Your inner dialogues and you.

We all know well, that in almost every moment of our day we talk to ourselves inside our heads, participate in inner dialogues, though sometimes it’s more of a monologue from our inner voice than an actual conversation. It’s part of our life, which can’t be (as far as I know) turned off completely.

You begin talking to yourself as soon as you wake up in the morning and you stop when you fall asleep. Who would’ve thought that you have so much to say, right? And yet… Those inner dialogues have an amazingly powerful influence on what we do and how we do it, how we react to what’s happening around us, how we deal with failure and how we react to success.

Are your inner dialogues empowering you?

You probably figured out that the positive and helpful comments from your inner voice have a much more powerful, motivating and simply better influence on us and the ways we live our lives, what kind of people we are. The negative things we say to ourselves – now, that has a different kind of result, the one we don’t really want. Uncomplimentary thoughts, opinions, comments, which a lot of us hear for the most part, make our lives much more complicated and unpleasant, especially when we face challenges and obstacles.

The way you talk to yourself was created and structured through years of experiences, your environment and beliefs you accepted as your own. If you catch yourself on thoughts like: “I’m not good enough”, “I’m no good”, “I am so fat” or anything similar to those, you probably know for sure how much better it would be to change those sentences into words of support and motivation, something completely opposite.

Changing things. For the better.

How to do that? There are a few ways, but I like the process I’m going to share. It’s not too complicated, but for sure might be time-consuming. If you stick with it, you should be able to transform at least part of your negative beliefs and inner dialogues into something of value to you!

1. Create a list of negative thoughts and opinions – find one day, from waking up to falling asleep, during which you will write down all (yes, all!) the negative chatter you catch yourself saying/thinking to yourself. It doesn’t matter if you believe them or if you know they are true or not, note them all down. I gave you some examples earlier, so you know what to look for in your head
2. Prioritise them – sort them on the list according to the amount of influence they have on you or the order in which you’d love to get rid of them. It will make it easier to focus your efforts on those that are the most important to you.
3. Replace them with opposites – replace the sentences you wrote down with their contradictions or opposites, starting with those on top of your sorted list. Write down some new thoughts and beliefs you’d love to hear from your inner self. Do that with at least the first 10. If you want to, you can do all of them at once. Even if you don’t believe in what you’re creating at this point in time, just do it – write the new versions down. change the negative ideas into positive ones. Ones that inspire and motivate you. For example, from a thought ‘I will never finish this’ you could get one saying ‘I always finish things that matter to me’. Choose things you want to be true for you!
4. Change your thoughts – the hardest part. Every time you catch yourself on a negative dialogue (or a monologue), which relates to the item on your list, exchange the old, negative thought with the new one you wrote down, the one which is supposed to charge you and make you feel great. You might not be able to catch yourself every single time, but with practice and time – you will master it. It does take effort, but keep in mind that most of your negative thoughts and comments about yourself didn’t show up in one day. It took hundreds and thousands of repetitions, so it might take the same to remove them and replace with something positive. With time new thoughts will become a habit, and then you’ll know it was worth it.
5. Eliminate old thoughts one by one – Going through your list, replace old, unwanted patterns with new ones. When you;re done with your top 10, create another one. However, very often the change in those that disturb us the most is enough to cause a big shift in our mindset and thinking patterns. The rest of our inner dialogues gets transformed as well. And then – having your own, inner motivator (or cheerleader) – there’s nothing better than that! It not only influences our mood, but also the amount of success we experience, sometimes in a very drastically positive way!

They’re here to stay, so choose them yourself!

The inner dialogues and monologues are going to stay with you forever, so I think it’s a good idea to spend some time on transforming them into ones that support your success, growth, goals. Everything you hear all the time becomes your new belief, your new truth. And what you believe in creates you and your results, actions, habits, mood…

I think that I don’t need to convince you any longer to at least try. And even though it’s not possible to control all the thoughts we have, identifying and changing some of them can create a breakthrough you’ve been waiting for

*Image used – courtesy of luigi diamanti at FreeDigitalPhotos.net