This negative self-talk keeps us holding back and is an inconvenient distraction. It is certainly not advantageous when we want to try something new.
You become disillusioned when you don’t succeed straightaway. Have you ever experienced that? The disillusion is demotivation. How can we feel motivated again? Action alone is not enough. I can take action and still not feel motivated. What is the answer? Progress is part of motivation. Action – Progress – Motivation. Your subconscious needs proof before you can convince it of something new and before it takes on a new reality. This is why positive thinking and positive affirmations are not the magical tools that many people claim they are. I can talk positively all day long and for weeks on end, turning into years, but still nothing changes. You are still there where you were a year or two years ago. What does help?
Action – Progress – Motivation.
Embodied feeling. Your nervous system gives you signals. Your nervous system is very intelligent.
How can we silence this doubting voice inside our minds?
We can silence this doubtful voice by simply recognising it, conversing with it, and turning the volume down. Over time, you will find that the voice is not as loud anymore. You can also feel it in your nervous system. You feel calmer. We all have our doubts in our minds, and this is the language we speak to ourselves. This is the internal dialogue you have with yourself very frequently during the day. Fear is attached to it as the voice in your mind has one primary function and that is to protect you.
Somewhere in your life, you might have experienced that people laughed at you. That feeling of being laughed at has manifested as an emotion and your subconscious mind doesn’t forget. It is embedded in your nervous system, which is linked to your brain. The limbic brain is responsible for processing this emotion. This is the emotional centre in your brain, and as children, we only process with our limbic brain – the primitive brain. So, when you experience someone laughing at you, that very same feeling gets triggered in your nervous sytem and it happens at a speed you are not even aware of. Autopilot. The process is that it gets pushed up from your subconscious to your conscious mind and you start to keep quiet by not voicing your opinion because in the back of your mind there is this memory of being laughed at and the emotion attached to it. Consequently, you are reluctant to speak up in meetings or other occasions because your ego, the limbic mind, wants to protect you. That is its job.
But what if you succeeded? Fear is attached to the doubting voice and what we think is often not true anyway. Your past experiences and circumstances were entirely different from what they are now. But the emotion being triggered in that moment is real. Recognising those emotions that arise, identifying a familiar situation, and then telling yourself, ‘oh, this happened when I was 8 or 9 years old,’ is crucial. I am safe now.’
Possible negative self-talk:
1. What will the other people think if I did…?
2. What if I fail?
3. What if people look at me?
4. I won’t say anything because they might not like me then.
5. I never get that right.
6. No matter what I do, I just don’t feel good enough.
7. Others are always better than me.
If, let’s say you sang a lot as a child, and then you stopped singing because of maybe some criticism around you, but you knew you were good and you enjoyed it. Later on in life you wanted to take it up again; would you or wouldn’t you? You see, a lot of the former experience might have come from people who did not want you to succeed. But is the situation your problem or theirs? Someone else made you believe and the belief is not even yours. I would love to see you sing right now and say, ‘That felt really good!’ Important is that you celebrate your successes, and you can do that very easily – anchor them by a gesture. It could be as simple as giving yourself a “high five” and say “YES!”
You can see that you took ACTION. You made PROGRESS. By doing it more often, you provide your subconscious with evidence. This is MOTIVATION.
Let’s go back to YOUR fun, and you can turn that doubting voice down. Your confidence will grow steadily. If the radio is too loud, you turn down the volume. Same principle.
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