Ep #29: Better Self-Talk
episode summary
We can't control our thoughts, so we're just stuck with them, right? Wrong.
It's true that we don't choose or control what thoughts pop into our heads, but we can decide how we respond. I've got a simple but powerful tool that will help you replace the gloom-and-doom voice in your head with a more positive one. You'll learn to catch your negative thoughts, inspect them non-judgmentally, and swap them out for better self-talk.
Featured on the Show
The Good Life Group Coaching registration
The Gap and The Gain by Dan Sullivan
Ep #05: How to Feel Less Stressed
For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.
If you are sick and tired of feeling overwhelmed, I can help. I coach clients 1 on 1 on how to create a more calm, relaxing, intentional life. The first step is to set up a complimentary discovery session right here.
If you'd like to receive my weekly uplifting emails and be notified of new podcast episodes, subscribe here.
Want to learn more about me or my work? Head to my website at www.michellegauthier.com
Thank you for listening. If you love the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review. 💗
CHAPTERS:
1:48 - Group Coaching Program
4:55 - Types of Negative Self-Talk
9:54 - The Three Cs
listen to the episode:
-
Hey, I'm Michelle Gauthier and you're listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. Hey friends, thanks for joining me today. Today we are talking about negative self-talk. Doesn't that sound like fun? There are tons of studies that show that positive thinking is better for our health. It's better for your heart, you live a longer life, etc. Of course, I totally agree with that and it's really no big surprise. But I think the other downside to having negative chatter in our head is that our thoughts create our results. So if I'm thinking, "I suck, I'm the worst mom ever", and that gives me the feeling of just feeling crappy or sad or mad, then when I feel that way, I probably am a less good mom, which just then feels evidence for me to think I'm the worst mom ever, again. So not only is it bad for your health, your heart, all those things, to have negative chatter in your head, but also you are creating different results in your life than you would if you had positive self-talk. So if you're thinking, "well, that's great. I don't want to have those negative self-talk in my head. How do I get it out? That is exactly what I'm going to teach you today. You are not alone If you have that. I think everyone has it, at least sometimes. So I will teach you about the different kinds of negative self-talk so you can spot it, because the first step of course you guys know if you've been listeners for a while the first step to any problem is to start noticing when it happens. So we're going to look at the types of negative self-talk so you can spot and identify it, and then I will teach you how to stop listening to that chatter in your head. Today is the day that group coaching registration opens. Well, as long as you're listening to this on the day that it comes out. If you're wondering what in the world is group coaching and how does this work, I'm just going to take a second to tell you what it's all about. And actually the lesson that I'm going to teach you today is related to some of the things that we're going to be studying in group coaching, so you'll get a little bit of an idea what we'll be doing. First of all, it's a three-month program and over the course of the program we'll work on solving whatever problem you choose. So maybe the biggest problem in your life is you're sick of your job and you hate your boss and you just really want to solve that issue. Or maybe you never do anything fun anymore and you have no social life and you really want to work on that. Or maybe you're going through or considering a divorce, or maybe all the negative talk in your head is holding you back, keeping you stuck. Whatever it is - and I'll help you identify and get really specific about that problem - you'll spend three months working on it and every week you'll get access to that week's module, which is a video, a set of videos, and you'll learn a new concept, or maybe two concepts, depending on the week. So the lesson that I'm teaching you today about negative self-talk is an actual lesson from the program. So you're getting an example here today in this podcast, but beyond the lesson that you'll hear today, in group coaching, you'll then apply that lesson to your own life using the worksheets in your workbook. I'm super excited about the workbook, a ctually. I love being able to write things down and I love journaling and I love having one place to work through a whole entire problem. And plus it's so pretty and it corresponds with all of the videos, so you can just watch the videos, take notes, apply it to your life very easily. So once you've done that, then you'll have a one hour live group coaching session with me and the rest of the women in the small group. Anyone can ask questions or ask for coaching. So let's just say the lesson is about what I'm teaching you today, negative self-talk, and you take the time to watch the video, you journal about it, you answer all the questions in your workbook but you still aren't clear on something or there's a place where you feel like negativity is still sticking in your life. You'd ask for coaching. I will coach you and this will basically ensure that you never get stuck or stop making progress, because a lot of times when we try to do self-help type things on our own and we read a book or we watch videos or whatever, it's really hard to stick with it, because when you get stuck, it's hard to know what to do next. So the group coaching aspect of it will prevent that from happening. If you've been in a group of intentional women who are working toward a similar goal - which I have had the good fortune to do - you know the power of that situation, and that's why I really wanted to create this group. So if you want to do it, if you're interested and I hope you do, sign up right now, today! I am intentionally keeping it to a small group size and when it's full it's full. So if this is calling to you, click the link in the show notes and sign up. And if you sign up today, you will also get the early bird discount, which is $200 off the regular price. Okay, so now let's get back to today's lesson. So I mentioned that there are different types or different categories of negative thinking, and I want to go over