self talk

Positive self-talk

Every waking hour of every day, we’re having a conversation with ourselves. This is truly powerful stuff, beautiful someone. The way we talk to ourselves affects how we think and what we believe is possible. It affects how we react to opportunities and new ideas. Self-talk influences every single one of our thoughts, beliefs, and actions.

With this kind of power, it would be great if our self-talk was always positive and supportive. But it’s not. We may say them out loud about ourselves or just repeat them in our own heads, but certain words — I call them forbidden words — do nothing but hurt us, they make us feel hopeless and helpless.

Here are some of the words I’m talking about:

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You Know What I Should Have Said?

We can probably all think of a time when our over-the-top politeness got the better of us. Someone was rude to us, but we were afraid to “make a scene,” hurt their feelings, or insult them. Or maybe someone standing next to us told us to be quiet, and we listened. Or our opinion was dismissed as “wrong,” and we let it be. We walked away and fumed, “You know what I should have said?”

Same thing, only more serious: a few years ago, Isabella, her husband and their two kids, ages 3 and 5, were on vacation in Florida and decided to take a walk on the beach after dinner. It was a beautiful night with a gorgeous sunset, and they were just enjoying being together and watching the kids collect shells and play near the water. Isabella says that the memory of what happened next still scares her.

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Give bad feelings their moment…then keep moving!

Excerpt from Dream Come True: How Love, Gratitude, and Simplicity

Can Bring Your Beautiful Dream to Life!

 

You know that feeling you get around someone who’s positive all the time—no matter what’s happening? That eyerolling “oh please” you just can’t hold back? It’s because it’s not possible to be totally positive all the time. We just can’t take someone seriously when they wish us a happy first day of Spring or they won’t admit that getting fired is NOT “the best thing that could ever happen to you!”

Inside we know: pretending everything is great when it is so not or that something doesn’t bother us when it so does isn’t living happy, healthy, and sane. That stuff we keep sweeping under the rug just turns into a giant lump we trip over every time we try to cross the room.

And that’s a good thing because denying bad feelings is denying a part of us. It leads to incredibly unhealthy thinking like, “I shouldn’t feel this way” and “This is so stupid—why am I thinking this?” Do you hear the self-recrimination in these statements, just for what comes naturally to us?

Be honest

Denying feelings is denying a part of ourselves—a part baked in from the moment we were born. Denying feelings makes us feel weird and guilty for having them and that hurts our dream quest. That’s why serious dream-seekers don’t do this! We don’t beat ourselves up and try to surgically remove honest bad feelings and replace them with plastic positive ones.

Bottom line: we will NOT be happy, healthy, and sane if we’re NOT honest, first with ourselves, and then because it will be impossible to keep our buckets of joy to ourselves, with everyone around us.

Stop struggling to erase bad feelings. They are real. They are part of you. They are totally natural and normal.

Onward!

Give them their moment: acknowledge your frustration or anger or disappointment, think it through, find the source, learn something about yourself. Maybe vent to someone you trust or get it all out in a journal, but then drop it, focus forward and get constructive, like this: “Okay, so knowing what I know now, next time, I’m gonna…”

Boom shakalaka!

Anything else is a conscious decision to let bad feelings run the show.

Um, that’s gonna be a hard pass.

Our dreams are too beautiful for this.

Beautiful is better than perfect

A long time ago, I think I must have been 9 years old, I overheard someone describing a piece of music. “It’s not beautiful,” she said in a tone that made it clear this was not a compliment. “It’s perfect, but it has no heart. So perfect, yes, just not beautiful.”

For some reason, this stuck with me, and I think about it all these years later. That a piece of music (or anything or anyone) can seem perfect, but lack something that makes it fall short of beautiful. That there are important differences between perfection and true beauty that make striving for perfection not worth it.

Beauty is layered in meaning and intriguing, the way someone’s crooked smile or weird ideas make them attractive and interesting. Or the way we can’t stop staring at an abstract painting in vivid but mismatched colors and misaligned textures. Beauty is boundless confidence in a person whose physical attributes would never get them a magazine cover. It’s the sexy, fashion-forward outfit rocked by someone you’d expect to see in sweats and flats. Or ocean-deep humility in someone so insanely talented that they could rightly brag about their accomplishments for days but would never dream of it.

For all these reasons, real beauty is in the unexpected, and less (even far less) than perfect can be incredibly beautiful.

This means the less perfect we are, the more mistakes we make, the more beautiful we become. The more interesting, the more complex. It means that we are more beautiful with time and experience. We gather strength, grow in character, and earn wisdom through every mistake, every should have said.

We have to remember this in tough situations that don’t go well. The less perfect we are, the better we’re getting: smarter, stronger, and more beautiful through every experience.

“Your vibe attracts your tribe”

I saw this on a T-shirt someone wore to barre class the other day.

I love it.

Because it’s true: our vibe, as in the way we live, our attitude about everything that happens to us, our willingness to cut people some slack when things don’t go well…all of this determines our tribe—the people who surround us.

So is our tribe kind, generous, empathetic, positive, hopeful, and happy? Depends on us, on how we interact with the world.

How—exactly?

When things don’t go well with someone and we let it go, maybe give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re just having a bad day, then there’s a really good chance they’ll do the same for us when we need it.

When we cover for someone who makes a mistake, maybe even by fixing it for them behind the scenes so no one ever finds out about it, next time we make a mistake, we’ll look up and find ourselves surrounded by people who are covering for us.

When we talk in positive, hopeful terms about life, the world, and the future, we’ll have a lot in common with people who do the same, and no so much in common with people who don’t. We’ll look around and realize we’re surrounded by the positive crowd: the people we have more to talk about with.

When we’re kind people, our love and understanding will eventually make anyone trying to be mean to us feel uncomfortable or out of place. They’ll have only one choice: be nice or be gone. Again, we’ll pick our head up and realize we’re surrounded by nice people. That’s not an accident or a coincidence.

The idea here is that our gentle vibe opens a channel of love and positive experiences that flows in both directions: out from us but also back toward us.
Beautiful someone, when we’re kind, understanding, and generous, or world is filled with kindness understanding, and generosity because those are the qualities of the people we attract.

This doesn’t mean that cruel people won’t enter our lives—they will, guaranteed. It just means they won’t stay because they won’t feel at home next to us.

We won’t grouse with them.

We won’t fight with them.

We won’t react to their cruelty.

Will this take a strong stomach? Sometimes, yeah. Especially when we’re tired or stressed, or just not ready to deal. But it’s a choice we make—a strategic choice, the long game—to create our lives. That means no one is allowed to hijack our day, week, month, year or happy, healthy, sane life by pulling us into a sticky web of negativity, anger, or fear.

And you know what? Not only will our vibe attract our tribe, it may even change people. They may see ours as a tribe they want to be part of.

Maybe sometimes our vibe creates a tribe?

Imagine that. Cool.