Episode 6 – Managing Your Self-Talk

Episode Summary

In this episode we talked about self-talk and the impact it can play on your subconscious thoughts which in turn can impact what happens in your life.

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Show Transcript

All right. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Emotional Embuffination podcast. I’m your host, David Enevoldsen, and here on Emotional Embuffination, what we are doing is trying to train to become emotionally buff enough to overcome any kind of conflict in life and to manage emotions, to deal with them in such a way that not only do you minimize negative emotions, but you’re learning to reach new levels of success and happiness. This podcast is just one of many resources I have available. Please check out my website which is embuffination.com. That’s the Emotional Embuffination website. On today’s show we are going to be talking about self-talk, sometimes called autosuggestion. One of the things that became really apparent to me many years ago during this, I talk about this time a lot and this was sort of my pivot point in my life where everything was sort of a disaster for me. I got suicidal. Everything sort of became a train wreck. I had a terrible relationship with my kids. I ended up getting a divorce. My business was just crashing and burning. I wasn’t making any money. I was super stressed out. It became a regular occurrence to stick a gun in my mouth. It was a train wreck of a time for for me. One of the things that contributed to that and there was a lot of different things, and I talk about some of the different aspects and different podcasts and stories that I’ve had, but a big one was self-talk.

I was walking around with the most toxic narrative about myself, and I remember consciously thinking these things. I remember doing this all through law school. I would drive to school and back, and the whole time I would just sit there and tell myself stuff like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m such a failure. Oh, I suck at doing school. Like I’m a terrible parent. I am just the worst husband imaginable. I am ugly. I’m unattractive. I can’t succeed at anything. I’m a failure.” I talked about this stuff all the time to myself. I would just like play in my head constantly. It was just this never-ending record of me telling myself how bad I was, at everything. The interesting thing about it is it all started coming true. I remember telling myself when I first became an attorney that I was a terrible business person. And when I first started and I started running a law firm, I was indeed a terrible business person. I was making way less than I should have been. I think I was netting something less than minimum wage my first year as an attorney. I was a bad parent. I ended up getting a divorce. I was clearly a terrible husband. I became a failure. And so all these things that I was telling myself manifested. They came true. And I think there was a really powerful subconscious message to myself that rippled out into the real world.

In a vacuum that probably didn’t seem like that huge a thing to me at the time. Even if I had become really consciously aware of how toxic my dialogue was becoming with myself and the impact that that was having on me, I don’t know that that information alone would have caused me to reverse everything. Now, as I’ve talked about in other materials that I’ve generated, there was this sort of low point that I hit. I ended up getting a bunch of counseling and throwing myself into self-help materials and various other things, and then life sort of turned around. I became very focused on changing the narrative because I knew the narrative had to change. But one of the things that really struck at home for me about the dialogue with myself was when I heard my daughter one day start saying something that had become kind of normal for her. And I don’t even remember what it was that that prompted this. But she did this kind of thing all the time where I said, “Hey, no, that’s not quite right. You need to do this.” And then she would start smacking herself in the head and going, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” And I remember there was a moment where it suddenly dawned on me that this was a behavior pattern I was teaching her. I had been setting this model where I was. Just denigrating myself and saying all these terrible things to myself constantly and thinking that was normal and acceptable.

In a vacuum it didn’t seem like that big a deal because it was just me. What did I matter? But then when I saw I was teaching it to my daughter, man, that created a whole nother level of problem that just made me double down even more on the idea that I needed to fix my narrative. I needed to change the way I was talking about myself to myself. Here’s another example that I like to use in terms of the distinction between your self-talk and the talk you’re making at or about somebody else. Because I think we have a tendency to be dismissive, like I was about what you are saying to yourself in ways that you might not do with other people. Here’s an example. I have heard people say, and I’ve said this myself, something like, “Oh, I can’t eat this donut. I’m already way too fat.” Now think about that for a second. We hear that all the time. We hear people say things like that, “Oh, I’m too overweight. I can’t have that. I’m such a fat pig know I can’t be eating these things.” Can you imagine if some guy said that to his wife? “You can’t eat that donut. You’re too fat. You’re a fat pig. You eat that donut, it’s going to get even worse.” We would think he was this horrible monster.

