Negative self talk refers to an inner dialogue that plays and replays moments of perceived failure, disappointment in yourself and scripts of why you just don’t measure up. In the early stages of looking inward to try to improve my wellbeing I came across an exercise which made me realize that I was a top candidate for negative self talker of the year.
What I was trying to do was understand a bit more as to why I suffered from low self esteem, outside of the fact that I felt generally quite confident. This is a whole other post which you can find here; How to Conquer Low Self Esteem. One of the exercises coming out of my self esteem exploration was catching myself in negative self-talk. While I knew that I didn’t always shine myself in the most positive of lights I had no idea how badly I was treating myself and how much it was affecting who I was both inwardly and outwardly as a result.
While it doesn’t tackle all corners of negative self talk by any means, this exercise is a great gateway to bringing some aspects of your negative self talk to light and in doing so can open a gateway to healing in a larger capacity.
The exercise is simple and goes like this: every time someone compliments you, you must say “Thank you. How kind of you to say.” You don’t need to say this exact sentence but the idea is that you have an automatic response that is more elaborate than simply “Thank you.” Something that both yourself and your complimentor will notice. The first few days I did this I noticed 2 things; number 1 is that my husband is incredibly complimentary of me and 2, that I was incredibly uncomplimentary of myself. Every time my husband would say something kind, I automatically wanted to default and say “oh sure”, “I bet” or “not quite”. It could have been large meaningful compliments like “you’re a good mother” to small off-hand comments like “you look good.” It didn’t matter, I almost always disagreed with him and beyond that I never took the compliment at face value. I always, always wanted to say “big fat liar” every time anything favourable came my way.
I found myself saying “Thank you. How kind of you to say” approximately 12 times per day. At first it felt insane and somewhat silly because of course it’s an oddball sentence to say. You too will no doubt feel silly going through the exercise. But do we care? No, we don’t. We are fearless. After the initial adjustments I came to notice just how many times a day my oddball phrase was said and the more times the opportunity came up for me to say my phrase the more I realized that I would have been unkind to myself each of these times. Over and over again, day after day. A little becomes a lot and I couldn’t believe how easily my default negative side was at the ready.
Of course it wasn’t only my husband giving me the love, my kids could say something simple, or a neighbour, a colleague, a stranger, a barista, a hair stylist, a store owner, a teammate, a doctor, an arborist. It adds up. Believe me. And every time; “Thank you. How kind of you to say.”
When you start to do this 2 things will happen. Firstly you start to eliminate the negative talk. Start to remove the automatic poison you are feeding to yourself. A cleanse if you will. And secondly you start to actually listen to the compliments, assess them and internalize them for the better. “Great hair!”, “F ya I have great hair! Thank you! How kind of you to say.” All of a sudden you start to believe it and then slowly but surely you will start to believe in yourself.
Next time someone, anyone, has something nice to say about you. Pause, smile, say an oddball sentence and believe it.
