Tag: self-talk

Why Is Rumination Bad For You?

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I’m not closed about the fact that I’ve experienced mental illness in a major way twice in my life, post-natally, after the birth of each of my daughters. I had post-natal anxiety and depression both times, although my experience of each time was different. The second time I was prepared, and was also introduced to Havening by my lovely friend and colleague Lynley. The first time I was unwell for a whole year before I started to heal, and the second time was done and dusted within 4 months. What a relief that was!  And certainly no more babies for us.

Although the illness manifested slightly differently each time, rumination was a huge problem in both. Was it a symptom or a cause? Who knows. but it needed to get under control.

There’s disagreement in psychology as to whether it’s a mental illness in and of itself, or whether it’s a symptom, or, whether it is a cause of mental ill-health.

As with many things in the understanding of human psychology, there is no definitive conclusion! Most of my undergraduate essays would end with the rough conclusion: It’s considered a bit of both…

What exactly is rumination? Google says:

Rumination is a thought processing disorder meaning that worrisome thoughts or even neutral thoughts are given excess analysis by the person who ruminates.

And is considered to be demonstrated as four different types:

Brooding, reflection, intrusive, and deliberate rumination.

I think regardless, a good way to label it is simply: overthinking.

Here’s the thing: overthinking is absolutely correlated with depression, anxiety, OCD, and phobias. It can also be part of a healthy person’s every day life, they just don’t know that they’re doing it: it can cause sleep issues and, aside from the things I’ve mentioned, it’s also just highly unpleasant being stuck in your head and not being able to turn off your thoughts, which just loop and loop and loop… you burn your friends and partner out seeking a circuit breaker from them… a little wisdom to give you and out. It can be TORTURE! Your head is working WAY TOO HARD and you’re giving it WAY TOO MUCH OXYGEN!

Imagine being able to notice your overthinking patterns, observe them, and have a way of simply letting them go? Not just now, but every time? Come and learn how:

Sign up from my upcoming in-person workshop Use Your Body To Solve A Problem and learn how to get out of your head.

Sigh up to my internal dialogue eCourse – Inner Critic to Inner Coach and get those thoughts under control.

 

 

 

Video 8: Achieving Goals

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Welcome to Video 8 of my free 8-day Video Series leading up to the launch of my Inner Critic to Inner Coach eCourse. Every day I’ll be talking about an area of significance to your life, and how negative self-talk either causes or perpetuates that problem. And then importantly, a quick-and-dirty instant solution that you can use right away to make a difference to yourself. In this case how to set a goal and actually achieve it.

The secrets of achieving goals? Firstly, you need to have one. Do you have a goal you’re working towards? If not then get one! Goals are really important, your brain loves them. Working towards something in your life makes you feel happier and builds up self-confidence.

Secondly, you need to believe you can achieve it. This part is influenced by two things:

  1. the goal actually being achievable and possible. If you’re just 4 feet tall, you’re probably not going to make it as professional basketball player.
  2. your internal self-talk

The first one is fairly straight forward. Your goal needs to have the right amount of challenge and stretch for you, which is relative to the situation you’re currently in. When I was unwell with Post-natal Distress (PND) my goal was to get through the day having completed some very basic tasks, like feed baby, sleep baby. And, later on when I became slightly better, make dinner. Conversely when I was thriving as an employed Lead Coach in a large government department, my goals were very different!  Ask – is it realistic for me? Is it actually possible/achievable? Asking a third person for their opinion can be a great way to check.

In terms of #2, if you have crappy internal dialogue playing in your head, then you will be very unlikely to achieve your goal. It will erode your belief in yourself by telling you you can’t do it, you’re not good enough to have it, or, the old favourite – who do you think you are?  In other words, WHO ARE YOU TO HAVE THIS?

You will then either be afraid of failure, or success, because with a lack of an Inner Coach practice, you won’t have a plan to support yourself 100% no matter what happens. Yes fear of success is something that can happen!

This will lead to some of those very unhelpful patterns that we have all experienced at some stage – self-sabotage and procrastination to name a few.