He was abusive. Or we’d just sit there and go, “What is wrong with you, man? Don’t talk like that to your wife.” But when it comes to us, when you’re saying it about yourself, nobody thinks anything of it. That’s just normal and acceptable. And that’s a problem because it normalizes this idea that you can send yourself a super toxic message and it doesn’t matter.

So, let’s talk about this whole idea. This is all revolving around self-talk. Again, it’s also known often as autosuggestion. Autosuggestion is essentially just when you are taking a message of some sort and you are feeding it into your subconscious such that it starts to ripple out and become real, in essence. Autosuggestion is sort of the way I interpret it at least, is sort of more along the lines of taking control of the self-talk because you are constantly engaged in some sort of self-talk. You’ve always got some sort of dialogue internally or externally or both that is working its way into your subconscious. Now if you don’t pay attention to it, if you just let it be whatever it is and you never pay attention, then it becomes all these scattered, crazy messages that are all over the place. Sometimes it starts drifting into super negative ones could theoretically also turn into positive ones. But if you’re not taking control of it, it will very likely either be all over the place or be negative.

And that’s why it becomes so important to pay attention to what your self-talk is, what you are feeding yourself by way of autosuggestion, and send the kind of messages that are going to facilitate who and what you want to become.

One of the really famous sort of mantras that are out there that are reflective of suggestion came from Émile Coué and for any of you French speakers out there, I’m sure I’m butchering his last name and I apologize for that. But his phrase, which it seems like everybody has heard somewhere, is “Day by day in every way, I am getting better and better.” That to me is a great example of autosuggestion at work. That’s somebody who’s taken a statement and they’ve said something positive about themselves and they start to incorporate that. So they just think I’m getting better and better and you start telling your subconscious that and then you start to become better and better. Now that’s a pretty generic statement. It’s very generalized, but the concept, I think, is really sound. We’re going to come back to that in a minute. This is not necessarily just some woo woo stuff. Now, it does have law of attraction implications. For anybody that’s followed me knows that I am an advocate for law of attraction for various reasons. But there’s research on autosuggestion as well and the self-talk and the impact that this can have. In my book Emotional Embuffination, one of the chapters I talk about is where one of the chapters is entitled Autosuggestion.

And I am of course talking about this self-talk and auto suggestion in that chapter. And one of the studies that I cited there took a bunch of geriatric patients who had some sort of illness, and they had each of these patients record an affirmational statement that they were saying, and then they were required to listen for 30 days each day for one hour each day this recording that they had created. And at the end of that, they took these two different groups of the geriatric patients, there was, of course, a control group and there was another group and they compared kind of where they were. And not surprisingly, the group that had been engaged in this autosuggestion stuff was reporting feeling better about their quality of life. More interestingly, they had done measurements of serum cortisol levels before and after this whole exercise, and they found that there was a significant shift in the group that was engaged in autosuggestion towards healthier levels of serum cortisol. So there was an actual physiological change that happened by way of just autosuggestion. So again, this is not really just woo woo stuff and there’s other research that kind of shows similar things. For example, there’s one study where they were looking at journaling, and in my mind journaling is sort of another form of autosuggestion because you can take the thoughts that you are running through and you’re just putting them in written form, in essence. And it’s sort of forcing you to go through whatever thought process you’re going to have.

So that is in effect, a way of facilitating self-talk. One of the things that I did when I was coming out of my terrible place and I talk about this one a lot is journaling. And I went to the store and when I was starting my sort of self-help journey and I got a blank journal and I was going through and writing these prompts to myself and I would make myself write something positive about me. That was one of the ones that I came to a lot. The very first time I did this it was an incredibly painful experience. I remember I wrote several things down that I was supposed to write about, something I was grateful for or something that I was going to accomplish but in the past tense, you know, there’s all this stuff. One of them was that I was going to write something positive about myself. And the first time I did that, I remember staring at the paper and my self-image had become so utterly toxic that I had a really, really hard time of coming up with anything. I stared at it for I think it was like half an hour or something before I actually came up with something and it was really silly.

