures and telling you that you’re never good enough. Any time you experience negative self-talk, close your eyes for a second, take a calming breath, and visualize that vandal as clearly as you possibly can painting the walls of your mental attic.
Step #2: Recruit a Janitor in Your Attic
To help you clean up the mess created by the graffiti vandal you need the services of a mental janitor. So now search google images and find one that you’d like to befriend. That’s my guy Spike pictured above. When I experience negative self-talk (like at this very moment where, dear reader, my mental vandal is painting a picture of you rolling your eyes and unsubscribing) I call on Spike. As clearly as I can, I imagine him sweeping away and painting over the lies of negative self-talk.
Step #3: Replace the bad lies of negative self-talk with good lies
As I mentioned, negative self-talk is never telling you the truth. Paradoxically, positive self-talk is also often not the truth. By definition, making positive affirmations is a way of talking you into believing something that isn’t yet quite true. Every day, I start my day by reciting that day’s promise from The Self Empowerment Pledge (you should too). I know that before the day is over, I will have broken that promise at least once. But after years of lying to myself about being Responsible, Accountable, Determined and the other four promises, I break them a whole lot less than I used to.
So Step #3 is to replace the bad lie of negative self-talk with a positive affirmation that says the opposite. It does not matter if you don’t believe that to be true (your mental graffiti vandal will always try to convince you that it’s not true), but the longer you say the words, the more they will sink into your mental DNA. They will become your truth.
One More Thing: The Janitor in Your Attic and Neuroplasticity
For more than 2,000 years, we’ve been warned to watch our thoughts (for example, “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” from the Book of Proverbs). Now, however, there is solid evidence of a physiological basis for this advice. It turns out that what the way we think can actually have a physical impact on the wiring of the brain. Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz is a psychiatrist whose research has convinced him that changing our self-talk and using mental visualization can actually bring about hard-wired, physical modifications in the brain’s circuitry. In his book The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (with Sharon Begley) he writes:
[W]e are seeing evidence of the brain’s ability to remake itself throughout adult life, not only in response to outside stimuli, but even in response to directed mental effort. We are seeing, in short, the brain’s potential to correct its own flaws and enhance its own capabilities.
After reading his book I cold-called Dr. Schwartz. We had a fascinating conversation about the parallels between brain plasticity at the human level and culture change at the organizational level. I told him about The Janitor in Your Attic and asked him, if someone were to make a concerted commitment to the process, he would be able to use brain imaging technology to detect alterations in the hardwiring of their brain.
He told me that he was sure that would be the case. Since that conversation I have become much more friendly with my guy Spike, and much more emphatic at telling audiences in my presentations that they should give it a try.
I can tell you from my own experience and from why I hear from a growing number of others that Dr. Schwartz was right. A Janitor in Your Attic can help you reprogram negative self-talk, and if you keep doing it for long enough, eventually your default self-talk will become more positive.
But don’t just take my word for it. If what you’re doing now isn’t working, give this a try.
At Values Coach our purpose is transforming people through the power of values and transforming organizations through the power of people. We do that by helping leaders build a stronger Culture of Ownership on a Foundation of Values. Learn more at www.ValuesCoach.com.