No B.S Friday: The way you talk to yourself can limit the results you get
When I first got married I used to follow my wife around and comment on the things she’d do.
If she spilt the tea, I’d say “Way to go. You’re such a clutz.”
If she called the dentist by the wrong name I’d say, “Nice work idiot. You fluffed that up.”
Or if she put together the shelves with the wrong side facing out, I’d be like “Oh man, you’re such a moron.”
And that’s why I have this scar across my forehead and walk with a limp.
No, I didn’t say these things to my wife.
I said them to myself.
These are all instances I remember where my inner monologue just went me because I had made an honest mistake.
I know this is a pretty common phenomenon. We can be our own harshest critics. And we can be brutally unfair.
And we can follow ourselves around, and torment ourselves, in a way that we would never to do another person – never in a million years.
(Promise, babe.)
But I don’t think it’s healthy. I’m sure it’s not healthy.
We don’t want to cultivate that kind of relationship to ourselves. If I’ve learnt anything from the mandatory management classes I’ve been forced to sit through its that if you want to get the best out of people, you need to treat them with respect.
If you want the best out of yourself, you need to treat yourself with respect.
But it’s also just a nicer way to exist – without some judgemental monkey in your head calling you names.
And so the next step from there for me was to start trying to catch myself laying negative self-talk on myself, and then correcting myself.
Which became something like, “Way to spill the tea, flopnot… No, don’t talk to yourself that way, you idiot.”
So that didn’t work. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Two acts of self-criticism don’t become a praise.
And so the strategy that worked for me was to try and slowly ‘crowd out’ the negative stuff with more positive stuff.
It’s like that dieting advice. Don’t set yourself the task of eating less cake. Set yourself the task of eating more carrots. If you eat more vegetables and healthy food, then slowly you can start to crowd out the unhealthy foods.
And so that’s what I did. I’d say, “Way to spill the tea fat-arse…” and then catch myself and say “but I love you and you do an amazing job of most things.”
Every time I caught myself saying something negative, I’d try and balance it out with something proportionally positive.
And eventually I retrained my relationship to myself. I got myself hooked on the positive. I started to feel a bit allergic to the negative.
And from that point on, I really started to get some great results out of myself.
“Jon is an excellent worker. 100 gold stars!”
JG.