just the top three that I most often see with my clients with you, so that, as you're starting to notice your own thinking and your own negative thought patterns, you can identify, "Oh, I see what I'm doing here. I'm doing personalizing", which is the first one. So personalizing is a type of negative self-talk where you blame yourself for everything that goes wrong. If you have plans with your girlfriends, for example, and they cancel, your brain automatically says, oh, they canceled because they don't want to be around me. So you make the problem, whatever the problem is, about yourself and take blame for it. I noticed that I do this a lot when it comes to my kids. I can remember my son broke his arm a couple of years ago. I wasn't even with him. He was at the park with his cousins and his grandparents. But I immediately thought, oh, this is totally my fault. I screwed this up because when he ran out the door to the park, I thought he shouldn't have on Crocs, he should have on tennis shoes. And I was like this is all me. If I had stopped and put his tennis shoes on, he wouldn't have a broken arm right now. So something negative happened, which was that my son fell on the playground and broke his arm, and what I did was attribute it to myself. So that one is personalizing. And the next type of negative thinking is called catastrophizing. It's a hard word to say, by the way. When you catastrophize, you take one small thing and automatically anticipate the worst case scenario. This one totally makes me think of my father-in-law. Well, I guess he's my ex-father-in-law now, but I still love him just the same. But we'd be watching football. We would watch Mizzou football, because we're from Missouri, and it would be like two minutes into the game and if the opposing team scored, he would always say, " it's all over but the crying Like the game was automatically lost, even though there were still like 50 minutes of play remaining and the other team scored one touchdown. So another example is if you're on your way to work and it starts pouring and you don't have an umbrella and you have to run into work and get wet and you think, of course this happened to me. Now my entire day is ruined. So what really might have gotten ruined is, like, I don't know, your hair got wet or you were, you know, had one or two minutes of discomfort as you ran into the rain, but that does not mean that your entire day is going to be bad. So catastrophizing is when you take one small thing and with negative thinking, project worst case scenario. The third type is called filtering. Filtering is essentially filtering out all the good things that happen and really just focusing in on the bad. So let's say you have an amazing Saturday planned with your best friend where you're meeting for coffee and getting manicures and going shopping, and you love being with your best friend. You go get your iced coffee, get a perfect manicure and you go shopping at your favorite store and you're looking for an outfit for that night and you find like the perfect jeans that you love, but they don't have your size. So you move on, you keep shopping, you end up buying a cute jumpsuit instead, and when you get home your husband asks why you seem unhappy and you say, "well, I just all I wanted was a new pair of jeans and they didn't have my size". And you completely discount the other 100 fun and good things that happen that day. If you're a perfectionist by nature, this might be your default negative thinking, because, basically, if it's not perfect it's negative, and because we know nothing is ever perfect, that gives you the tendency or the opportunity to look at things from the negative side. There's a book that I've recommended on this podcast before, maybe more than once, called The Gap and The Gain, and it talks all about how to train your brain to stop doing this filtering, that you focus on the gain, the good things, instead of the gap, that one in my example, that pair of jeans that they didn't have in your size. So now that you're familiar with the types of negative self-talk that we sometimes have, we can move on to how to solve this, how to make this feel better. One thing I just want to remind you, and we've talked about this in earlier podcasts, but just a reminder, and that is that you're not in control of the thoughts that come into your head. So there's really not a way to eliminate those negative thoughts from coming into your head. It's really helpful if you can just know that and not judge them. But what we do have the ability to do is try to notice those thoughts and evaluate those thoughts and decide if we want to keep that thought or if we want to think a new one. So the goal is not to just get rid of those thoughts entirely, even though it would be nice if we could just turn them off, but we can't do that. So instead, what we want to do is just be able to notice them, evaluate if they're true, and then choose a new thought. So I'm going to teach you this method, called the three C's, that you can use to do just that. So there are three steps to turning around negative thinking, and they all start with a C, so hopefully it'll be easy to remember. I'm just going to run through them at a high level now, and then I'll explain each one in detail. So the first one is to Catch the thought, and what that means is catch the negative thought that you've just had. So normally, most of our thoughts, 95% or more, are unconscious, and so you're probably having lots of negative thoughts that never make it to your conscious mind. So when you start practicing and noticing and catching those thoughts, again, we can't get rid of them, we can just notice them. So we're going to catch the thought, then you're going to Check the thought, you're going to see if it's actually really true or if there's a way that it could not be true, and then the third step is to Change it. So that's where we come up with a new thought. But remember - for this (and I've talked about this before on the podcast too) you can't make a sunshine and rainbows thought, because it just won't stick. It has to also be true. So let's just go through an example of a couple of the different kinds of negative self-talk and see how we would turn these around so that instead of negative self-talk we have somewhat better self-talk. Let's take the example of personalizing. So when your friends are all going out and then they end up canceling and you just personalize it and have a negative thought that it's