I know that you’re hurting and part of it is because you beat yourself up for every little mistake you make. I want to offer you some relief from the level of pain you’re experiencing but you might not like the solution.
Your brain can be a pretty scary place and you don’t always love digging around in the negative parts of it.
It can be scary to look at the negative parts of yourself but I also want to promise you it’s one of the most freeing things you can do.
You don’t have to share these thoughts with anyone to begin with. You can keep them safe in a private journal or document.
The good news is, the more you look at your own brain and get to know these negative parts, the less scary they become. You’ll start to see that these parts of you are hurt and scared and will be as mean as possible to try to keep you where they think you will be safe, to keep you in a place that’s familiar because change is scary.
Here are the steps to get some relief from negative self-talk:
1) Feel the painful feelings
When you’re beating yourself up, you probably feel bad. Maybe it’s a heaviness in your chest or a sticky nausea in your belly. Allow yourself to feel bad. Don’t try to run away from it. Actually, welcome it into your body.
It doesn’t feel good, but it also won’t kill you. So take some deep breaths and welcome it in.
Now I’m sure you’re asking, “Why the fuck would I welcome the feeling in??” and this is a very good question.
Here’s why: sometimes avoiding this bad feeling is what keeps you from going for your dreams. This is what stops you from taking the risk or telling the truth. The more you can FEEL THIS, the less this feeling will control you, the more you’ll get the life that you want.
I want you to be FREE. To make choices that serve you, your life, your family and so that you can build exactly the life that you want.
2) Write it all down
Write every negative thought you can think of. Start writing and don’t stop. Get as much as you can down. The amazing life coach Brooke Castillo calls this a thought download and says to put your pen down and don’t stop writing.
My negative self-talk download looks something like this:
- You’re probably going to get fired
- You should have studied more
- Did I think this was a free ride?
- Who do you think you are?
- You’re irresponsible
- You don’t take things seriously enough
- You’re a bad person
- You’re a c**t b*tch wh*re
- You meant to hurt people
- You did a bad job on purpose
- You don’t care about other people
- You’re selfish
Getting it all down will help you to have a little bit of perspective and see what parts of it are reasonable and what parts of your negative self-talk is totally out of hand.
3) Bring in a new thought
Now it’s time to create one new thought that will replace all the other thoughts. The most important thing is that the new thought is BELIEVABLE.
If you don’t believe it, it’s not going to work. So the new thought can just be one stepping stone that starts to replace all the negative beliefs.
For example, the replacement thought for:
“I’m a horrible person” could be replaced with “I made a mistake, but I was doing my best.”
If you tried to think “I’m a wonderful person” before you’re ready to believe it, it’ll simply result in an internal battle. But if you’re totally ready for I’m a wonderful person, which I truly believe you are, definitely take on that thought!
“I’m irresponsible” could be replaced with, “I did what was asked of me given the circumstances, I didn’t go above and beyond but that also wasn’t requested or required.”
If negative self-talk is an issue for you, you absolutely have to listen to the latest episode of my podcast where I’ll tell you a story of an incident that sent me into a complete shame spiral complete with tons of negative self-talk and then I tell you how I was able to climb back out.
And I want you to continue to take the risk of exploring your negative self-talk. It’s scary but there’s also way more freedom once you start to tend to your thoughts as if a garden.
You get to weed out unhelpful thoughts and plant new ones. Now, this might not seem like that fun but I promise you it’s going to be completely LIFE CHANGING.
Keep taking good care of yourself,
Bryn
