The Power of Self-Talk
The most important conversations you will ever have, are the conversations you have with yourself. We spend most of our time in our own head, so what we say to ourselves not only affects how we feel, but how we act. Imagine the difference we’d achieve in our productivity if our ‘self-talk’ was always framed in the positive!
Numerous studies show the importance of our internal talk and how if we say the right things to ourselves, we are much more likely to succeed in our health and fitness journey.
Right now, start thinking about the images or thoughts that come into your head on a day-to-day basis that affect the actions that you take.
For example, when it comes to thinking about the word ‘exercise’. Do you conjure up images of pure pain? Or pure joy?
How about the word ‘nutrition’? Do you get thoughts of bland, boring food and the idea of missing out on ‘fun’? Or do you think about healthy, life-giving, energy-providing foods?
The types of thoughts that go through your head when you hear, say or read certain words, are there because of your conditioning and habitual repetition. Changing our thoughts and self-talk is like any skill – it can be learned. We can change our habits; including the habit of thinking thoughts and images that we associate with certain words or actions. Changing these thoughts and our ‘internal dialogue’ just takes practice and repetition!
We can ‘condition’ our mind, just like we condition our muscles, to literally reprogram themselves when it comes to our self-talk.
For example, I used to hate running and even the word itself would make me feel sick! It would take me back to those dreaded P.E classes at schools where teachers made us poor kids do cross-country – without any prior training! I remember feeling so sick I thought I was going to faint, and my teacher saying ‘You probably just drank too much water’. Horrible. So needless to say, it could have quite easily put me off something I now love. When I was in my late teen’s, I’d often drive home after a hard night out and see people running down the streets at about 9am and say to myself ‘Crazy people!’I couldn’t believe that people would actually choose to run! I had programmed my mind to think that running was as painful as it was on those P.E days in winter in our horrible school uniform… One day I realised that I had stereo-typed ‘those types of people’ and how I had made a perfectly wonderful activity so awful in my mind. I realised ‘those people’ could actually be me. In my thoughts, I had labelled ‘runners’ a certain way and it was limiting me. I wanted to be able to run, I was just put off because it seemed so difficult.
I had to change my mindset; which involved changing my self-talk – and I’m so glad that I did. Instead of telling myself ‘they’re crazy’ I started looking at them with respect and saying to myself ‘You could do that’. Long story short, I now love running – and have been doing it consistently for over ten years; but only because I pursued it and persevered.
Yes, it was hard and horrible at first. My heart rate soared so fast and I felt like my lungs were burning! But I would keep telling myself ‘I love running, I love the results, I love seeing my legs changing shape, I love feeling fit’. I literally had to repeat this over and over until I believed it. Over time, my brain started to realise that actually, I was speaking truth. My logical mind just had to catch up. I didn’t realise it then, but I could have actually built up my fitness slower, so that I enjoyed it more initially; rather than pushing myself so hard I was putting myself off heading off for my run! But the point is, all of our actions – including exercise, start off as a thought. And what we associate with those thoughts, give us a powerful reason on what action to take.
Change always takes place in the mind first.
What limiting self-talk has stopped you taking the actions that will get you closer to your goals?
Posted by Kat 
getkat.wordpress.com 