I don’t even remember exactly what it was now. I think it was something like “I’m good at legal analysis” or some generic boring statement, but I kept trying that and I tried it day after day and it got easier as time went on, as I started to alter my self-dialogue and my perception of myself as a result. So, journaling is a big one and there’s research on that. And one study they were finding that just engaging in journaling can be as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy in dealing with depression in adolescents. So here again, I mean, there’s research showing you that self-talk matters, that it can alter how you feel, what’s and it ripples out into other stuff. It can have physiological changes in your body and all of that can turn into what you’re doing and how you’re interfacing with other people and what you’re accomplishing, and so many other things. That takes us into the law of attraction implications. Again, as, as you may know from having heard me in the past, I’m a huge advocate for the law of attraction for a lot of different reasons. And Law of Attraction is very much about what you’re saying and the idea that what you are saying to yourself and the messages that you’re putting out there are going to find a way to become real. And this seems like a great example of that.

If I’m sitting there and saying, as I did, “I’m a terrible parent. I’m a business failure. I suck. Everything I do just turns to garbage.” Then I’m going to create those things. So, if I’m going to dwell on all these negative things as toxic dialogue, that’s what’s going to show up in my life per the Law of Attraction rules. So, one of the important ways to kind of take control of this is to generate a mantra. A mantra, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but it’s essentially just a short statement that you say to yourself and it encapsulates what you want to become or the direction you want to take yourself. In essence, it’s taking autosuggestion, getting control of the messages that you’re sending to yourself and encapsulating it in a statement that you can kind of repeat over and over and over again. A couple of guidelines for this. One is make sure that you’re incorporating the word “I.” You know, make sure it’s somehow wrapped around you so that you are altering what you are becoming in the way that you’re seeing yourself. Think about this Émile Coué statement we had a few minutes ago. “Day by day, in every way. I am getting better and better.” So, that statement encapsulates the “I” right? It’s incorporating me. I’m making myself better every day. Another one is to another guideline is to use the present progressive tense.

I’m a big fan of this. Like, for example, you say I’m growing or I’m becoming slimmer. When you use these words as the present progressive it’s things that are actively happening. I am becoming more wealthy. Part of the reason I like that is that it takes away this sort of fakeness to it because a lot of times we’ll say like, “Oh, I feel poor right now and I’m going to tell myself I’m rich.” And if I just say “I am rich. I am rich.” I might not really buy into that theory because I look around, I know I’m not rich. And so, it’s sort of hard to just say “I’m rich” and convince myself I’m rich when I’m not. The present progressive helps that because if I say, “I’m getting wealthier all the time,” then it doesn’t mean that I have to instantly become rich. I can just have a little more money or a little more access to resources or something that’s going to move me a little closer to that. And it can be about anything. I’m actively growing. I’m actively getting more fit. And here again, that phrase that we have before, “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” I’m getting, I’m actively doing something that’s improving stuff that fits this present progressive tense rule. Another important guideline is to focus on positives, not negatives. For example, if you say something like I’m getting wealthier all the time, I’m now focused on the positive affirmative state.

In contrast, you might say something like “I’m eliminating my debt.” Now your focus goes on to the debt. Here’s another one “I, I am sick and I want to not be sick.” So I started to say, “I will no longer be sick.” Here again, my focus has become on the illness, the state of being ill as opposed to health. So, you might make a mantra that was something more along the lines of “I am getting healthier and healthier all the time.” Now you’ve shifted it into the thing that I want to focus on. The last guideline I would offer to you for kind of autosuggestion-based mantras is to keep it short. I mean, you don’t have to write like a huge novel. I’ve used a lot of different mantras in my lifetime now, especially since I’ve gone through my, I guess, awakening or self-help journey. And my my running theme is the thing that I’ve discovered is that it’s it’s nice to try to write a novel, but you just want to be able to quickly say it in your head over and over again for various reasons. Sometimes you want to meditate on this and you want to just repeat the statement to yourself. Sometimes you want to write it somewhere and see it. But just keeping it short to the point and something you’ll remember. I think that’s important. And that kind of leads into what do you do when you notice this dialogue?

