The late minister and heart surgeon Martyn Lloyd-Jones asserted, “Most unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself rather than talking to yourself.”
Now that might sound like semantics, but let’s think about it.
Say you asked a coworker who they talk to most on any given day. They’d probably say their spouse or partner or their child.
But, in reality, the person we talk to most every day is ourselves.
So it’s essential to ask: what kind of voices do you hear when you talk to yourself?
When you face new experiences, does a voice in your head say you’re going to fail?
If you hear negative messages, you need to give yourself positive mental talks. The best way to retrain your attitude is to stop your mind from going down any negative forks in the road. Just like you would with your diet, to improve your mindset, do the following: Feed yourself the right mental and emotional “food.”
If you’ve been starved of positive self-talk, then you need to start feeding yourself a regular diet of motivational material (which you’re getting right here, so that’s a great step). Here are some options to jumpstart a positive influx of material:
- Read books that encourage a positive attitude. Check out our latest insurance reading list.
- Listen to motivational tapes, podcasts, TED Talks, or audible books.
- Connect with a mentor who can share positive experiences.
Turning It Around
If you’ve had a negative mindset your whole life, the longer it will take to turn your attitude around. As they say, the best time to start making a change was yesterday, and the second-best time is always going to be today. If you consume a steady diet of the right brain food, positive self-talk will be the norm. The voice you hear the most throughout your day will be positive. Set and achieve that goal for yourself every day. Don’t get me wrong: we all get into ruts of negativity now and again. In the insurance business, it might be because you don’t feel you’re making the number of sales you wanted, as fast as you wanted. If that describes you, then make sure you are setting daily achievable goals for yourself. (Hopefully this sounds familiar – we are big on this concept here at IAO). And we don’t mean goals based solely on sales. From there, as the small daily wins rack up, you start a streak. Then, before you know it, a pattern of positive achievement emerges. And then follows the pattern of positive thinking and self-talk.Write it on your wall: what you want to achieve, and how you want to speak to yourself. Seeing a visual reminder on a daily basis will change the way you think.We are flooded with information all day long. Visual positive reminders help keep us focused on the right messages to internalize. The great American author Alex Haley used to keep a picture in his office of a turtle on a fence post to remind him that everybody needs the help of others at some point. It’s incredibly common for winners and positive thinkers to display awards they’ve won, inspirational posters, or letters they’ve received that encouraged them. It’s on purpose. Find the thing that will work for you – even if it’s a simple post-it note taped to your computer monitor. The note could read: Speak positively to ME! We’d love to hear about what gives you inspiration and the tactics you use for positive self-talk. Drop us a line and let us know.
