By Michelle Elman / Happiful
"What does your self-talk sound like? For most of us, it's focused on negativity and can be destructive to our self-esteem. But, as life coach and author Michelle Elman reveals, there are ways we can reduce its volume...
Your own personal cheerleader, rooting for you, and boosting your confidence every step of the way – that would be our ideal inner voice, but in reality, more often than not what we get is an inner critic.
According to a study published in Nature Communications, the average person has 6,000 thoughts each day. That's a lot going on inside our heads, and it would be fair to say that not all of them are going to be positive and productive.
Let's say you drop a plate and it smashes; what's the first thing you say to yourself? "You're stupid. You can't do anything right. You can't even hold a plate, so how on earth are you meant to take care of yourself?" Now think back to your childhood; what would the grown ups in your life say if you broke something? Notice how the words are similar. Your inner critic is not your own voice – it's largely formed of your worst critics as a child. But more than that, these incidents can impact how your identity forms, so if it was always a big deal when you smashed something, and you were labelled as clumsy, you may have formed a hypervigilance around dropping things, and therefore your brain remembers those events more significantly.
Those memories can create an insecurity around clumsiness. If you were fortunate enough to grow up in a household where mistakes were not a big deal, your inner voice would sound more like what you heard. "Oh well, it's just a plate." Or "Let's sweep this up before anyone gets hurt," "Oh no, I'm gutted, I loved that plate!" You may be more capable of being disappointed about the damage, without blaming yourself or using the broken plate as proof of your incapability. ".
Image: Happiful