So that’s probably one step of it because a lot of the time you’re not going to notice it. We kind of get into these behavior patterns where we start to just repeat whatever we’re saying all the time and we don’t think too much about it. And it’s hard to constantly be thinking about what you are saying to yourself. But occasionally you’re going to notice it. Especially when you start thinking about something like here we’re talking about it, and that’s going to make it much easier to notice it, right? So, the first step is catch yourself. If you are saying something toxic, like you say, you go in and you see the donuts in the break room and you’re like, “Oh, man, I’m going to eat one of those donuts. No, no, no, I’m not going to eat that donut. I’m too fat.” So suddenly you notice you’re doing that. Catch yourself. That’s first. And then kind of rewind and then maybe try. There’s a couple of different options you have here. Maybe try doing it again. “I’m choosing not to eat that because I want to make a healthier choice right now. And because of that, I’m getting more fit all the time.” That’s another dialogue that doesn’t turn into “I’m fat.” It just turns it into something constructive where you can say, “I’m making better choices and I’m getting fitter as a result.”

That mindset is dramatically different. So if you can catch yourself doing it, rewind, make a new statement that is more in line with the kind of mantra message guidelines we had a minute ago that will help to start to rewire things. Another one that I’m a big fan of is wristbands. So, I do these all the I’ve done these for a long time now. I will wear wristbands all the time that have little messages. And you can get these easily customized. You can go online and spend a couple bucks for five bucks, You can have a customized message to yourself that says whatever you want it to say. I’m getting more fit all the time or whatever message you want there. You can write it on there and just constantly be seeing it. Wristbands are a great one. Writing notes to yourself is another one that I like. And you can do this in different ways. You can write out a letter to yourself. You can write on little cards. Sometimes I use index cards and I’ll tape them in different places and I’ll just write my mantra on it or some little message to myself that reminds me what I should be thinking. Another one I like haven’t done this as much recently, but I’ve done a lot of this in my lifetime now is using dry erase markers. If I always have a dry erase marker in my medicine cabinet in my bathroom, and I will write messages to myself on the mirror all the time because it’s easy to erase and you can kind of change it or rewrite it or do whatever you want to.

But it’s you’re going to see it because you go in the restroom and you use the mirror and you’re going to hopefully and I’m hoping you’re using basic hygiene to make sure that you’re clean and you’re seeing a mirror in your restroom, but you’re going to see that message there.

Another one is to use triggers. So, this is an idea that when you see a certain place or thing, that you will automatically start to tell yourself a message. Like every time I walk through the door of my office, I’m going to immediately tell myself whatever message I want, or every time I open my car door, I’m going to tell my message to myself. You pick something like a landmark or an event or something that’s going to trigger you telling yourself this message. That’s another great one. Couple more ways. Remember we mentioned earlier journaling. Journaling is huge for me and for anybody that isn’t aware, I’ve got a guided journal that actually came from that time that I was talking about before where I just got that blank journal and I was writing prompts for myself and I was going through and just trying to rewire the way that I was thinking. And so journaling is huge because there’s something about the act of journaling and writing stuff down that just connects it into your brain differently.

When I was in law school or any school, I remember there was always something just almost magical about writing material down on paper, like writing down an outline, or I would draw pictures and write stuff on index cards. Just the act of doing that alone seemed to somehow pound it into my brain better. And journaling is kind of another way of doing that. Like you’re taking these messages that you want to internalize and you’re writing them down on paper. Journaling is huge for that. So I took that journal that I started off and I kind of culled out some of the prompts and I put them into a standardized journal that you can now get if you want to learn more about that. It’s a it’s called My Reality Generator. And it’s got a combination of prompts, things like, you know, stuff that you’re grateful for or stuff that’s positive about yourself, things that you have control over, things that you’re going to acquire. It’s also got some free journaling sections. It’s got reminders and quotes and all the stuff. You want to learn more about that, check out myrealitygenerator.com. And you can see some more there. But journaling is a huge one and you don’t even have to use that that commercialized journal. You can just get a blank journal and sort of write some of this stuff to yourself.

