Change Your Thoughts, Change your Outcome
I am a teacher, and my classes start at six in the morning. Every day I say good morning and ask my students how they are doing. There is a specific reason for this. It gives me a chance to change the way they start their day.
On day one, I tell them that every day starts the same and ends the same. What we do with the time in between makes the difference in the day. I tell them that the sun comes up and they have a choice to make, they can decide that they are going to have a great day or they aren’t. The day is what they chose to make it, then the sun goes down and another day is over.
Every day I say good morning and set the stage. Then I ask how they are doing. Inevitably there will be someone that was late, doesn’t feel good, got stuck in traffic…all negative messaging. Sometimes I ask if that is going to define their day or if they are going to change it. Other days I let it go and focus on the ones that get it.
Over the course of the class, they slowly change and by the end of class almost every one of them comes in with a positive attitude. They all start to recognize the power of positive thinking and while this is in no way a scientific study, almost all of their grades improve with their morning attitude. I’ve witnessed it over and over again.
Personal messaging, or as clinicians call it, self-talk is a powerful force. It can be equally positive or negative. In my class, I don’t allow negative self-talk, that message is as important to my student’s success as the curriculum itself. How can you learn if you are using words like I don’t get it, can’t, I’ve never been good at…?
The problem is that our brain has been wired over thousands of years with what we call a negative bias. It is a part of our fight or flight response to every situation we find ourselves in. It automatically protects us as the default response.
This served us well when we truly experienced life threatening circumstances on a frequent basis. When there was always the threat of being hunted by predators, we were always aware of our surroundings and ready to run for survival. We rarely face true life threatening situations anymore, but our brain remains wired that way. It believes that this is how we have survived, so why change a good thing.
I heard a new word the other day, meta-cognition, and it fascinated me. Meta-cognition is thinking about thinking. How many of us ever think about our thinking. If we really thought about what we think, we would probably find that most of us are pretty negative in our thinking.
Over the next few weeks, I want you to think about what you are thinking. Become aware of your self-talk and really think about how it is affecting your day and the things you do. My guess is that you will find that your protective brain has started affecting parts of your thinking and life where it really isn’t needed.
For the next few weeks, I am going to put out an article each week on negative self-talk and how to change your thoughts. We will explore the different types of negative self-talk and how they affect us. We will look at ways to change the way we talk to and about ourselves.
We won’t change overnight and that is alright. Like my students you will start becoming aware of how you talk to yourself and will start making changes. With each success the brain will reprogram itself away from a negative bias and toward a positive bias. It will find that it prefers being positive and when the power of that change becomes greater than the inertia of keeping the same old negative thinking, big changes will begin to happen in all areas of your life.