Have you ever stopped to listen to yourself? I don’t mean out loud verbal listening…I am talking about listening to all those thoughts that freely without obstruction control your mind and thus your life?

If we ever hope to shift our life to something better, if we ever hope to transform our lives into something we love then we must get familiar with how we work and learn where the controls are.

Unfortunately when we are born we do not come with an “instruction” manual. Life is an adventure, a journey that happens as we are creating it. And, that’s the key to this whole puzzle.

Life unveils itself in the moment, so, the obvious key is to study and understand how we “operate” in the moment.

It’s at this moment that you finally “meet yourself” for the first time and really begin “listening” to your self-talk.

Self-talk is all those voices in our heads. And, there are many.

Self-talk is essentially the statements that we repeat to ourselves throughout the course of the day. Unlike affirmations that are planned, these thoughts are random and never planned. They are automatic thoughts that pop into your mind.

The first step to managing your personal self-talk is to put serious effort into tuning into your automatic thoughts. As you experience your day rather than go at it blind and allow whatever thoughts want to rule take command, you step to the place and begin to study them.

In other words, no longer do you allow your thoughts to control you as a spoiled child might want to do. You take control and begin focusing on what it is that your mind is telling you for each interaction throughout your day.

For example: Let’s say you are running late for an appointment. How do you handle it? What runs through your mind in those moments?

Are you berating yourself? Coming down on yourself and telling yourself things like: “so typical, you are always late. You always seem to find a way to screw things up.”

That’s negative self-talk. When you try your hand at a new project but it does not turn out do you see yourself as a “failure.” If so, that’s more negative self-talk.

This kind of self-talk is very powerful in its effects and will eventually begin to dictate and reflect in your whole life.

However, once you begin to be engaged with yourself and study your thoughts…you begin shifting your thoughts from negative to positive in nature and in the end your life transforms too because your life is nothing but a reflection of your thoughts.

The best way to train your mind to stay aligned with your new positive nature is to focus on tuning all your thoughts for one week.

Don’t worry so much about changing them at this point, just focus and become more aware of each moment and your participation in it.

This can be tough at first because you are shifting your attention from the external world to your internal one. You have discovered that the controls to your life are on the inside not the outside.

Once you have a spent a week getting familiar with your thoughts and your reactions to situations, the next step would be to start changing any negative thoughts that surface with at least 3 positive or neutral statements.

Focusing on creating 3 new choices rather than one gives you more ammunition to begin shifting these thoughts to the positive side. As time goes on and you keep doing the 3:1 positive to negative statements, you will see the frequency of the negative statements going down as this happens and you can start to shift the ratio to just 1:1 instead.

You are actively changing how your brain thinks and banishing negativity from your thought process. The negative statements that previously focused on you, now become more positive statements that focus on the situation or circumstance although they still have some relation to you as a person.

The next time you fail at a project your thoughts no longer immediately go to “I am a loser” but will think new thoughts such as “at least I tried and put myself out there.”

The more often you do this the more your mind is trained to the positive side of life because you begin to feel empowered and in control, something  you did not have before. This is a very powerful feeling and helps you stay aligned with the right direction of where you want your mind to be.

All of these changes take patience and determination on your part. You did not develop your negative thoughts and habits overnight and neither can you shift them overnight. Each time you move past negative patterns that previously controlled you the feeling of empowerment grows stronger and stronger until one day you find that your immediate thoughts in any given circumstance are now shifted into positive ones and this new positive nature reflects in your life.

The important thing to remember is that the goal is to release yourself from your negative programming.

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