And just as long as you’re going through that act of rewiring your thought process by way of what you’re writing down. Another big one for me is meditation. There are a lot of different ways that you can meditate, of course. Although there’s probably some debate about that. Other people say there’s only one way to meditate. I’ve heard different kind of takes on that, but in my opinion, there are numerous different ways you can meditate. One of them is to just pick a mantra that you want to incorporate. And I’ve done this before where you just sit down for whatever time frame you want and you just repeat your statement to yourself. “I’m getting better and better at marketing.” “I’m getting wealthier and wealthier all the time,” and just keep repeating that statement over and over again. “I’m getting wealthier and wealthier all the time. I’m getting wealthier and wealthier all the time.” Whatever the statement is, you just sit there and you don’t have to say it out loud. You can say it out loud, but just kind of keep repeating it over and over and over again to pound it into your brain. Here’s another one of my favorites. Calendar and/or phone reminders. You can do this, like pull out your phone right now. We all have smartphones now, right? Use your calendar to set a reminder like a recurring event that pops up.

Something opens up on your phone every like 10 a.m., every single day or whatever time frames you want. You can, it doesn’t have to just be one. You can do multiple. Like I have one that pops up on my phone at 10 a.m. every morning and at 5 p.m. every evening. And it will tell me whatever message I’ve incorporated right now. And it’ll just have a reminder as a calendar entry that says like, “Hey, here’s your mantra right now.” And then I see it and I read it to myself and then I kind of move on. That’s a big one for me. Here’s another one I really like computer desktop images for for those of us who work on computers a lot, which I certainly do. I’m an attorney, so I spend an enormous amount of time on my computer. Plus, I’m doing some of the Emotional Embuffination stuff, which also puts me on the computer a lot. You can put things on your desktop. You have a lot of control over what’s showing up there. You can show images to yourself that are reflective of the kind of messages that you want to be or the things you want to manifest in your world. You can put just direct text on the screen on the backdrop there so you can see the messages just on a constant basis. So, if you’re working on your computer a lot, this can be a great one to just sort of subconsciously knock it into your brain, whatever those things are.

This is another really big one for me is, be very careful about what you’re saying on social media and to other people generally, not not just on social media. But just any time you’re making any statements to anybody else. Somebody is offering you the donut. Don’t go to, “I’m a fat pig.” Go to, “I’m eating healthier now and I’m getting more fit as a result.” Like, change the dialogue that you’re having with other people, change the message that you’re putting out on social media, if you’re using social media. Although there’s lots of arguments not to use social media at all, if you can help that. But just be very careful about what you’re saying to other people. A lot of times I think there’s an impulse to try to meet some sort of agenda and perspective that we have with others. I saw this as a family law attorney a lot of the time. It’s kind of interesting. You would talk to somebody who would say they were facing child support issues in their case and there was a fear that they were either going to be paying more or receiving less of the child support. And so, in that situation, they would immediately go into all sorts of dialogues about how little money they had and how they couldn’t afford anything. And all of a sudden the dialogue would revolve around their poverty.

But in contrast, at different times they would say, “Oh yeah, I really know money really well, and I’m super good at this.” So, it would be these very confused messages. So, take control of what you’re saying to other people. Pay attention to it and just be conscious of and control the self-dialogue. Last one is the same thing I talked about in that study before with recordings. You can record messages to yourself and again, we have smartphones. There’s so much technology now that it’s really easy to just download a free app, record yourself saying something, and then you can find a way to play it back to yourself on a regular basis.

Let me circle back to this, this theme about social media, because this this is a big one for me. And it’s fascinating to watch this on, I see it on Facebook in particular. But in other places, too, like Insta, Twitter, all the social media places, you see fascinating insight into how people are thinking. One of the fascinating things I think people do is they will constantly go into these self-deprecating comments and memes. I want to give you a few examples and kind of listen to these and just think about the common themes within them. There’s a picture of a woman who looks very happy. And on the top it says, “When someone calls me lazy” and then the girl in the first frame says, “Thank you.” And in the second frame, she’s holding her heart and closing her eyes. And she says, “I know.” “When someone calls me lazy. Thank you. I know.”

Here’s another one: “Is done an emotion? Because I feel it all the time.”

Here’s another: “No Money November was a success. Dead Broke December is about to be poppin.”

Another meme. “When someone asks where you see yourself in five years, buddy, I’m just trying to make it to Friday.” And it’s got a picture of this monkey with crazy hair. Like he’s just really having a rough time.

Another one. “I thought I was in a bad mood, but it’s been a few years now, so I guess this is who I am.”

Here’s another. “Do you ever feel like your body’s check engine light has been on and you’re still driving it like, ‘Nah, it’ll be fine.'”