The solution? A self-talk revolution will be extremely helpful to you, which is the point of the eCourse. And, in the meantime, try these two things:

  1. write down the very first, tiniest little step you can take towards this goal.  Just the very first one, and make it small.
  2. write down why it is possible for YOU to achieve it. What strength or past achievement or resource do you possess, that will help you?

I talk a lot about learning how to ‘have your own back’ and supporting yourself 100% no matter what, in the Inner Critic to Inner Coach eCourse. They are such essential stills to develop in order to achieve anything. Knowing you can manage potential ‘failure’ is everything.

Any questions, please get in touch!

Love, Charlotte x

Video 7: How To Boost Self-Confidence

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Welcome to Video 7 of my free 8-day Video Series leading up to the launch of my Inner Critic to Inner Coach eCourse. Every day I’ll be talking about an area of significance to your life, and how negative self-talk either causes or perpetuates that problem. And then importantly, a quick-and-dirty instant solution that you can use right away to make a difference to yourself. In this case a distinction and a tool to help you boost your self-confidence.

I just love this topic of self-confidence, because this is a huge part of what the Inner Critic to Inner Coach© Process is about! I make the distinction between self-confidence and the self-esteem in the earlier self-esteem post.

I want to make another distinction: between inside-confidence and outside-confidence. Let me tell you a brief story. When I was growing up as a teen and a young adult, when I still lived in England, I had a lot of outside-confidence. I was loud and said what I thought. I was brave and did scary things. I was socially competent and funny. To all I seemed a very ‘confident’ person. Once I moved in New Zealand and started my – what was going to be a never-ending, but in a good way! – self-development journey, I did so much healing. Because on the inside I didn’t feel confident, almost at all. I was highly insecure and needy; I doubted myself incessantly; I hated my body and appearance; my self-worth was in the toilet most of the time; I didn’t believe in an ounce of my own intelligence and I had no proper aspirations for myself. Yes, I put myself out there, but because it was the only way I knew how to get approval from others and keep them liking me, something I desperately needed to stay afloat in my life.

Once I’d done about 3 years of intense inner-work, I finally felt like I’d ‘bridged the gap’ between the outside and the inside. I felt so much more whole, and more self-confident in a very genuine way. I went back to London for a visit, and asked my friends if they’d noticed any differences in me. The overall answer was – ‘no’!  I guess that’s the thing with outside-confidence – it’s extremely convincing. However I felt the difference on the inside, which is the point.

Of course all the issues with self-confidence I’ve described can be solved by putting a stop to the constant Inner Critic and learning how to fundamentally talk to ourselves and therefore treat ourselves differently. So here’s a tip. See if you can begin to distinguish between inside and outside confidence. I’ll give you a clue – the more outside-confidence you have, the less inside-confidence there currently is. You can tell if it’s of the outside kind as your motivation will be about others, rather than you.

A quick way to begin boosting your inside-confidence is by finding real TRUTHS about yourself that you believe in 100% – specifically your abilities, competence or capacity to do something. Something you know about yourself. It could be as simple as: I know that I’m really organised, and this benefits me and the people I live with. Do a brainstorm of these small things that you absolutely believe about your competence and keep this list somewhere. When you need to cultivate that inside-confidence, you have a start.

This is such an important concept that’s explored in much more depth in the training.  For now, try it, and tell me how well it works for you!

And get in touch if you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you.

Charlotte x

Video 5: Shifting To A Better Feeling Mindset (no more ‘Imposter Syndrome’)

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Welcome to the Video 5 of my free 8-day Video Series in the lead up to the launch of my new eCourse – The Inner Critic to Inner Coach Online Training. Every day I’ll be talking about an area of significance to your life, and how negative self-talk either causes or perpetuates that problem. And then, importantly, a quick-and-dirty instant solution that you can use right away to make a difference to yourself. In this case, the biggest mindset hack for overcoming the so-called ‘syndrome’.

Mindset and Imposter Syndrome – two huge things!  And phrases that are now prolific in the professional / business / entrepreneurial world.

I hear about these MOST OFTEN in the business communities I’m part of. Why?  Because we all know that your mindset basically equals your success – what you believe you can achieve, you will achieve.

