Talk To Yourself As You Would To A Friend - Negative Self-Talk Begone

Be more aware of your internal communication. Have you heard the way you speak to yourself? You wouldn't speak to someone else like that, so why do you speak to yourself like that? Change your negative self-talk now.

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash

Transcript

Hello everyone!

I hope that you're doing amazing wherever you are in the world.

My name is Boom Shikha and I welcome you to my channel.

As always I'm so grateful that you're listening,

Subscribing and commenting.

I really appreciate the support.

In this one I wanted to speak to you about self-talk.

I've been noticing recently,

And I've been kind of noticing my thoughts and noticing the way I speak to myself,

And some of the things I say to myself are a little bit unfriendly to say the least.

And so I started,

You know,

Kind of questioning it.

Why do I speak to myself the way I speak?

Because if I had to kind of turn things around,

And if my sister came to me,

Or my friend,

Or my mother,

Or anyone else really,

And you know they said the same thing to me,

Or they did the same thing,

Or they made a mistake,

Or whatever it was,

Whatever I was being angry with myself for,

If they came to me I would not speak to them the way I speak to myself.

In fact I would be extremely kind to them,

And I would say,

You know,

Well things happen.

You know,

You're still human and you know you're not a god yet,

Yet.

And you know there's things that happen,

You can't control them,

And you know let go of it.

And you know I'd say all these things,

Nice things to them to make them feel better.

And then you they'll feel better,

And then they'll go on and do amazing other things.

But for myself,

If I make a slight mistake,

Or if I am a little bit lazy,

Or if I take an extra few minutes to do the task that I'm supposed to do,

Or if I procrastinate a little bit,

Anything really,

I start berating myself as if I am the most terrible person,

The terriblest person on the planet.

I don't know if that's a real word.

That I have,

That I shouldn't be allowed to speak to anyone,

I shouldn't be allowed to do anything anymore,

You know I'm I'm a blight on the face of the earth,

You know,

Things like that,

You know,

Like I just can't go overboard with berating myself.

And I'm sure you're,

You know,

You've kind of experienced this for yourself as well.

We do this to ourselves,

Where we're really just really mean to ourselves.

And I just wonder to myself why I'm like this.

Because,

As I said,

If someone else came to me,

I would be nice to them.

I would say nice things to them.

I would be kind to them.

I would,

You know,

Pat them on the shoulder.

And I would say this is just one moment,

And this too shall pass,

And you know,

Things like that.

So of course from this I kind of started building a little bit of a strategy or an idea,

Where I told myself that the next time I do something wrong,

If you want to say it,

Not wrong,

The next time I want to be mean to myself,

I decided what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to pretend like I'm speaking to a friend.

And so if I do something wrong,

Instead of being like,

Oh my god,

You're such,

Oh my god,

I can't believe you did it,

You know,

Things like that,

I want to take a step back and say,

Okay,

Pretend like it is not you you're speaking to.

Pretend like it's your friend.

Speak to yourself as if you're speaking to a friend.

What would you say right now?

And instantaneously the tone changes,

Right,

Instantaneously it's as if I'm speaking to a different person.

Instantaneously it's as if I am a different person,

Right,

And so instantaneously I was saying to myself,

Oh,

You know,

It's okay,

Boom,

It's okay,

Like,

This happens.

I'm sure you didn't mean it,

You know,

It wasn't intentional,

And next time you do it you'll know this lesson,

You'll have this lesson in hand,

And you'll be able to do better.

So it's okay,

Don't worry about it,

Everything's fine,

Right,

And at first it feels a little bit awkward and odd and like,

What am I doing?

Who am I speaking to?

What am I speaking about?

Why am I saying things like this,

Right?

At first you,

You're not used to speaking yourself like this,

You're not used to being nice to yourself,

You're not used to being kind to yourself,

You're used to being kind to other people but not yourself,

And so for me it was awkward,

Extremely awkward.

At first I was like,

Okay,

What am I doing?

This feels weird,

Why am I doing this?

But then when I got used to it a little bit,

You know,

I did it a couple of times,

The third or fourth time it wasn't that bad,

And actually I was like,

Oh this is actually really nice,

Because instead of spending a few minutes wallowing in self-pity or feeling bad for myself or feeling like,

Oh my god,

I can't believe I did this,

I just was able to placate myself and pat myself on the shoulder and be on my own side,

A video I just recently did,

And be kind to myself,

Which is such a good balm,

A soothing balm to to the soul,

And because of all those kind words and all of that encouragement,

I was able to move on past the mistake quicker.

