“Be careful how you are talking to yourself because you are listening.” Lisa M. Hayes

In WW we’ve been addressing this topic for years.  I remember using the quote above in one of my first workshops 8 years ago and I know many of you have been WW members for far longer.  So, how’s the self-talk going for you?  Have you changed your inner dialogue?  A lot?  Very little?  Not at all?  Why?

Self-talk, whether it’s positive or negative, is like any other habit in our lives: at some point we developed a behaviour and just kept doing it.  As with any other habit we want to change, understanding when and why we began the habit can give us insight into our behaviour.  Obviously, I can’t speak for anyone else but I do know my negative self talk was given to me as a child by the adults in my life.  To be clear, this is not an exercise in laying blame. As a child, and young adult, I often laid blame on my adults but once I started making my own mistakes in life, I started to realize, like everyone else I was just doing the best I could based on what I knew and had been taught.  We do not come into this world thinking we are unworthy; we may own that feeling like we did but our sense of self-worth, positive or negative, was born out the actions and words used by our adults. The purpose of reflection in this instance is to establish when and how those feelings started so we can understand what we believe to be true about ourselves.

Whenever I talk smack to myself, or about myself, it all stems back to the comments made by my adults: you can’t do that, that will never work, don’t talk so much, sit down and be quiet..etc, etc, etc.  But here’s the thing; there were times when I couldn’t do something or something would not work as I planned to do it, or I did talk too much at certain times and needed to sit down and be quiet.  The problem was I rarely (in my mind, never) got the flip side: you can do that, that will work, tell us more, we want to hear what you have to say.  If we had been given lots of positive reinforcement, then perhaps the negative comments we did receive would not have become the foundation of what we believe to be true about ourselves.  After a while, we didn’t need others to reinforce those beliefs, we did it ourselves.

As kids, of course, we couldn’t have known that perhaps our adults were simply passing on what they had been told or what they believed about themselves.  In this case, even when we have discovered why and how we started our pattern, it doesn’t matter what we now know, what matters is what we still believe. We can’t change our beliefs until we change what we know, or what we think/believe we know.  How might your life have been different had you grown up with a positive personal belief system?  How might your WW plan be different?  Reflection doesn’t change what happened in the past but often when we understand something, we are able to let it go and start to make the changes we want within ourselves. My reflection has led me to believe so many of the comments I heard as a child probably had nothing to do with me.  Even as I write it, the thought still stuns me.  Imagine a comment that hurt you as a child. Now imagine the person who made it and what might have been going on in their mind.  Have you ever made a comment that upon reflection realized it had more to do with how you felt about yourself than the person you said it to? I often think about mean old Bertha, the lady who always just called me Chubby.  How did she really feel about herself?  What was said to her as a child? Doesn't make what she said right, but it does offer me another way of looking at it: maybe it was not about me.

Every time this topic comes up in WW you are being handed an opportunity, an opportunity to take back the worthiness you were born with but never got a chance to know.  Maybe last time we talked about it you weren’t in the headspace to hear it, or maybe your age-old beliefs were still too strong.  Maybe now you’re tired of your negative self-talk and really want to change. Maybe now you’re ready to start believing how great, wonderful and fabulous your friends say you are!  Why not, what have you got to lose, other than some pain and self-loathing?   Nothing. But, if you find it hard to start talking to yourself the way your good friends do, why not start by talking to yourself the way you talk to your animals, kids or grandkids?  That will tell you what to say!