Improve your Internal Dialog to build confidence
“The only difference between the best performance and the worst performance is the variation in our self-talk.”
- Dorothy and Bette Harris
If I could plug a set of headphones into the minds of most people and listen in on the messages they make to themselves all day, I am certain that the majority of them would be negative:
• “I’m running late once more – as usual.”
• “My hair looks horrible this morning.”
• “That was a stupid comment to have made – she most likely thinks I’m a dummy.”
By the thousands these messages flash across our brains everyday, and it is no wonder that the outcome is a reduced personality.
One effective daily exercise for developing self confidence is to practice a friendlier internal dialog: Change Self-Criticism With Regular, Positive Self-Talk.
Donald Meichenbaum has developed a complicated approach on helping people change their stream of internal discussion. Here, for example, is the manner an impulsive and extremely self-critical child might handle an assignment:
Oh my, this is going to be hard. I’m certainly going to make a mess of this. Oh! there you go, you’ve already made an error. I could never draw. Stupid, you were supposed to go down there. He’ll see where I’ve erased that. It seems as if others are doing well on theirs, but this is a total mess. That’s as good as I can do, but it’s not what they want.
Here is the manner Meichenbaum teaches the same child to talk within:
Okay, what is it I have to do? You want me to copy the picture with the different lines. I have to go slow and be cautious. Okay, draw the line down, down, good; then to the right, that’s it; now down some more and to the left. Good, I’m doing well so far. Remember go slow. Now back up again. No, I was supposed to go down. That’s okay. Just erase the line carefully … carefully. Okay. I have to go down now. Finished, I did it.
Such a manner of talking to ourselves can be a great help in reprogramming our personality.
The Origins of Self-Criticism
Where did we learn to talk to ourselves with accusation? We learned it from other people, for sure. The thousands of negative thoughts that came from parents and teachers and older brothers and sisters, as they tried to change us into socially acceptable individuals, are all stored in our memories. Many of those thoughts get incorporated into the general pattern of dialogue we keep on with ourselves all day. “Why are you always late … What’s the matter with you, do you want to get run over? … This way, idiot. … Can’t you even catch the ball?”
We learn from the assessments of the people around us. Some psychologists go so far as to say that we know ourselves only from the reflection of other people’s responses to us. If someone says, “You have trouble with math, don’t you?” It is usual to believe – if such persons are bigger and older and smarter – that they’re correct. Then for the rest of our lives, whenever a set of numbers appears before our eyes, our automatic reaction is, “Remember, you always have trouble with math.”