Do you ever find yourself speaking to yourself?  We mutter and mumble our way through the day, and frequently we are giving ourselves negative messages.

Consider your daily thinking.  What do you tell yourself when no one is listening?  Many of us speak to ourselves harshly.  In fact, if you stop to ‘think’ about what you’re actually saying to yourself, you’d be shocked. You wouldn’t talk to anyone else like that. You have heard the phrase “you are your own worst enemy.”

(1) Negative self-talk is what creates that illusion.

As Descartes said, “Except for our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.”

So what would it look like if you could become your own best friend?

It takes a lot of critical thought and awareness to change the language within. But when you understand how much time is spent speaking negatively and turn it around, you will be amazed at how different life will look both personally and in business.

We are all creative human beings. We are creating something every time we have a thought, open our mouths to communicate and creating actions that result from those thoughts. Thought + word + action = our reality. Your life starts and ends with you.

(2) You are 100% responsible for whatever manifests in your life.

You may feel that life is unfair, that there are other factors at play; other people are calling the shots, circumstances that feel like they are out of your control.  But when you think about it, you made a choice, conscious or unconsciously, to allow those people or circumstances into your life.
We are all walking garbage pails.

We carry the detritus of our lives, handed down to us by other people, by our own careless behavior, thoughts and actions.  We accumulate the negative ‘stuff’ throughout our life times, until one day we realize that the ‘stuff’ has become too heavy and we must do something about it.

(3) We must take out the garbage!

(4) Communicate the truth of who you are.
It is a challenge, but one that is worth the price of admission to the world of self-awareness. Do you know who you are? How do you see yourself?  What are the things that matter to you?  Who is most important in your life?  Are you experiencing life fully on your own terms at work and at home? If not, what is getting in the way? Think of the words you use each day.  Where did they come from?  Who do they belong to?

Growing up we where given a storehouse of words that helped describe us, our environment, the people in it, the things that mattered, the attitudes, behaviors, judgments, criticisms, prejudices, and expectations of everyone around us.  If you were lucky, you were fed some really good stuff, and that became the foundation for all you would continue to learn and absorb as you grew into maturity.

But many of us grew up hearing and digesting pretty negative stuff, and that became the way in which we identified ourselves. We became someone we didn’t want to be, we became someone we were not.

(5) The language of our maturity did not evolve beyond the negative messages we absorbed in childhood, and it became our way of communicating with each other, perpetuating the same cycles of garbage thinking.

(6) The words you use define and determine how you see and experience life.

(7) When you change your language, you change your behavior, and you can change your life.