The way you Speak to Yourself and its Affect on Others
Photo by Robert Collins from Unsplash
The purpose of this post is to explore the topic of how we communicate in our mind and how this affects our relationships with others and the different aspects of our lives. I invite you to reflect on yourself to see if the information in this post is true for you.
If you want to communicate effectively with the people around you, it would be good to understand how the mind works. When we think about something, we feel certain feelings as a result, and these feelings lead us to behave in specific ways.
While people cannot read our minds, when we feel certain emotions, they can partially sense these from the way we act. For some people, it is easy to feel and sense others’ emotions, and for others, it is not.
If we want to have good relationships with our spouse, children, friends, co-workers or people in general, it is good to look within and reflect on how we actually communicate in our mind first.
Our mind likes very direct instructions, and in response, will do exactly what we ask it to do.
We communicate consciously, but we also communicate through our unconscious mind as this is where we store our memories from the past experiences - bad or good, and what we believe is right and wrong and what is important to us in each part of our life.
We have what we call an internal dialogue going on all the time, and experts say we have about 50-80000 thoughts per day.
We should be aware that the way we speak to ourselves and the specific words we use have an incredible power to support our growth and development but can also lead us to feel down and even worse about ourselves.
Do we respect and appreciate ourselves and everything we do by saying certain phrases? E.g. I’m doing my best, nobody is perfect, or my best is already good enough? - or - do we punish ourselves daily with phrases like I’m stupid, I’m not good enough, I’m never going to succeed, I always fail, or I always let myself down?
The practice of using supporting and empowering words in our mind can help us to focus on the good things and appreciate ourselves and the life we have even more.
What is also fascinating is that our emotional state will be mirrored in our physiology. This is because the focus and the internal dialogue we use in our mind, directly reflects the way we walk and move our body and what posture we have.
We create emotions through our mental and physical actions.
If you think about someone who is depressed, they very often view life in a specific and very negative way, by thinking about the worst possible scenario. They will say things in a certain way, very often in a sad tone of voice. A depressed person’s posture will look more like shutting itself down; very often this person would look down a lot, with collapsed shoulders and even their breathing would become shallower.
If the majority of thoughts in our mind are negative, this will lead us towards behaviours that might not support our health and well-being.
We tend to sit down a lot as if we want to be in the cocoon of comfort. We might overeat, abuse alcohol or drugs, leading to tiredness and to a downward spiral. For some people who live in this depressed state for so long, it feels just more comfortable to stay there. It takes effort to be depressed and if we are used to feeling sad most of the time, it takes time until we can reprogram our mind to be happy and more energetic.
If you think about someone who is happy and confident, they tend to think about the best possible scenario, they walk more energetically, they speak in a confident tone of voice and very often they enjoy everything they do.
Most of the people who are happy and confident enjoy any sort of movement and they love taking care of their body, as their mind is on the right track.
As we keep our body healthy, we have a healthy mind and vice versa. If our emotional state starts from happy, encouraging thoughts, this motivates us to do the things that help us and encourage our personal growth and development and that will be reflected in the relationship we have with others.
It is possible to change our mental state by changing how we talk to ourselves and what we put attention on, and that will be reflected in our physiology and movement.
A really easy way of finding out where the focus goes is by writing down your empowering and disempowering thoughts daily and then putting more of your attention on those that empower you and make you feel good about yourself. A qualified NLP coach will be able to help you redirect your internal dialogue and discover your true potential by using simple coaching methods.
Being honest with ourselves will help us to gain a better understating of why we do things and react in a certain way. The way we communicate in our mind will be projected on the world around us and how we treat others.
Therefore, in order to feel good about ourselves and communicate well, we need to be mindful of our internal dialogue.
Earl Nightingale said: “We become what we think about”.
If we do not choose our thoughts wisely, our minds can wander and subconsciously choose to focus on the negatives. When we appreciate our life and focus on positive and nice things, then our thoughts will move towards positive feelings, we will project positive vibes, and that will make people around us feel good as well.
I hope this post was valuable to you.
If you would like to find out more, get in touch to book a coaching session where we will explore your internal dialogue.
Call on (+44) 7510344750
Email to contact@wellbeingwithmagda.co.uk