I saw one that has a picture of what appears to be a board game and it says “Stay Alive the Game.” And it’s got a picture of this woman who looks just kind of depressed and she’s holding and staring at this little glass of wine on the box. It says “The ultimate game of waking up every goddamn day and doing the same stuff over and over and over. F me. One, wake up. Two, go to work or don’t. Three, bedtime again.

Here’s another common one I see. There’s usually I’ve seen this one, the exact same meme in many different variations. It essentially has a dog with a crazed expression on his face, like you just surprised the dog or something. And it’s got wide eyes and it’ll say something like, “The therapy dog after I share all of my problems.” “The emotional support dog, after I get done telling him my problems,” something like that. And the implication, of course, is that this dog is just utterly stunned because of how messed up your life is.

Here’s another one. “Me: Not today. Satan. Satan: Oh, thank God. Because even I can’t deal with your life right now.”

Here’s another. “I once set up a sim to have my exact life. The sim spent all the time crying. I stopped playing after that.”

Here’s another. “I want to be 14 again and ruined my life differently. I have new ideas.”

Here’s another one. It’s a picture of this kind of skeleton with fairy wings and a wand on. Running across lava, it seems. And on the top, it says, “When you’re dead inside. But your best friend needs emotional support.” I have tons of these. I started, like, a weird little collection, which is probably some problem in and of itself. But I’m fascinated by the dialogue here. I could go on and on and on, but I think you get the idea. The common link here is that they’re all sending these toxic messages and trying to be funny about it.

And we try to say, “Ha ha, I’m dead inside. Ha ha. I saw my life as a train wreck. My life is a disaster.” Now, if you put this all in the framework of what we’ve been talking about with respect to autosuggestion, with respect to the subconscious messages I’m sending myself, with respect to the implications of the Law of attraction, with respect to the physiological changes that this is going to start to have, with respect to how I’m going to be looking at the problems I’m dealing with, I am creating a narrative that about my life that sucks. I am telling myself, I am telling the universe, I am telling the people around me, things are terrible and I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a train wreck. Now, if that’s what you want, cool. Tell yourself that. But I find that problematic. So, I’ve tried to be extremely careful for many years now about the stuff that I’m seeing on social media. I try to say, “Look, things are great. My life is together. I’ve got it going on.” You know, whether I feel like that in that moment or not, I am doing my best to make sure that that’s the message. Now, there’s an interesting additional element here about the message, and that is with respect to intentions and sort of the underlying emotions around it. Because you can say words out loud. You can even say words to yourself and not believe them.

I’ve had times where I’ve had a mantra that I didn’t quite buy into and it didn’t seem like it was going anywhere because subconsciously I knew that I didn’t really believe what I was saying. The example I gave earlier about I feel poor and I’m just going to sit there and tell myself I’m rich. Like, subconsciously, I’m not really buying into it because I’m looking around and I’m like, “Oh, there’s cockroaches in my crappy apartment and I have my broken down beater car. I’m not rich.” But even though I’m sitting there telling myself, “I am rich,” I’m not really believing it. So, intentions matter. I mean, think also of like when somebody says, “I’m sorry,” but they clearly don’t mean it. Like the words don’t really matter. It’s that intention under it that matters. There’s a quote here that I think also, cuts to another issue. Let me let me start this again. There’s a whole nother issue that we have that goes around conflicting directions. So, when we’re not paying attention, especially to the messages that we’re sending ourselves, they tend to bounce all over the place. And that gives our subconscious a really confusing time. The quote that I have is from Joseph Murphy in a book called The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. And in it, he says, “If you get into a taxi and give half a dozen different directions to the taxi driver in 5 minutes, he would become hopelessly confused and probably would refuse to take you anywhere. It is the same thing when working with your subconscious mind.”