However when your belief in yourself starts to falter, for whatever reason, we can get into all kinds of negative spirals: self-sabotage; low-confidence; procrastination; avoidance strategies and so on. All because we don’t want to fail, and we feel like a failure. And once this self-doubting has really kicked in, we start hearing the phrase “I’ve got Imposter Syndrome…..”

You want to hear my BIGGEST mindset hack for this? OK, here it goes:

STOP CALLING IT IMPOSTER SYNDROME!

Because it simply doesn’t exist. The English language has a bad habit of doing this – turning verbs or processes into static things or objects. You don’t have a ‘syndrome’, you don’t have a disease and you don’t have a collection of symptoms. You don’t wake up in the morning and put the ‘imposter’ part of your brain in, do you? As long as you think of it as a ‘thing’ you are powerless to change it. Because what can you do, take a pill?  No.

Understand this – YOU are creating it with YOUR inner dialogue (and other factors will lead up to this creation, but ultimately this is what you’re doing).

I talk about this concept in much more depth in the eCourse because it is a crucial part of you stopping giving away your power, and starting to get your power back.

So, here’s how you get some energy into the situation and activate your personal power again: first step – stop calling it that.

Second step: Take a moment to actually DEFINE what the problem is for you. What are you concerned or worried about? What’s actually going round and round in your head? Write some stuff down until you get something that starts making sense. For example: I’m worried that I’m not qualified for this job and I don’t have the right tools and resources to feel good at it.

Just notice what changes when you do this and how you can start to get yourself a plan for morning forward.

As always – any questions, please give me a shout.

Charlotte x

Video 4: How To Improve Low Self-Esteem

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This is such an important topic!

The distinction between self-esteem and self-confidence (which I’ll be talking about in a few days) is this: self-confidence is how you feel about your abilities, your competencies and your capacity to do something.  Self-esteem is how you feel about YOURSELF – about who you are as a person.

How you feel about yourself as a person depends on what you believe. A belief isn’t objectively ‘correct’ or something ‘absolutely true’ – simply something that your brain holds as ‘absolutely true’. What you believe is fundamentally influenced by what you talk to yourself about inside your head. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s real – what’s really happening out there in the real world – and your internal thoughts, images, words etc. It simply responds as if they were real. Of course, the logical part of you knows the difference, but not the unconscious part. So, what you’re telling yourself about yourself is crucial to what you believe about who you are, and therefore the sum of your self-esteem.

The beginning of a solution to start improving low self-esteem is to find something POSITIVE about yourself and who you are, and make it something you already BELIEVE is absolutely true.  And I advise going with the smallest possible thing – as long as you genuinely believe it about yourself. It’s much better to go small and believable, then go lofty and ideal, as these kinds of things will be rejected by your brain. And make it about YOU – even if it has to be about your appearance. If you have a poor body-image and each time you look in the mirror you’re telling yourself you’re fat and that no-one would want you, then find something about your body/appearance that you absolutely and positively like that’s already rooted in your belief system. It can be as small as “I really like the colour of my eyes”.  And then focus on that when you look in the mirror or think about your body.

There’s a neurological reason why finding an existing positive belief really works to turn this around, which I go into in much more detail in the upcoming eCourse – Inner Critic to Inner Coach.

For now – try this quick self-talk solution, and tell me how it works for you.  Any questions please get in touch!

Charlotte x

Video 2: How To Make The Right Decisions (no more self-doubt)

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Welcome to the Video 2 of my free 8-day Video Series in the lead up to the launch of my new eCourse – The Inner Critic to Inner Coach Online Training. Every day for the next 7 days I’ll be talking about an area of significance to your life, and how negative self-talk either causes or perpetuates that problem. And then, importantly, a quick-and-dirty instant solution that you can use right away to make a difference to yourself. In this case, one that allows more courage in your decision making.

Okay – confession time!  I lead you here under false pretences. Sorry!  You see, there is no such thing as a ‘right’ decision. There’s no-one in the sky with a clipboard, marking every one of your decisions off with a tick or a cross.

There is just decision making and then feedback: the natural consequences of that particular decision. These consequences are either desirable, or useful to your life, or, undesirable and not so useful to you. And of course, some decisions have no real notable or immediate consequence to you (e.g. whether I wear my grey tights or my black tights).

