By CluelessNeep Ask anyone who knows me what they think of me, and you’ll hear one of three things: “Neep? Oh, he’s awesome, but he’s really hard on himself.” “I wish he’d be a little kinder to himself.” or “Who?” It’s a throughline that’s existed for as long as I remember. I’ve spent years lying to myself. Not out loud, and not even about big stuff. But there has always been this quiet voice playing in repeat in the background. And the worst part is that I believed it.
The Lies We All Tell Ourselves
I picked up What to Say When You Talk to Yourself by Shad Helmstetter a few years ago, but it has always just sat on my shelf, taunting me. It wasn’t until I cracked it open a few weeks ago that I realised how much nonsense I’d been feeding into my brain. All the times I’d told myself:
- “You’re not ready for that.”
- “You’re not good enough to do that.”
- “Why would they ever listen to you?”
- “Why would you ever think she’d like you?”
- “They’re just being polite, why would they care about you?”
I don’t even think these things deliberately. But they’re there, looping in the background like a bad radio station I forgot was playing.
Where the Lie Comes From
Helmstetter argues that most of our self-talk is negative, and worst of all, most of it isn’t even ours. According to Helmstetter, in the first eighteen years of our lives we are told “no”, what we could not do, or what won’t work more than 148,000 times. I’m a little sceptical of that number but, for the sake of argument, let’s go with it.
Suffice it to say, it’s programming we picked up as kids, from people who meant well but didn’t know better.
As an example, my Granny would often chastise me, telling me to “stop being so down on yourself,” and that I had an Inferiority Complex. She wasn’t wrong, but in repeating it over and over again, she didn’t cure it – she reinforced it.
“What adults tell us and what we learn to perceive about ourselves as children has an incredibly important effect on us.”
Interestingly, thinking back on it now, I know where the being down on myself came from, and it’s another example of an adult not knowing the effect they were having; it was from my dad jokingly saying that I was useless or hopeless when I struggled to do something, and he’d help. But that’s a story for another time.
Why It Matters
During the time I was reading this book, my mind kept going to that Henry Ford quote I’m sure we’ve all heard: “If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you’re right.” Helmstetter agrees.
“Your success or failure in anything, large or small, will depend on your programming – what you accept from others, and what you say when you talk to yourself.”
Could it be that the programs that have been fed into our brains, and how often we’ve repeated them have led us to where we are in our lives? I think it just may be.
Consider this: you’ve been unemployed for many months. You’ve sent out hundreds of applications and heard next to nothing back, aside from the occasional form letter thanking you for your interest. You begin to get demoralised. You tell yourself, “I guess I’m just not good enough.” And you tell yourself this repeatedly. Then one day, you get an interview. You’re excited. You get to the interview early, eager and willing to put on your best show, tell them you’re the person for the job, that you’re more than qualified. But…for the past few months you’ve been telling yourself that you’re just not good enough. Your body language reflects your thoughts, and you mumble through the interview, downplaying all your achievements, and you walk out of that interview room deflated. I know, because that was how I was after being laid off from a job I’d had for fifteen years and getting nowhere.
Another example: there’s someone you like, you have great chemistry, and you have feelings for them. You spend the next few months debating whether to tell them, and you talk yourself out of it. They move on, get happily married, and you’re left alone. All because of how you talked to yourself. And yes, this has happened to me.
Honestly, I could go on, but just think how life could be different if only our mental programs were different?
How To Break The Pattern
Helmstetter talks about the five steps that control our success or failure, those steps are our programming, our beliefs, our attitudes, our feelings, and our actions. That is to say, our programming creates our beliefs, our beliefs create our attitudes, our attitudes create our feelings, our feelings create our actions, and finally, our actions create the results. It’s almost like the habit loop that Charles Duhigg talks about in The Power of Habit – The “cue/routine/reward” loop. Unlike the habit loop, though, we can’t just pick any of the steps and change it, we have to begin with programming, but we don’t just remove the bad programs, we replace them.
There is a great analogy in the book about an apartment. You live in an apartment but all your furniture is either really old or broken. You take all that old furniture and you put them into storage so you can get rid of them the next day. Great days work, but now you’re sitting in an empty apartment. “Let me just grab that old chair,” you think to yourself. So now you’re in an apartment, sitting on an old chair. “I’m kinda bored,” you think, so you grab the old TV, the CRT that has a line that moves up in every so often and doesn’t get channel 4. Little by little, all the old furniture ends up back in your apartment and you’re back to square one.