I very much agree with this statement. So, if you are just bouncing all over the place, your brain gets confused. The universe gets confused from a law of attraction perspective. The people around you might even get confused. So you need to pay a lot of attention to the emotions that are underlying things in addition to the direction that you’re sending things. So don’t just start, “I’m going to make this little joke and then I’m going to go back to telling myself I’m wealthy, but then I’m going to jump back and post five memes that say what a failure I am.” And then I’m going to be like, “Yeah, I don’t understand why things aren’t working out for me.” Become consistent. Make sure that the emotions are lining up with the message that you’ve got. Make sure that your intentions are lining up with the message that you’ve got. I see a lot of inconsistent messages like this. Here’s another couple of memes. I’m fascinated by Facebook, in case you haven’t gotten this, just because it tells you so much about what people are thinking and where they are and how their mindsets are aligned. In this first meme, it says, “Tell someone you love them today because tomorrow is not promised to my family and my friends, I love you.”

This exact same person posted on a different day, “The strongest people are the ones who are still kind after the world tore them apart.” There’s sort of conflicting messages there. There’s another one here. Again, same person that posted these. “Some people just drain the f-ing nice right out of you.” So, there’s all these people out here that are draining nice from you. Same person at a later date post Amin, that says, “No matter how much I try to be nice, someone always finds my F off button.” So now we switched from I’m just so nice all the time and I just get drained to I can be nice and then I immediately flip into f off, which is intrinsically not nice. Here’s another meme that I think reflects the intention aspect of this, and I’ve seen a couple of variations on this one. “You attract what you fear. Me: Ahh, wealth.” It’s interesting because you’re kind of joking, but here we’re taking the intention of the statement about you attract what you fear. And I’m saying, I really don’t think I can have wealth. And I’m trying to turn that into a funny joke. So again, pay a lot of attention to the intention, the emotions under underlying things. Another meme that I think is reflective of the same concept. My toxic line is, “I wish you the best. Knowing damn well I hope you go to hell.” So here again, we’ve got words that are kind of different from the intention and people read into that and you read into that more importantly.

With that in mind, it sort of begs the question, when you go back into that scenario we were talking about before, where I may be saying something outwardly, but I’m not totally buying it and I want to like I’m wealthy, but I’m looking around and I see I’m not wealthy, you know, what do you do in these situations? This is one that I tried to do for a long time. I was really struggling with the idea of marketing for a long time, and I had a narrative to myself, and I knew I had this narrative that I suck at marketing. And I remember telling myself that. I remember telling other people that. I would go places and be like, “Yeah, I can figure out how to do operations really well and I can do blah, blah, blah, blah. But I really suck at marketing.” Like I would, that was a statement I was making to people all the time. So, it became this message and this almost mantra to myself that I was terrible at marketing. And initially when I realized that, I started saying stuff like, “I’m a master marketer” and “I’m I’m just really good at marketing. And it just was not working. It almost seemed to put more attention on the fact that I was having trouble with marketing. This to me goes into how do you deal with limiting beliefs, in essence? Because I had in effect, a limiting belief that was created by this narrative that I was telling myself about being a terrible marketer, and it was making it even more true.

And in my mind, this is a problem because most of the time, a lot of time, a lot of life coaches will say things like, “The pathway is uproot all your limiting beliefs, figure out what they are, and then controvert them. If you think that you’re a terrible marketer, just start telling yourself you’re a great marketer and then pound that into your subconscious.” That can backfire because if you don’t believe it, like I didn’t believe that I was a master marketer, I just started to ignore my own mantras or I started to put more attention on the idea that I wasn’t a good marketer. So, what do you do in that situation? In my mind, there’s a few different things you can do. One is you can use the present progressive, like I’m learning more and more all the time about how to do marketing. I’m getting better all the time at doing marketing. Another thing you can do is sort of take the attention off of trying to controvert the message and turn it into things around marketing that you might be good at or whatever the situation is. Things about developing wealth that you might already be good at and you can kind of believe in.

There’s an exercise that Abraham Hicks talks about, if you have any familiarity with that line of thought, and this hovers around some of the Law of Attraction stuff, but I really like it. And it’s called the focus wheel. And what the focus wheel does is essentially you take the thing that you’re trying to achieve and you sort of write that in the center of a wheel and then on you write, little spokes coming out of it. On the side spokes, you start writing things that are related to the underlying thing that you were trying to connect to but that you already believe are true. Like, for example, if at the center of mine, mine was to become a great marketer, I might say something like, “Well, I can speak well.” “I, I’m a trial attorney and I’ve got good oratorical skills.” If I’m looking at that stuff. Being able to speak well can tie into marketing, right? Because if I can go out and talk, that’s a part of marketing. That’s one of the mechanisms you use to market. So, if I can find these things that I’m already believing in, I might be smart, I might be capable of doing the thing, I might have a great support network to get more healthy, whatever the objective is. If I can do that and start focusing on the things that I’m good at, that takes my energy into something more constructive, that wraps around the ultimate objective. And then I can start to retrain my narrative.

