Everyday we talk to numerous people, be it home, work, neighborhood or social media. Talking is an integral part of who we are and how we express ourselves to others in our everyday dealings with the world. Can any of us imagine the world, without talking? We cannot imagine a soundless, noiseless society. It is quite inconceivable and would be eerily deafening. Talks are mostly, a casual expression of our thoughts. Some kind of talk is going on around each of us all the time in some form or the other. However we hardly think about the substance of our talks. Conversations are ubiquitous and the foundation of our daily existence. If it is so important, how much attention should we be paying to our conversations? Do we really pay attention to the conversations we have with ourselves? I am sure, unanimously we would say, ‘yes’. However in reality that is not what we do when we talk to ourselves. We are way too demanding and hard on our own selves in comparison to others. We have this habit of juxtaposing ourselves to some perfect entity, which we want to be, but we are not. Consequently, our talks with ourselves are not in the same form, we think it is. These are few of the most common conversations we have with ourselves on a daily basis. This is the conflict of our entire discussion.
The Conflict
I don’t like the cold. It’s too cold for me. I hate my work and my boss. I hate the heat. I am a terrible wife. I am a terrible husband. My life has been rough. I never have enough money for anything. My kids are out of control. I was never popular. I am bad at math, reading. I am too fat, I can’t lose weight. I am always in debt. It’s impossible to go to the gym in this weather. I am not making enough money. Traffic is too bad. My kids are lazy and they don’t care about me. My house is too small. My friends are selfish. Everything turns against me. I feel tired all the time. I hate cooking. I don’t have money to spend on vacation. I can’t stay at home. I can’t find anything nice around me. My boss is a freak. I never get appreciated for the work I do. No one cares about me. Not a single dress fits me? I am always stuck. I am not as lucky as others. I have to work my tails off to get by the day. I had a bad teacher. I am frustrated with my life. My marriage will not work. I will never get promoted. In a nutshell, “I was born to suffer”, and so on and so forth. Does this sound familiar? Sure, you were born to suffer? So what? What did you do to change it?
Analysis
We all experience these mental echoes doing the rounds of our mind every single day. These terrible rants within our own mind occur on a regular basis. I am confident that, some of these thoughts, if not all, cross our mind occasionally and inadvertently. We all are hard wired to these negative preconceptions. We have the tendency to be negative about most of the things that we have to deal with, in our ordinary lives. We are somehow stuck with these ‘thought stereotypes.’ It is so rampant and widespread that it does not make us feel uncomfortable or unusual. We become the part of this web of negative thought cycle, and continue to be in it, until we are jolted by a thunderbolt of some unpleasant or extraordinary event. And in many cases, we are absolutely oblivious of this fact, and for most part it goes on, unnoticed. This is not an ordinary but a remarkable yet disturbing manifestation of our environment in which the seeds of self-victimization was planted and nurtured from the very beginning. We all have at some point experienced our parents and elders talk about, how they had been victims of ‘bad luck’ or ‘bad situations’, so it was quite natural for us to perceive those casual statements as normal. The perception becomes the part of reality. However the story does not end there? Does it? Inadvertently we become an extension of those casual benign statements. These ‘negative thought stereotypes’ remain with us in ‘active’ and ‘dormant’ state depending on the situation we are in, and keep surfacing in different form and shape from time to time.
Eventually we grow into adults, and try to make into this world on our own and succeed to some extent, for most part of it. We do feel invincible for some time, till we are hit by the reality and rigor of life. When due to any reason, life, does not take the course that we had initially planned for ourselves, the subconscious mind, which had all the data stored from our childhood, starts retrieving it line by line. The ‘negative thought stereotype’ comes back in full force, and we, same as our parents, start dealing with it, in the same way as they had dealt with it. Those same benign statements e.g. ‘how lucky others are’, become part of our everyday conversation and a new reality. This negative self-talk, does not stop at one thing but enters into most aspect of our lives. One negativity leads to another and another, till we don’t even care, what thoughts we have when we talk.
Our early beliefs, are greatly influenced by our social, emotional and financial fabric around us, we become the extension of our early teachings and knowledge, and thus, the same words keep on repeating in our subconscious mind. We start accepting our condition as part of our destiny, and wait for some miracle to happen. That miracle is nowhere to be found, because that magic is inside us, in our thoughts, we just need to identify them. We are the mirror image of our thoughts, we can temporarily fool others, but never ourselves. Our social projection can be entirely different from what our inner projection is to our own self. I do stumble upon people who appear very happy and successful and social but in reality they are far from what they appear. They are always trying to outdo something or somebody. In the process, they do achieve few things here and there but at what cost? The focus should not be on ‘outdoing’ something or somebody, but ‘doing’ something. Therefore it should be our outmost priority to filter the conversations we have with ourselves.