I was able to go past it and actually start working and doing something else again much quicker and in a much more happier fashion,

Right?

It wasn't like,

Oh my god,

I need to do this and I hate it and I'm so terrible at it,

Why do I even bother?

But I was thinking to myself,

Oh you know what,

No,

It was just a mistake,

It's okay.

As I told myself,

It's fine and these things happen and I'll just keep on going and it's better to try and try and fail rather than try not at all and things like that,

You know,

Things that I told myself when I was pretending to be a friend.

Now of course this is just like a kind of like a band-aid solution because really what should actually happen is that you should be kind to yourself and your self-talk should be positive as much as possible.

You know,

Even if you make a mistake,

It has to be positive self-talk.

It shouldn't be like,

Oh my god,

You're an idiot,

But okay now go and do something else with it.

Maybe you learned a lesson,

That's fine.

You know,

It shouldn't really be like that.

You would never speak to anyone like that.

You should never speak to anyone like that.

You know,

Even if they're hurting you,

Like mostly it's nice to try and be nice.

I think that's what the idea is,

That's the basic tenet of it.

And so I wanted to do this because I was extremely interested in improving my self-talk.

I don't want to speak to myself the way I speak before.

I spoke before,

I should say.

And I know the reason I spoke to myself like this is because of the way I was spoken to by other people.

And most people are like that.

They are unkind in a way,

Especially to children.

I don't know why we speak to children like that.

Why?

Why do you speak to children like that?

Even if you are speaking to children like that,

I mean stop obviously,

But don't speak to yourself like that.

Just don't do that to yourself because it's just not a kind way to treat yourself.

And if you want to improve your love for yourself,

If you want to improve your view of yourself,

It has to start with your self-talk.

Negative thinking is another way I did recently.

Of course that's important,

But how do you speak to yourself?

Are you unkind to yourself all the time?

Do you say mean things to yourself?

Or about yourself all the time in your head?

How is that going to result in any kind of positive situation in the future?

And even though I'm pretty,

I mean I've worked out on a lot of myself and I've improved in a lot of different ways,

I do still notice that my self-talk is not as positive as it should be.

Now I'm not saying it should just be rainbows and roses and tra-la-la,

But it also shouldn't be so mean and negative.

If I make a mistake,

Cool.

Made a mistake,

Awesome,

Move on and go on to the next thing.

Don't berate yourself and be mean to yourself and unkind to yourself for minutes or days or weeks.

On end some of us do that to ourselves.

We don't forget the wrong things we've done for decades on end.

How is that useful?

How is that useful to you,

Your psyche,

Your self-esteem,

Your subconscious?

It's not useful to any of that.

It's actually a negative thing.

You're actually putting yourself down over and over and over again,

Which doesn't help anyone or anything.

So I just wanted to do this short video just to kind of outline that this is something I've been trying and I thought it was very useful for me and I noticed an instant improvement in the way I speak to myself.

So hopefully you can try this for yourself as well if you have negative self-talk.

If you don't,

Then awesome,

Really good for you and maybe you should be giving us tips on how to improve our self-talk.

But if you do have negative self-talk,

Then try.

Pretend like you're speaking to a friend.

Pretend like your friend is speaking to you.

Would your friend ever say these mean things to you?

Probably not.

Unless you have a really mean friend,

But maybe you should get rid of them.

But most people will be really kind to other people and mean to themselves.

Yes,

We have a high standard for ourselves,

But doesn't mean that we should be mean to ourselves about it,

Right?

I think.

Anyways,

Let me know what your thoughts are on the subject and if you are gonna try it or if you've already tried it or if you have positive self-talk and you have some tips for us,

Let us know as well.

Again,

I'm so grateful that you're on my channel,

On your channel,

My channel.

And I shall see you in the next one.

Bye!

Reviews

I find that when I'm alone I can even speak out loud to myself in this kind way, almost like mothering myself, as it cuts through the inner critic that can be so strong inside that we can't always overpower it with thoughts alone. Using our real voice is much more powerful of a vibration than the dark thoughts that mutter away without us even being that aware they're controlling us and hijacking our emotions and sense of self. So thank you for sharing your kind voice with us :)

You sound way to young to be so wise. Very simple but powerful approach. I am sending it to my daughter who is in first year University immediately:)