Another thing to kind of keep in mind is that you want to keep this all fresh. I found personally that sometimes I’ll do like the calendar entries in my phone or I’ll have a mantra, and maybe after three, four or six months, it just sort of becomes background noise almost. I might not be really paying attention to the words anymore. So, periodically go through and write a new mantra or rewrite the way it’s working or change the calendar entries in your phone or whatever. Just, kind of rework what you’re saying to keep it fresh. Because remember, emotions are an important element of this whole thing. Also, another thing that I found in a similar tone is that sometimes I’ll have a phrase and I start to think that that might have alternative meanings to stuff. You know, maybe there’s like double there’s different ways of kind of interpreting a statement. So be on guard for different implications for the things that you were saying, as well.

I would encourage you to kind of sit down and make a mantra right now if you have not already done this and. I’ll give you sort of a six step process on this. If you are in a position where you can do so, maybe do this right now, just write it down if you’re driving or something, don’t of course, but at least think through this.

So step one, what’s something you want to improve in your life? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to be able to pay your bills effectively? Do you want to get healthy? Do you want to find a job? Whatever it is. Identify a thing you want. Step two. What’s the affirmative or positive state you want to be in that’s related to that. So, for example, if your objective was I want to lose weight, then you make a statement about your fitness. If you want to be able to pay your bills, you want to talk about your wealth. If you want to eliminate illness, you want to talk about your health. Think about the affirmative positive state of your objective. Step three. Find a way to turn this into a present progressive statement. So that’s the ing framework. I am constantly getting more fit. I am making more and more money. I am getting healthier and healthier all the time. I am becoming the ideal disciplined employee, whatever it is. Like, find a present progressive statement that wraps around what your ultimate objective is. Take a look at your statement. This is step number four and see if you can shorten it down a little bit. Can you make it briefer? Can you cut some of the words out? How do you make it just a short quip? Number five, can you make it sound cooler? Can you add like some rhymes or something? I remember the Émile Coué “In every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” Like it sounds cool. See if you can kind of reword it a little bit.

And then step number six, add it somewhere, like write it down on a card where you’re going to see it all the time. Put it on your mirror with the dry erase markers, put it in your calendar in your phone, like do something so that you’re going to see it all the time. And it’s going to become this recurring message that you’re just hitting over and over and over again. And that’s probably going to do it for today. So that’s kind of a broad brush look at autosuggestion. Self-talk, in my opinion, is extremely important to be very aware of what you are saying to yourself. You might not get to such extremes as I was where I was turning my life into a total train wreck as I was sitting there talking constantly about what a failure I was. In fact, I didn’t mention this before, I don’t think. But there was a point where I remember carving the word failure into my arm with a little rotary cutter. So, it’s probably not going to become that bad if you’ve got this sort of bouncing around thing, but you could very much be undercutting your efforts in things. You could be sending these subconscious messages that are conflicting and then you never really get anywhere.

So, get a grip on what you’re saying. Become very conscious of your self-talk, become very conscious of the messages that you are sending yourself and take control of them. Start to say the messages that you want and it’s going to make a world of difference over time and you’re going to start to become the kind of person that you want to become.

All right. I think that’s enough for today that’s going to bring us to the end of the show. I hope you found this useful. I hope that you can take something away from this and you’ll just become a little bit stronger, better, become a little bit more emotionally embuffed. Remember, Emotional Embuffination is something that you have to keep doing over and over again. You know, you don’t just go to the gym and do two curls and say, “I’m buff and I never have to go back.” Like you go every day. If you’re going to the gym, and you want to be fit you got to keep working on it. At the end of the day, I want you to be emotionally strong enough to go from saying, “Oh my God, this struggle is real.” To be able to say, “What struggle?” Thank you all for listening. I appreciate you and your time and attention. Hope you have a great week and we’ll see you on the next show.