fbpx

3 Ways Negative Self-Talk Damages Us

Psychologist Martin Seligman explained that there are three ways in which our internal beliefs or narratives  become damaging: we make them personal, pervasive, and permanent.

Personal: I failed, so I must be a failure

Pervasive: I failed in this instance, so I’ll probably fail in every instance.

Permanent: I failed once, so I’ll probably fail always

When something goes wrong, watch how you speak to yourself.  Be careful of the words “never” and “always”.  A failure is a single instance of particular context and a particular version of your past self – taken positively, each failure makes you a better version of yourself.

It is not what happens that makes life hard, it is the perspective we chose to take on what is happening.  We can chose which questions we ask ourself.  If I ask myself “Why am I such a loser?”, my brain happily provides a long list of good answers.  If I ask myself “What would I change next time?”, my brain engages in a more positive search for answers.

The only true failure is to let one setback stop you completely.  You are not your current situation, you are the fullness of the journey that you will complete over your lifetime.

A mountaineer is not a failure when they are at base camp and only a success when at the summit.

On Psychologically Resilient Self-Talk:

  1. 10 Habits of Resilient People
  2. All Life demands Struggle

One response to “3 Ways Negative Self-Talk Damages Us”

  1. Congrats Conor on a very informative and entertaining blog – (your Dad introduced me to it) I have signed up and am looking forward to reading more. Moving people to action is a hugely relevant discussion – thanks and well done
    Ian Slattery (recently ex-Acn Dublin)

What are your thoughts?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d