To keep ourselves aware of the situation, we must classify words into positive triggers and negative triggers, e.g., can’t, don’t, no, hate are negative triggers. Whereas can, do, like, yes are the examples of positive triggers. Positive triggers are refreshing and binding. Negative triggers are mundane, trite, regressive, derisive and destructive. We should be mindful of negative triggers, while we are talking to ourselves and others.
Have you ever wondered, why some people are always exercising and yet they never succeed, even if they lose weight temporarily, they get it back almost immediately. The reason being, the entire emphasis is on loosing something, in this particular scenario, it is ‘their weight’. When we emphasize more on getting rid of something, whether it’s a habit, weight, lethargy, incompetence or debt, the evidence suggests we end up having more and more of the same. On the contrary the whole idea of positive self-talk is about, gaining, building, constructing, and creating. Instead of emphasizing on losing weight, if the emphasis is on healthy eating, daily exercise, timely sleep and positive thinking, it would be much easier for people to achieve their desired weight and energy to maintain it. Automatically if you pay more attention on what you want to achieve in comparison to what you want to get rid of, the ‘want to achieve’ has a winning calculus.
After replacing the ‘negative thought stereotype’, with positive productive thoughts, you can continue with the renewal and rejuvenation process of subconscious layers in your mind and therefore your thoughts. However, the replacement of one thought with the other, does not guarantee the continuation, or even beginning of the reciprocal attitudinal change on the part of the others. Although it might be the first step toward a positive perception of the life in particular. It is quite possible, that your positive attitude does not change the environment around you instantly. However it will be able to eliminate your preconceived judgment of your existing condition and hence it is an indication of a right step toward a better, clutter free living. By replacing the negative thought with positive thoughts, we will, be able to remove some of the thought pollutants from around us. Therefore with your renewed and rejuvenated energy you can start looking at life with new vigor and exuberance. I compare negative thoughts similar to environmental contaminants. The environmental contaminants pollute the planet and atmosphere, likewise negative thoughts distort and damage our spirit and enterprise. Our effort should be on strengthening our spirit and enterprise by arresting our thoughts from further distortion. It is just like, removing the bad air from our house. What do we do when the house is on fire, when we smell smoke? We all try tirelessly to extinguish it and get rid of it as soon as we can. To protect our house from getting destroyed, we take speedy action and abate the fire. Same is true with our thoughts. Why do we keep on living with the same negative thoughts year after year? Why don’t we try to eliminate it from our system? When we don’t change our thoughts and nothing around us changes, who should we blame for it? Ourselves right? For the situation to change around us we need to first change our thoughts without which, the life will just slide from our grip before our eyes, for we will be left, only to repent, and that will be too little too late.
Considering, we are here on this planet for some significant reason and purpose, our entire energy should be channelized toward securing and wisely using the best tool that we have. Our thoughts. Because, you are, your greatest, spokesperson and nobody can speak for you, better than you. No one knows you better than you, and only you can change the course of your life, which substantially depends on the thoughts that guide your actions, which subsequently paves your way for your goals. Therefore it is in the best of your interest to choose your words wisely, while you are in conversation with yourself.
Self-worth
In the words of Buddha
“You can search throughout the entire universe, for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.”
It does not matter how good you are to others, what matters is, how great you are to yourself. What thought stereotypes you have for yourself? A positive person in all likelihood will be a positive person for others. Instead of lamenting about your misery, it is better to change the thought process which put you in that situation to begin with. The acrimony, and acerbity, toward your own self, has to be continuously replaced, and renewed with the freshness of self-deference, and enterprise to achieve the dreams. Somehow those dreams were not in sight, because the negative thought pollutants, had overshadowed it. When you say that ‘so called’ ‘good things’ are for ‘few lucky people’ it sounds as if you are almost apologetic to yourself, for yourself.
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Why do we have to cripple ourselves with these narrowed and flagrant thoughts? Instead of enslaving ourselves to our negative preconceptions, we should be in full authority of our thoughts. We shouldn’t be the slaves of our negative predisposition. We should be the masters of our mind and only, we should be commandeering our thoughts in the most constructive way.
