Personal Care

Self-talk: 3 reasons to use it to your advantage

Self-talk can be negative and condition us in our day to day life. How to improve it and change it for something positive? Discover the keys in this article.

Self-talk: 3 reasons to use it to your advantage

Self-dialogue is that conversation that we have with ourselves without realizing it. For example, when we make a mistake and we say to ourselves “I have failed at this, how come I did not know how to see it”. Normally, we do not verbalize it, although there may be times when we do.

The biggest problem with self-talk is that we tend to tell ourselves the negative. Surely we feel identified with phrases such as “how bad you have done it”. If we analyze our self-talk a little for just a few days, we will discover that we speak quite badly.

This self-talk of disapproval, if maintained too long, will end up taking a toll on self-esteem. We are not as bad as we think or as terrible for having done something on time.

Reasons to practice self-talk on your behalf

There are many reasons for us to start practicing self-talk in our favor. We talk and treat each other very badly, and since we don’t usually verbalize it, we don’t even wonder if what we say is good or bad. The truth is that this influences us more than we think.

1. Influence emotions

When we practice self-dialogue, we are able to see situations differently or make more accurate decisions. This calms us down, creates calm and helps us manage our emotions much better.

Self-talk: 3 reasons to use it to your advantage

Self-dialogue helps us make better decisions, as we analyze what happens with greater objectivity.

2. Increase self-knowledge

Another reason to practice self-talk is that it allows us to get to know ourselves better. We are able to connect with ourselves, with what happens to us and what we feel. We could say that self-dialogue enriches us.

3. Reduces anticipatory anxiety

This is an evil suffered by many people. It is about anticipatory anxiety, which arises when nothing has happened that could trigger it. Talking to ourselves can help reduce it and prevent it from appearing.

Tips for practicing positive self-talk

Since there are all these reasons to practice self-talk, how can we get started? There are people who communicate with themselves unconsciously and even use it to their advantage. But many others, such as our case, we need some advice to start working with this powerful tool.

Keep a journal

Writing a journal is useful, since it is a tool that we all have and to which we only need to dedicate a few minutes a day. In addition, it will allow us to return to what we have written to reflect from a perspective that, perhaps, will help us.

Self-talk: 3 reasons to use it to your advantage

Through writing we encourage reflective thinking about what we are and what we do. He orders us and helps us.

Questioning our self-talk

Another way to improve our self-talk is to question it. For that we must go back to what we have written in the newspaper and ask ourselves some questions, such as “Am I judging my way of being instead of the way I have acted?”

Change the way we talk to each other

If the answer to the question of whether we are being very negative or just seeing the bad part of what happened is yes, it is time to make a change. All those phrases we say to ourselves can hurt us.

We speak negatively to each other very often and it is essential that we change this. Some examples of positive phrases that we can say to ourselves are the following:

I am human, I can make mistakes, but I will learn from them to improve.
I’m going to work on my cover letter, take a course, or continue handing out resumes. They sure will catch me.
Although this may seem silly, it works. Our self-talk has a lot of power and it is important that we take advantage of it.

Most of us talk to each other in a way that we would never do if we were talking to someone else. So here is the key. We must take care of ourselves and respect ourselves just as we would with others.