Imagine knowing you can change who you are by your thoughts? By simply thinking differently, you can transform yourself, for good or for bad. The mind is a powerful tool. It controls your thoughts, emotions and behaviours.
It’s common to have negative thoughts roam around in our heads. We are mostly unaware of our negative thoughts since these negative thoughts are masters of disguise. They lurk in a sea of thoughts, camouflaged, unable to be detected by your conscience and appear sporadically. Difficult to detect due to the fact that its part of us and we get so accustomed to them.
A method to be self-conscious about these negative thoughts is meditating. Once you take the time to meditate you notice and are more aware of your internal dialogue. You notice when you say to yourself, “I can’t”, “no one will listen to you”, “don’t be ridiculous”, “why are you even trying". Without you even realizing, your subconscious self-talk leads to self-doubt and most likely prompts you to abandon some of the goals you had set out for yourself. Taking the time to listen to your thoughts will allow you to identify triggers when you negatively talk to yourself.
Imagine someone you trust - a parent, sibling, close friend - would talk to you the way you talked to yourself negatively on a daily basis or even multiple times per day. How would your deal with that individual? You would most likely confront them and tell them what they were saying is not true. Another way to deal with negative self-talk is adding a name or a face to it. This allows you to remove the negative self-talk from one self and talk to it like it’s another person.
Identifying the triggers and dealing with the negative thought is half the battle. Next comes shifting your mindset to positive thoughts such as “I can”, “helping one person is worth it”, “you won’t know for sure unless you try”. Take charge of your thought pattern. Be the leader of your thoughts. If you catch yourself in the negative mindset, flip the thought to a positive one and be grateful.
It won’t be a straight path to success. There will be ups and downs and you might feel you are not making any progress. However, what is important to remember is to be aware of your thoughts and notice when the negative thoughts happen. Once you catch yourself in that negative state of mind, the next time it will be easier to detect and to deal with it. Nothing comes easy but with practice, it will get easier. You will get to a point where you will be shushing the negative thoughts and be more confident. Of course, you will still have those bad days but they will be far in between. As the saying goes, you are what you eat, you are what you think is also true.
Take care.