I Can Do Anything Good!

Have you seen that YouTube video of the little girl, standing on her bathroom sink, repeating the mantra, “I can do anything good! I love my hair! I love my pajamas! I love my house! I can do anything good yeah yeah yeah!” If you haven’t, I’m gonna need you to click on the link at the bottom of this post when you’re done reading.

Why do I bring up this little girl, watching herself in the mirror while chanting these phrases you ask? Well that’s a good question! Today I want to talk about a very important topic that oftentimes gets overlooked. The power of positive self-talk. Now, if you were ever an athlete and got into sports psychology you might have learned about this topic already. But if you haven’t, let me be the first to tell you how important and helpful it can be to use positive self-talk in your everyday life.

Many people go through life not even aware of the subconscious things that they tell themselves. They don’t realize that they talk down to themselves all day long. If they heard how they talk to themselves being said by someone else, out loud, they would be shocked. Yet they do it constantly to themselves. For some reason, we often treat ourselves much harsher than we would ever treat others. It doesn’t make sense, and yet until we become aware of how we are talking to ourselves we just do it automatically. Think about it. There are so many memes out there about trying to go to sleep and instead your brain decides to go through every single thing you have ever done in your life that has been embarrassing or that you are ashamed of. I literally saw a post about it yesterday and it sparked my desire to write this post.

Positive self-talk can be a powerful tool in your arsenal of winning at life. Too often, our internal dialogue is plagued with negative commentary. We recall all the times we have failed, or been belittled by someone we love and over time internalize those messages into how we think about ourselves. In extreme cases this can do irreparable damage to our psyches and therapy may be necessary to help deal with past traumas, but for most people there is a way out and a way forward. But first, you have to be aware of your internal dialogue.

Once you become aware of your internal dialogue, you can begin to change it. Replacing negative self-talk with positive self-talk can be tricky at first. So let’s go through an example. Say you make a mistake, your initial reaction may be “I never do anything right.” If you find yourself saying this, stop yourself and intentionally say, “I choose to accept and grow from my mistakes.” Or maybe, “As I learn from my mistakes, I become a better person.” This helps you to transform mistakes into opportunities to work on personal growth. Mistakes can be used to weight you down, or they can be used as your stepping stones to being a better person. You are the only one who can decide which path you take. And the path you take is directly affected by how you talk to yourself about that mistake.

This is not lying to yourself. This is merely looking to bring the positive out of a negative. A positive exists in every negative. It is a fundamental truth that negative things will happen to you. They happen to everyone. No one is perfect, no one is immune to negativity. But the difference between those who succeed, find joy and happiness regularly is how they perceive each negative thing that happens to them and how they talk to themselves about it. That’s the secret sauce.

Lastly, I want to offer you a technique to help bring awareness to how often we have internal dialogues that I would like to share with you. It can help you recognize, and change your internal dialogue to create a lasting difference in how you communicate with yourself. Put a monetary value on each time you find yourself in a negative self-talk situation. Depending on how often you have negative self talk maybe some of you should start with a penny or ten cents ;) For my example we will use a dollar. Each time you internally OR externally find yourself saying something negative about yourself, first correct yourself and replace that negative thought with a positive one, and then tally up the dollar. At the end of the day, see how many dollars you have accumulated. Each day you should be working to have less dollars tallied up. At the end of the month you can tally up the dollars and see how much money your negative self-talk has accumulated. At this point you can take the money you have earned from changing your negative dialogue to a positive one and spend that money on yourself, put it into savings, invest it, or donate it to a charity of your choice. This allows you to reaffirm with your own money that you love yourself and you are worthy of positive self talk! You deserve all the good things that happen to you! So go out there and be your own best hype man!!!