What are you saying to yourself when you let yourself focus on something that isn’t working in your life the way you want it to?   Here’s a few tips you can use to choose more healthy thinking and behavior instead:

1. Recognize it’s only a problem if you say so.  You have a choice in how you are interpreting what’s happening and in how you deal with it.  There will be things that don’t turn out as you think they should. How you relate to these circumstances and what you say about them is up to you.

2. Feeling bad is within your control.   i.e. You notice your eyes are red and you say to yourself, “I didn’t sleep well last night” and then you say, “I feel tired.”  Or you notice that someone doesn’t call you back and you say, “He/She is probably bugged at me from our last conversation,” or “He/She’s a jerk anyway,” and you feel upset.   We give what happens meaning and often our habit is to ascribe negative meaning.  You can stop doing this.

3. Listen to the inner dialogue you’re having with yourself right BEFORE you get upset, in other words, notice when the “flow” seems disrupted for you and whether you’re handling it well and staying focused.  Also notice if you’re self-assessing too much.  If so,  just put one foot in front of the other and get into positive action.  (You’ll shift more quickly if you let go of these things enough to engage with others).  Soon you’ll forget you were worried or not getting the results you expected and you’ll find yourself past the curve of the road and on to a whole new attitude and resourceful again in producing positive results

4. Read Dr. Joseph Luciani’s book, “Self-Coaching, The Powerful Program to Beat Anxiety & Depression” – even if you don’t actually feel THAT bad about things.  His simple steps help train you to break negative habits. 

5. A quick method to break this chain of negative patterns and permanently and quickly rid you of negative habits or emotions is available at PositiveThinkingWay.com

Are you taking steps to coach yourself out of the habit of negative self-talk?

It doesn’t seem possible that permanently changing behaviors that have been so entrenched for so long can really happen.  It can. 

About three years ago I began studies with the Lefkoe Institute.  Their vast work with thousands of clients throughout the world and in various industries proves the point of this cognitive and experiential process.  If you want to change your reaction mechanism to life, get rid of your negative beliefs.  For any given pattern of behavior you want to change there is a finite number of negative beliefs associated with them. 

These can be quickly eliminated as you “experience” yourself as the inventor of those beliefs (much like when you first got the concept of how to balance when you were little and learning to ride a bicycle).  You will get that you never saw those beliefs in the world to be true (even when you think you did) and that they’ve only existed in your mind (which gets changed through this process, with nothing else you need to do).  This sounds easier said than done, but the short process of identifying and eliminating beliefs has been valuable for my clients who want to make changes but keep getting stuck in their own limiting interpretations of themselves, others, or life in general.  Why carry around old baggage that stops you from confidently making changes?  (for more, see Beliefs work on my Services page)

What limiting behavior or belief have you tried unsuccessfully to change?