3 Tips To Changing Your Negative Self-Talk

In her book True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart, meditation teacher Tara Brach poses this question:

If you could be your own best friend, how might you change the way that you talk to yourself?

This is a juicy question, and in this article I want to unpack its underlying assumptions and three things you need to begin to change your self-talk.

The Underlying Assumptions

Baked into this question are a few assumptions:

• you don’t already act as your own best friend — or at least not a healthy best friend
• the way you talk to yourself now isn’t constructive
• you are aware of how you talk to yourself now

Of course, if this question resonates with you, then it’s likely that the first two assumptions are valid. Your version of being your own best friend may look more like a “frenemy,” and the way you talk to yourself, at least most of the time, is not constructive.

This leaves us with the third assumption: that you are aware of how you currently talk to yourself.

In discussing this question with some peers, it was clear to me that we were all aware of our unhealthy patterns here.

Some examples that came up:

• “I beat myself up a lot.”
• “My inner critic is very active.”
• “No matter how great I do at something, I focus on the worst part of my performance.”
• “I’m very hard on myself.”

Although these comments describe the energy of how we may treat ourselves, they don’t mention the things we say.

The question we are considering is:

If you could be your own best friend, how might you change the way that you talk to yourself?

The ABC’s of Change

Whenever we talk about change, it’s best to start with the fundamentals.

I call this the “ABC’s of change”: Awareness Before Change.

Self-talk is a habit. Habits are triggered by our subconscious. To change them, we must bring them into our awareness.

The habit of negative self-talk is one of the most difficult habits to change, because it’s harder to bring self-talk into your awareness. The defining aspect of self-talk is that we don’t speak it out loud.

If you want to change how you speak to yourself, the first step is awareness of how you speak to yourself now.

3 Components of Awareness To Help You Change Your Negative Self-Talk

My work to change my self-talk has been slow and full of set-backs. In my journey, I’ve identified 3 components to awareness necessary to changing my negative self-talk.

(1) Specificity

Specificity is a crucial component of behavior change, especially when it comes to self-talk. If you’re going to change your self-talk, you need to be aware of the words you say.

Knowing that your inner critic is active is a good start. Seeing that you beat yourself up is great awareness. AND each of us has certain patterns of words we say to ourselves in these moments.

What, specifically, do you say to yourself when you are being hard on yourself or beating yourself up? What specific things does your inner critic say?

What words do you use?

You can’t change how you’re speaking to yourself if you don’t know what you’re saying now.

TIP:

When you find yourself beating yourself up, listen to the words in your head and write them down. Do this repeatedly. As you do this more often, you’ll be able to catch yourself in the act and stop that way of speaking to yourself.

(2) Source

The second piece of awareness is the source of these words: where did they originate?

Although you may have been speaking to yourself in this habitual way for a long time, you were not born with this negative self-talk going through your mind. Our self-talk habits are learned behavior.

You learned this way of speaking from someone else. Maybe from multiple people.

Who taught you how to speak to yourself in this way?

Most likely, your self-talk echoes what you heard from people who influenced you in your formative years: parents, caretakers, teachers, mentors.

Your words may be echoes of how these people spoke to you, how they spoke about you in your presence, how they spoke to each other, or how they spoke to and about others in your immediate world, such as your siblings.

The way you speak to, about, and around your children is how they’ll speak to themselves.

When you become aware of the source of your words, you realize that your pattern of self-talk is learned behavior. That’s good news, because what is learned can be unlearned.

TIP:

Once you see the words you say to yourself, reflect back on where you first learned how to speak in this way. Or, if your formative influences are still alive, listen to how they speak now. It’s likely they still speak in the same patterns. If you have kids, listen to how you reflexively speak to your kids. There’s a good chance it echoes your self talk.

(3) Service

The third part of awareness to facilitate change is awareness of how the behavior is serving you.

Anytime we engage in a repeated behavior or action, it’s because we get something from it.

One common resistance point I’ve had in my efforts to reform my negative self-talk is the fear that if I speak nicely to myself I won’t ignite myself to action. I’ll be too “soft” on myself.

I sometimes wonder: Where is the line between speaking nicely to myself and speaking in a way that will motivate me to the action I need to take? Don’t I need some “tough love”?

This question and the underlying fear is the portal to awareness of how my negative self-talk serves me: I use it as a motivator. I am conditioned to respond in a certain way to criticism and harsh comments delivered in the guise of “tough love.”

The real issue here is not where is the line between nice self-talk and tough love? but how do I retrain my response mechanism to respond to loving self-talk?

If you’re wired to respond with action only to criticism or a disciplinary force, then you’ll continue to be hard on yourself, strengthen your inner critic, and engage in negative self-talk unless you rewire your response mechanism.

Our failure to retrain our response mechanisms is why our efforts to change our negative self-talk often don’t last.

If you’ve learned to jump at the sound of a bell, you won’t suddenly jump at the sound of a horn — unless you retrain yourself to jump at the sound of the horn.

In the same way, changing your self-talk must include “rewiring your neurology” so that you learn to find motivation from self-compassion and self-love.

TIP:

At this outset, this requires you to trust that you will be able to motivate yourself to “get stuff done” through self-compassion and self-love.

H/T to my friend Peter Nakamura, for sharing this prompt with me. Peter just released the second season of The Ikigai Project podcast, in which he explores themes around crafting your purpose.