Most of us have this ability to reduce ourself. This “ability” may not be that useful for many reason and primarly because there’s no point in doing it because what we tell ourselves is simply false.
Positive thinking is the ability to always see the positive option of everything. It doesn’t mean that you don’t even want to consider the bad options but that you’ve analysed them enough to know that they aren’t a big deal and aren’t worth your time.
What you want to be able to do is to find what is positive to your life and make it even better. Life is to be lived once and you must make sure to enhance it by any means. Would you ever consider living your whole life under pressure because of works and peers? That would be a nightmare. But everyone does it… Why? Because most people don’t live their life, their life lives them (they do not decide what they want in life).
Positive thinking is an healthy habit to maintain. It’s not lying to yourself, it’s simply going for what you want, maybe failing, but not over-analysing the situation which leads to action-paralysis. Once you get into the habit of seeing the positive in what could be accomplished, you won’t care if you fail because the end result will generally be better than your false conception of WHAT COULD OF happen… Yea, like it would happen, 100% sure…
Self talk. This is an interesting subject. You know, when you’re talking to yourself in your head? That’s self talk. The idea here is to simply provide you tools which will allow you to DO what you want instead of freezing up in front of situations which could lead to a win situation for you.
First, I must say that I’m not in the favor of what is called affirmations, those little sentences you tell yourself and supposely do magic. The problem with those and why it doesn’t work for most who try them out is that they aren’t authentic. They don’t come from a place of true belief and purpose. What is better is actual affirmation, in the moment. Say you are about to go do a presentation in front of a huge crowd. You start feeling not really good, but you’ve done this before. At least once.
You’ve done it once, and here we are again. What can happen now? The worst? People laughing at you, you getting unconcious, etc? Now that you’ve imagine what could happen, think about what you just imagined. Yes, it’s exagerate, fun, near impossible. Now, remember the last time, it was FINE! You did well, maybe even better than you expected. It’s going to be the same now.
The best self talk you can give yourself is from a place of confidence. If you feel like you king of the world, it will show in your actions. Confidence is gained by acting confident in inconfident situations.
I would suggest you try this: If you happen to feel stressed or unconfident in yourself at a certain point in your day, especially if you’re going to do something like speaking in front of an audience, asking a girl out, asking for a raise, etc., to tell yourself to FEEL confident and able to do the task, EASILY. We are the only person who can control our internal system, and if we decide we want to act confident, we must tell ourself to become confident.
The point of this is for you to realise, AFTER it’s been done, that the task wasn’t as huge as you IMAGINED it. Huh? Imagination again? Yes. It is the only thing that stops us from acting upon our needs and feelings.
Positive thinking with self talk will be great tools to you, if you use them, because, like knives, they need to be sharpened before they can work perfectly.