Instead, let’s say we get rid of all the old furniture and replace it with shiny new furniture. There’s no space for the old furniture anymore so it goes, and you’re left with just the good stuff.
That’s how Helmstetter argues we should do it – we take the old programs and gradually replace them with shiny new ones, positive ones.
He suggests there are four ways in which to do this: thinking, talking, writing, and listening.
We think constantly, whether we notice it or not, and one thing he suggests is that we spend more time noticing our thoughts. Personally, I’ve done this with mindfulness meditation in the past – and thought about starting again – but we can do this anywhere. But it’s not just noticing – we have to immediately flip the statement. For example, I was in the shower earlier today, thinking about writing this post and it suddenly occurred to me that I have a victim mentality. I didn’t mean it as a derogatory to myself, just an observation. But I recognised the implication: I was telling myself that I have a victim mentality. I cut it off and immediately said, “I take full responsibility for my life”.
Helmstetter also suggest talking to yourself. Out loud. He tells a story in the book about how a flight he was meant to be taking got delayed. The departure lounge was incredibly crowded, so he sat on a seat and proceeded to talk to himself, out loud. And no-one sat next to him. Now, I’m going to be honest, I will not do this in public, but if that’s something you want to try? More power to you. Seriously though, I have done this. I do it in the car when I’m thinking through a problem or just thinking out loud. I will have full blown conversations with myself, but after reading this book, I’ve noticed how negative I can be towards myself and have started changing that.
Writing positive self-talk is an interesting one, but also fairly simple – it boils down to affirmations. These are nothing new if you’ve read any kind of self-help – you write down sentences that are positive and in the present tense. I’d started doing this every morning independently of the book, so as an example, one of mine is “Each time I delay gratification, I grow stronger, more focused, and more in control.” The only difference between the way I do it and the way Helmstetter suggests, is that at the end of the day, I write down evidence of how I’ve applied these affirmations.
Listening to self-talk is something I hadn’t considered doing, mostly because I dislike the sound of my own voice. However, this part of the book also acted as an advertisement for an app Helmstetter’s company runs where he will read self-talk statements to you. The funny thing is…it works.
At the heart of all of this, there is one key ingredient for it to work: repetition. We didn’t get the bad programming overnight, so we’re not going to change it overnight.
How I’m Doing It Now
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve already started with affirmations. I do that every morning and put in evidence in the evening. Is it working? Too early to tell, if I’m being completely honest.
As I said before, I’ve started flipping around negative self-talk that I catch. I haven’t been catching many but I’m getting better at it. I’ll catch maybe 10-20 negative thoughts a day and flip them. I’ve caught two of them today: the one in the shower, and another when I was sat looking at my notes for this post. I sat there, wide-eyed, staring and thinking, “There’s just too much, I’ll never be able to make this make sense.” I caught it, shook my head and immediately said, “No, I’m great at taking complex information and breaking it down in a way that makes sense.”
Something I’ve also done is signed up for Helmstetter’s self-talk audio programs. I honestly didn’t believe they’d work but I decided to try in the name of science. My plan is thus: I listen to the Self-Esteem program (something I’ve struggled with for a long time) in the morning on my way to work, then again on the way home. Coincidentally, the length of the program is the same as my commute back. And it’s weird, it’s like my brain has bookmarked audio. On the days I forgot to press play and just listen to the radio, certain lines would replay on my head when I reached certain landmarks. One example is when I’d cross a bridge in my town and in my head, I would hear, “I build self-esteem every day. I talk to myself and in just the right way.” Or there was another time where I was walking around the workshop at work, I noticed I was slouching and I heard, “I stand tall, I think sharp, I look good,” and I stood up straight. I didn’t consciously think that – it just happened. From my two-week trial, something appears to be clicking, but time will tell. I’m still not perfect at it. I still have bad days where my long-standing depression rears its ugly head, but I’m no longer just listening to the same old script – I’m rewriting it.
Start Telling the Truth
We’ve been lying to ourselves for years – without even realizing we were doing it most of the time. We were given these programs by people who meant well, who meant ill, or didn’t mean anything at all. But we can change it, we can rewrite the programs. We can fill our mental apartment with nice furniture. All we need is a little repetition, and a lot of time. So, what are you waiting for? Start telling yourself some truths you want to hear, and let me know how it goes.