Self-Care 101 – Managing Your Self-Talk

I did a workshop recently with a group of girls aged 12-18 with a focus on personal leadership and self-care. Simply put, my goal was to support these young women to develop a growth mindset; to approach life courageously with an open-mind about their value, abilities and endless potential. I also helped them to understand that to do so will require equal amounts of bravery and resilience. That putting themselves out there to test their boundaries – figuring out what they like and dislike and where their strengths and development areas are – will inevitably mean facing setbacks and disappointments, and that they’ll need to have good strategies in place.

One of these strategies is paying attention to the stories they’re telling themselves about themselves. The first step is to pay attention to the tone of their thoughts – identifying when their self-talk is encouraging and positive and when it is discouraging and critical. When it is constructive and useful and when it is unhelpful and limiting. The second step is flipping the negative narrative (or changing the story) to one that is more beneficial. Eventually, with practice, they’ll be able to manage their self-talk, and even filter out the unhelpful stories that others might tell them.

I really enjoyed facilitating that workshop. These young women were incredibly open and perceptive. But if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that lately I haven’t been practicing what I’ve been preaching. I have allowed the story someone else believes is true about me to get inside my head and plant seeds of doubt. I have allowed their false story to start negatively influencing the way I think and feel about myself. Thankfully I am practiced at listening to my thoughts and recognising when I am being unnecessarily self-critical, so I can flip the narrative (or change the story) to something positive. But like anyone else, I am human and therefore not immune to the negative stories of others. Nor am I able to completely block out the critical thoughts I have about myself.

I firmly believe that one of the things we women often struggle with – irrespective of age and life experience – is self-criticism; the tendency to criticise ourselves for what we feel we do ‘wrong’ or ‘not well enough’. While it is useful and valuable to reflect on our actions (or lack of) in the spirit of improving, this can be a double-edged sword. If we do so from a place of kindness and with an attitude of growth, we might identify something we can do better in the future and actively do it differently. But if we set our standards too high, we may begin to fixate on things we do im-perfectly, developing the idea that we are always lacking in some critical way. If we constantly tell ourselves ‘we can never do anything right’ we are at risk of believing this limiting story and developing a deficit mindset – holding us back from developing the very skill we wish we had or changing the behaviour we’ve identified as problematic. The result? You guessed it! An even greater sense of failure and harsher self-criticism.

And so we get trapped in a truly vicious cycle. A bit like being stuck on a merry-go-round with a high-school bully that won’t let you get off. Except in this case, you’re the bully.

If you’re reading this and thinking you’re inner bully needs to be shut down, all you need to do is start paying attention to your thoughts. I’ll admit that this can be challenging, especially if you’re leading a busy life and your thoughts are often focused around others – at home, at work or elsewhere. You may feel you simply don’t have time to stop and reflect on the stories you tell yourself throughout the day. But I can promise you that creating small pockets of time and space (even if it has to be while you’re on the toilet) to tune into your thoughts will go a long way towards lightening that heavy mental load.

Here are a few suggested questions to help with the process:
– What have I been thinking about today?
– What percentage (roughly) of those thoughts were about me?
– What percentage of those thoughts were affirming (positive) and which were self-deprecating (negative)?
– Is there a pattern to my thoughts? Do I think more positively or negatively about some parts of myself than others?
– What impact did those thoughts have on how I feel about myself?
– How could I turn my self-deprecating thoughts into growth-focused ones? 

Once you become more conscious of your self-talk, you’ll be able to shift those limiting thought patterns – “flipping the narrative”, so to speak – and really take life by the horns.

Rather than allowing your inner-bully to hold you back.

♥