**NB: I’m not talking about extremes where people make decisions to intentionally physically harm another human being. I’ll leave that kind of analysis up to the right experts, which is definitely not me.**

I’m talking about the average person on the street, you and me. What can happen is that we become DISABLED in our decision making because we believe there’s a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’. And it’s this belief that feeds the Inner Critic’s endless tape of self-doubt, and keeps it going around and around like a hamster in a wheel. I know that if you’re reading and watching this, I don’t need to describe self-doubt to you – you know it all too well.

The reason that self-doubting exists in our brains is because we are so afraid of getting our decisions ‘wrong’. Even when it comes down to those small and often inconsequential decisions like what to eat for lunch!  Why?

  • because somehow we won’t be OK in the world. We’ll be rejected, criticised, no longer belong
  • because we may no longer be physically safe (our inbuilt survival system kicking in)
  • because what we’re REALLY afraid of is the judgement and criticism and disapproval we will turn inward on OURSELVES
  • because turning on ourselves like that feels BAD. And we are afraid of these feelings.

The ONLY solution then, is to learn to HAVE YOUR OWN BACK and support yourself 100% – no matter what.

That’s it. No more, no less.

If you can find some way to say to yourself in any given moment – it could go this way or that way, and, you know what, I’ll ultimately be OK. I can learn from this.  This will cultivate more courage, and perhaps – dare I say it – more risk taking, getting out of comfort zone, and growth (even if you start with what to have for lunch.)

Any questions – just ask! I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

Until tomorrow where we look at Creating More Happiness (not depression).

Charlotte x

Video 1: How To Control Anxiety

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Welcome to the first instalment of my free 8-day Video Series in the lead up to the launch of my new eCourse – The Inner Critic to Inner Coach online training.  Every day for the next 8 days I’ll be talking about an area of your life of significance, and how negative self-talk either causes or perpetuates that problem. And then, importantly, a quick-and-dirty instant solution that you can use right away to make a difference to yourself. In this case, one that brings you back to calm.

**NB: Just to be really clear and keep everyone watching 100% safe, this is only relevant to minor, low-level anxiety issues like nervousness or small and short freak-outs/panic. If you have major anxiety issues or any kind, major panic attacks or any unresolved trauma, please seek more appropriate help for those issues as they will need a broader spectrum of help and support.**

Your self-talk and your feelings/emotions are inextricably linked, and especially so for anxiety. This is what we call a cycle of bio-feedback. You will either get a direct anxious feeling first, or a self-talk though first. Either way, your self-talk will at some point notice the anxious feeling, and start talking to you about it – You’re nervous, they’re going to notice….. you’re freaking out, OMG what am I going to do? Oh shit, now I’m even more nervous….God, this is so stupid….And so on.

This increases the level of adrenaline in the body and sends you further into anxiety loops. I talk about this in much more detail in my Imperfect Parent eBook.

In a key piece of neuroscience, it was found you can you break this cycle deliberately. You simply notice what sensations or thoughts are going on inside of you, and describe them to yourself in as much detail as possible, using your internal dialogue. The key component that was crucial in the success of changing where the blood was orientated in the brain was if you addressed yourself in the 3rd person, and used your own name. So for example, saying to yourself “OK, I’m freaking out here…” didn’t have the same affect as saying “Charlotte, you’re freaking out… your hands are sweaty, your heart rate is up..”.

This successfully sent the blood away from the Amygdala, stopping Amygdala hijack, and back into your Prefrontal Cortex, your logic and reason centre. I had reason to test this two or three days after hearing about it on the radio when I physically reacted to eating some pineapple and started freaking out, and within 2-3 minutes my nervous system was back to normal again.

All you have to do is use your own name to address yourself in the 3rd person, and describe what is currently happening in your body and thoughts, and your nervous system will re-set itself and bring you back to calm.  I talk about this neuroscience in more detail in the eCourse.

Any questions?  Please let me know!

Otherwise – try it, it really works!

Charlotte x

P.s. See you tomorrow for How To Make The Right Decisions (no more self-doubt).