“Whoever controls your subconscious mind controls you.”
Negative Self-Talk is the foundation piece of all limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs cripple you from the inside out. When you have limiting beliefs, you end up making the wrong decisions, choosing wrong friends and partners, sabotaging your own success, and many other things that are extremely frustrating.
In this article, I touch on 10 Pillars on which you can anchor your choice to turn your self-talk into empowering inner discourse.
PILLAR #1 – Awareness of Your Inner Self-Talk
We start with a question, “do you talk to yourself?”
When I pose this question, out of hundreds of answers I have received over the years, the is “that will be a definite, no!”
The natural and immediate answer in most of us is a loud, “no!” because we associate talking to ourselves as a symptom of being mentally unstable.
So let us start with a more piercing question.
It’s a lazy morning. You have been lying in bed for some time (it could be minutes or hours depending on your life). And then you get to a point and say, quietly, silently, in your mind – to yourself – “I think I will get out of bed now?”
Have you ever had that experience? Who is telling who they will get out of bed?
Now that is self-talk. It is you talking to you.
The first pillar of shifting our self-talk to empowering inner dialogue is becoming aware that we do in fact converse with ourselves.
We all have a continuing conversation within yourselves. What most of us think of as thoughts is an ongoing back and forth conversation. It is you talking to you. Thus the common adage, “kujiita kamkutano.” (Summon self to a meeting.)
ACTION
As often as you remember to during the day, pause. Listen to the opinions your mind gives to events as you go about your affairs. Most of it is commentary about whatever is going on. The more conscious of the inner chatter you become, the faster you will be able to cause your shift into more empowering self-talk.
EXAMPLE
If you are speaking with someone, listen to your mind plan the response you will give them. If you do not need to respond, listen to your mind comment about their clothes, their looks, their voice, their hair, their point. Do not judge your self-talk. It is neither good or bad. For now, just become aware that it is there.
PILLAR #2 – Understand that You Have Control Over Your Self-Talk
The second pillar to overcoming negative self-talk is discovering that you have control over what you think. What most people consider to be “thoughts” is in fact self-talk.
What is significant about our inner-dialogue is that most of us hold a false belief that we have no control over our thoughts. It is the basis of the infamous excuse, “the devil made me.” That is a false belief. We have full control over what we think.
ACTION
Practice stopping yourself from thinking a particular thought. How do you do that?
If we were talking and I mentioned a yellow elephant, what would you immediately start thinking about? A yellow elephant, right? But what would need to happen for you to stop thinking about a yellow elephant and start thinking about a blue hyena instead?
Did you see it? All you need to shift to a new brain topic is to give yourself a new topic. It is a practice that you can hone in time.
PILLAR #3 – Inner Dialogue in Important Because it Affects Our Life Results
But why are we speaking about self-talk? Because self-talk – that is both the way you think and also how you speak to yourself – affects to areas that affect your life results.
How you think about yourself manifests in how you talk about yourself to others.
As you repeat your negative self-talk to others, you immediately tend to believe the other person can see just how inadequate you are. The psychological reason for doing this is the need to find people who will support your negative opinion of yourself.
What you do to yourself in this disempowering habit is that you end up walking away from most conversations feeling inadequate and disempowered.
It also causes you to most often give less than your best, because you falsely believe, since the other person you told how inadequate you are did not correct you, they agree with you. It is an unfortunate game of your mind against you.
ACTION
As you listen to yourself talk to yourself, become more aware of what you say:
• About yourself to yourself.
• About yourself to others.
If you wish to deeply shift your self-talk and fast, start to note down the self-depreciating statements you hear from your thoughts.
Pillar #4 – How You Learn one Thing is How You Learn Everything
Do you recall learning how to ride a bicycle, play a musical instrument, carry out any skill that you are good at? Repetition.
You learn, anything, by repetition. If that is the case, and seeing that most of our negative self-talk is repetitive, we in effect are building up files. Your negative self-talk is a way of teaching yourself about yourself.
ACTION
Look at the list of things you say about yourself to yourself and to others. If you met a person who says that about themselves, would you give them an opportunity, trust them, want to work with them?
Pillar #5 – The Two Minds Learn Differently and We Should Be Aware of It
A primary purpose of our coming to Earth is to learn and we are gifted with two minds for it; the conscious and the subconscious mind.
THE CONSCIOUS MIND – sometimes also referred to as the day brain.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND – sometimes also referred to as the control brain.
The different functions the two minds has great impact on whether you achieve any goal or desire on earth. As such, it is important that you become familiar with the workings of the two minds.
ACTION
Keep in mind that you have two minds.
Pillar #6 – Self Programming Goes to the Subconscious Mind that is the Control Mind
“Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.”
Some claims have attributed the quote to St. Ignatius Loyola, but later the idea was proclaimed to be a Jesuit maxim that reads “give us the child till he’s seven and we’ll have him for life.”
Most people who have encountered this information get caught up in the details and miss the very important piece in that saying – it works!
Now research tells us that the first 7 years of an Earth life the brain is highly receptive to new information. The mind of the child up to age 7 is in the same brain-wave pattern as you would be in a hypnotized state. Information in this state is received straight to the subconscious mind of a child.
What that also means is that what you learn as a child is retained in your “control mind” the subconscious mind – for life… UNLESS YOU CHANGE IT CONSCIOUSLY.
ACTION
Are their things you learned as a child that still affect you as an adult?