you. So the first step is to catch it. The way to catch a thought, especially if it's usually unconscious, is to be very in touch with how you feel. So, for example, when I think about getting a text from my, I'm just picturing like my best for college, best friends, if all of a sudden everyone's texting like I don't feel like it, I don't want to do it tonight, and I notice that I felt down. Immediately, as I'm describing this to you, I feel like a heaviness in my shoulders and my shoulders are kind of rounding. So when you notice that you're feeling a feeling like disappointment or stress or anxiety, just pause and try to catch the thought that caused that feeling. So in my example, the thought that we would catch is they canceled because of me. They don't like being around me. Okay, so yay, step one I caught the thought. Again, we're not going to judge ourselves. You didn't make yourself have that thought. We're just gonna catch it. Then we're gonna check it. So we're gonna ask a question about the thought. Is there any way this thought couldn't be true? You just have to think of one way that it couldn't be true. We can't know for sure, but what I could guess is that it could be true that everyone else is exhausted because we're all working moms and we all have kids and we're running around all week long and nobody feels like going out. I don't even feel like going out, right? So just think about a way that it could not be true. And then ask yourself, too, would your best friends say this to you? Would your best friends say, you know, if you were explaining this thing to them and saying, "I was supposed to go out with all my college friends and then, I don't know, they just canceled? I think it's me, I think they're mad at me, would your best friend be like "yeah, they're probably mad at you. You're probably the reason they canceled". No, and would you ever say this thought to your kids? So if your kids were like, oh, mom, today at school, all my friends were going to play a game at recess and they decided not to play it, and I think it was because of me Would you be like, yeah, it probably was. No, you wouldn't. So when you check the thought, you can usually poke some holes in it. Even if it partially still feels true, at least there is an option that maybe it isn't. And then the last step is to change the thought to a new one. We've worked on this in previous podcasts and a couple of different episodes. There was one about thinking about our thinking. So you can go back and get more details on that one if you want to. But changing the thought to a new one, you just need to come up with another thought that feels as true or more true than the original thought. So the original thought I was working with is my friends canceled because they don't want to be around me. And when I checked the thought I realized, okay, I don't really know the reason why they canceled which is a great new thought. I don't really know the reason why my friends canceled. I could even go with a thought which would also be true of I'm also super tired and I'm really glad I just get to stay home. So change your thought to your new thought. Think the thought in your head. If you have the opportunity, say the thought out loud, even write it down on a piece of paper. If you consistently do this process, where you catch the thought, check the thought and change the thought, you'll start to notice patterns. If you write down when you're having these negative thoughts, you might start to notice that "I always have negative thoughts when I'm thinking about I don't know if something bad happens to my kids, if one of my kids has a bad day at school I think about something that I should have done and I personalize it and make it my fault." And once you start to notice those, you don't have to think negatively about that. You can think great, I understand and I know so that when one of my kids does come home and tell me oh, I had a really bad day at school today, I know that I will probably have a thought of what could I have done differently, and that's okay. And just knowing proactively that that's a place where I might have a negative thought and be prepared to catch it and check it and change it. And the more you do that and the more you look at it with an open, non-judgmental mind and change your thoughts, you will start to see those negative thought patterns shaking loose and you will have those negative thoughts less often and eventually you can really get rid of that pattern. Like I said, we can't get rid of every negative thought that comes into our head, but with practice we can start to have more positive thoughts. So back to what I was talking about at the beginning, which is the group coaching that opened today. That lesson that I just gave you is one of the lessons from the coaching program. And if you were in the coaching program, what you would do now is you would turn to the worksheet pages about this topic. You would journal about where you think you have negative thoughts and you would spend the rest of the week jotting down in the form in the workbook when you're having those thoughts, how you're feeling about it, what the thoughts are, what situations, and then you would come to group coaching on Friday and you would tell me what you found. Talk to me about anywhere you're stuck. I would coach you, help you continue to keep moving on your journey to have more positive thoughts, and then you would go from there to the next week's lesson. So that's, in general, how it will work for the group coaching. I'm super excited about this coaching program. I feel like it has such amazing content and that you will definitely be able to solve whatever problem you're having in your life right now that feels really hard to even approach. So today is the day. Sign up. The link is in the show notes. Other than that, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Thanks, as always. Every time I run into someone somewhere, they'll say oh, I forwarded your podcast onto someone else, or now the girl who cuts my hair listens to your podcast, or whatever. So thank you so much for continuing to talk about it and pass on your suggestion that people listen to it. I really appreciate you guys. Okay, have a great week. Talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier. com. See you next week.
Loving the podcast?
Follow me on Spotify and subscribe via Apple Podcasts!
And don’t forget to leave me a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