We have to talk to ourselves in such a way that all the negative clutter around us is replaced by thoughts which are healthy, meaningful and motivational. This effort has to be kept until it is automatic and becomes the new normal. Initially it will appear difficult and insurmountable, but gradually as we use more and more of constructive words, the entire view toward the life will change. If we keep repeating statements like “I am a happy person”, or “I am fulfilling my dreams”, or “my kids are wonderful”, the mind will start registering those positive feelings and will store in the layers of our subconscious mind. This stored data of positivity will come in handy, when we actually need it. In a way the idea is to create a reservoir of positive thoughts in our mind, so whenever it is needed, it is available for the individual to utilize it. It is similar to debit card. You have to deposit some cash before you will be able to use it. When we want to use our thoughts for achieving better life, some deposit of positivity has to there. The more positive thoughts we store in our brain the better chances we have for accomplishing any or all of our goals. There will be trying times while we are digging ourselves out of the mound of those negative thought stereotypes, as we have been hard wired and preprogrammed for the negative clutter. Although it is challenging but surely not impossible. Most of the successful people that we all can think of have done it.
Example
There have been times in my life, when I have been absolutely hopeless about everything around me. This was some years ago, when I was not keeping a very good health, or so I had convinced myself into believing. After numerous tests, that I couldn’t even pronounce the name of, everything was found normal. Medically, nothing was wrong with me. Then why was I feeling the way I was feeling? Why was I frequenting the doctor’s office so often? That was the time, I resorted to mediation, yoga and healthy diet. That was the game changer. I was slowly able to unravel my thinking behind it. My hypochondriasis had made me so miserable, that the only thought left was, the other dreadful ailments I could possibly get? I refused to live with the negativity that I was in. I was determined to change my entire thought process. That time I understood the power of positive self-regeneration. I started telling myself, I am healthy, intelligent, beautiful, thoughtful human being. Everything is normal with me. Life has been kind to me and not appreciating it, will be a huge disservice to me, and my rock solid family. That thought itself lead to the process of self-preservation and appreciation of my entire emotional ecosystem around me. I started self-introspecting myself deeply in order to find my serenity which was buried somewhere in the layers of my mind. I started creating a new environment around me with the available resources that I had at that point in time. I took a paper and pen and wrote down, the elements that were most important in my life. I made the list of places and people that thrilled me. I also wrote about all the extraordinary events that had influenced my life in some way. I started emphasizing on the objects that, I wanted in life and from my life, and not the objects that I didn’t have. My point is that, initially it appears hard to get accustomed to new thoughts or ideas because change is hard. But eventually, the freshness of positivity and empowerment that comes with it is irreplaceable and permanent. The renewed thought positively changes your life unimaginably.
In the words of Buddha…
“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think, When the mind is pure, Joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.”
These words of wisdom should be practiced in its entirety to revolutionize our way of thinking toward us. Our primary focus should be to replace all the self-destructive thoughts with most constructive ones. Every positive thought, however insignificant sets the foundation for a chance that we give to ourselves for better and more meaningful existence.
The solution
It is simple and uncontroversial. Negative thought stereotype, or most commonly known as negative self-talk is an amalgamation of myriad of internal and external factors that affect us during our formative years and beyond. It is not an outcome of one particular event or one particular person or persons. It’s a menagerie of cultural, social, educational, economic and political elements, which establishes us, as an individual in the society. Based on those beliefs we choose our life and our ideologies. Those ideologies form the core of who we are, and who we want to be. Any ideology which is self-deprecating should be abandoned and coerced out of our life. Even if the coercion is with your own thoughts. If the entire wheel of society runs for the attainment and pursuit of happiness, how can that be achieved?, if the bricks are laid on the foundation of negativity and self destruction.
To further substantiate my point I want to quote James Ray (Byrne, 2006)
“Most people look at their current state of affairs and they say,” This is who I am.” That’s not who you are. That’s who you were. Let’s say for instance that you don’t have enough money in your bank account, or you don’t have the relationship that you want, or your health and fitness aren’t up to par. That’s not who you are; that’s the residual outcome of your past thoughts and actions. So we’re constantly living in this residual, if you will, of the thoughts and actions we’ve taken in the past. When you look at your current state of affairs and define yourself by that, then you doom yourself to have nothing more than the same in future.”
To all my readers: Please feel free to share your thoughts. I do encourage you to leave your comments and describe any negative thought that has kept you worried?
Bibliography
Byrne, R. (2006). The Secret. New York: Atria Books.
Helmstetter, S. (1982). What to say when you talk to yourself. New York Pocket Books