Pillar #7 – Become Aware of the Learning Process of the Two Minds
There is an important difference between the learning process of the conscious and subconscious mind;
The Conscious Mind
The conscious mind, the day brain, the intellectual brain, learns by observation, attention, and focus. The conscious mind, in its true function is not a “learning mind” it is actually a decoding mind. It sees and interprets what it sees. Additionally, the conscious mind only retains memory for a limited amount of time and thus called “short term memory.”
If you reflect upon it, there are a lot of things you learned in History in early learning years, for example. Can you remember all of it? Better yet, can you recall with 100% accuracy everything that went on in an event you attended a week ago?
The Subconscious Mind
The Subconscious mind, the control brain, the intuitive brain, receives information. It is a receiving and learning mind. It receives in two ways:
• Impulses from your consciousness which we identify as intuition
• Impressions from your day brain. Repeated information is stored as important information for your survival. That means, it learns.
Let us keep learning narrowed down to skills and abilities. BY REPETITION the subconscious mind accepts the new information until it has automatic recall or the information reaches automaticity. That means the information can be accessed without your conscious awareness. This is why it is called the subconscious mind. You do not necessarily need to be aware for the information in the subconscious mind to work.
If you reflect on it, you will observe that all the things you know, such as language, walking, eating, why is a color one thing and not another, smells, heat, cold, literally everything you “know” is information you gathered through repetition. Subsequently, that when it is required for recall it comes on automatic, meaning it is from the Subconscious mind.
Anything the day brain gives attention to, repeatedly, is eventually picked by the control brain – the Subconscious mind – and stored. That pocket of information goes into automaticity.
Pillar #8 – In Case You Forget, Think of Psychomotor Skills
What are psychomotor skills?
The importance of thinking about psychomotor skills is to remember how you learn them, because that is important when teaching your subconscious mind what it should remember about you. The unique factor of psychomotor skills – as opposed to other skills – is that they are the skills “one does not forget.”
DEFINITION #1 (edited for easier understanding)
Psychomotor learning is development of organized patterns of muscular activities guided by signals from the environment. Behavioral examples include driving a car and eye-hand coordination tasks such as sewing, throwing a ball, typing, operating a tool, and playing a musical instrument.
DEFINITION #2 (edited for easier understanding)
By Watson: Psychomotor skills are acquired through a three stage process: (1) early cognitive – usually of short duration and includes attention, observation, and thought about how and why the skill is performed, (2) lengthy practice or fixation – includes practice sessions aimed at shaping correct performance, and (3) final autonomous stage – correct performance becomes automatic, with increases in speed, accuracy, dexterity, timing, and greater understanding of application settings.
If you take the two definitions of psychomotor skills you get the basic idea that:
… by attention, observation, and placing value on the how and why the skill is performed, and then with repetition (practice) the skill finally reaches a point where it is performed automatically.
The medical world tells us, even with loss of memory, most people do not lose their psychomotor skills. In other words, skills learned with repetition until they are automatic are not easily forgotten. Unlike those in the conscious mind, these ones go into long term-memory, that is the subconscious mind.
Here’s what you need to remember about the “skills you don’t forget” – you taught them to yourself by REPETITION until the skill reached automaticity. Until it became natural to you. That is the power of repetition.
ACTION
Look at your list of things you say to yourself. Is that the brain programming you would want to learn until it becomes automatic for you to BE that individual or would you want to improve it?
Pillar #9 – Self-Talk Repeated in the Subconscious Mind Becomes Your Paradigm
A paradigm is a controlling brain file. It dictates how you see the world. It controls your actions, your expectation, and subsequent results.
You build your life paradigms through your repeated self-talk. If your daily self-talk is negative, you are programming yourself for a life with deeply negative results.
ACTION
Start building a new list of positive paradigms you would want to make your own. Remember: if you want to change results, you MUST change the paradigm.”
Do you want to keep programming yourself for a life you do not want?
Think deeply about that.
Pillar #10 – Repetition, Emotion, and Brain State Make Learning Deeper and More Likely to Control You
In learning three factors together affect how deeply the new information is received in the control mind (the subconscious mind) and how thoroughly the mind attains automaticity:
1. Repetition
Remember we said to learn language we learned through songs, nursery rhymes and practice. Also remember for psychomotor skills such as driving, riding a bicycle, playing a musical instrument, you learned by repetition.
2. Emotion – either deep joy or extreme fear
Most children love learning because it comes with play, especially in the earlier years. They are happy to incorporate learning in their games. Traumatized children on the other hand mostly learn through fear. Both impulses help to make stronger neuro-pathways in the brain. Emotion is powerful in cementing a lesson in the subconscious mind.
3. An altered brain state.
The slowed down state of the brain, that is in alpha brain waves, means a child learns much faster.
Pillar #11 – To Change Negative Paradigms to Build Deep New Empowering Paradigms Use the Three Supports of Repetition, Emotion, and Altered Brain State
The lessons you learned as a child are ironed-in pretty deep. The more troubling ones’ life is, the more likely it is that the troubling file is one they picked as a child. If it was a wrong file, it affects them for years in adulthood and they have no idea what is ailing them.
Very little of the challenges we face have causation outside of ourselves as adults. Most of it is within, but at a subconscious level, hardly discernable, except as very unappealing life events.
A frightening number of people on starting on the self-transformation journey try numerous transformation tools, and yet none works for them. Technically what they are saying is the troubling file is stored so deep, they cannot bring it into their conscious awareness – not even at will.