The Importance of Inner Dialogue

Inner dialogue is something that is an important facet of everyone's experience. It is sometimes said that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. If this were true, everybody would be judged insane. Everybody has an inner dialogue, but perhaps what you say to yourself is the determining factor as to whether the bahavior is problematic..

The default for inner dialogue seems to be as your Inner Parent were admonishing your Inner Child. It mostly seems to be very negative, although you do sometimes say, "Go on! You can do it!", and other positive urgings. The frequency with which this happens to you could probably be traced to how encouraging your parents were when you were a small child.

Of course this negative self-talk does not improve matters when you are attempting to change attitudes. In fact it helps entrench a very negative self-image and a not OK feeling. Like any habit this too is ultimately under your control and you can choose differentlt.. Lots of habits are reflections of inner beliefs, even ones which seem not to be so will have been a preference which was repeated. A preference would derive from your beliefs/life script.

It is possible to change the sort of self-talk which is you predominant mode. Train yourself to change all negative self-talk into positive self-talk as soon as you become aware of it. Further, you can actively train yourself to use positive self-talk when you are faced with a task or decision. Instead of telling yourself how boring a task is, find some way of making it more interesting or challenging and focus your self talk on beating the challenge. This will certainly be an improvement on telling yourself how boring it is and that it is taking forever! There is always some way of making any little task more interesting....

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