Welcome to Video 6 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, changing the questions you’re asking yourself to get out of a ‘funk’.
So, what do I mean by a funk? My way of thinking about it is a negative ‘state’ – a state of mind and body that is undesirable to you and unpleasant. For example, worried, distressed, anxious, etc., and also an unhelpful situation that you’re in, which feeds into the bad state.
As we’ve been learning, your internal dialogue and the way you feel are infinitely connected. One feeds into the other. And your self-talk makes bad feelings worse by talking to you or asking you questions which are not helpful and simply take you further down a spiral.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you are in a lot of debt, and don’t have much money. When you look at your bank accounts online, and see your negative balance, you will feel bad. What you may not realise, is that in the back of your mind there will be a little guiding question, and it will be structured in a way that only looks for negative answers. For example in this case it’s likely to be some variation of:
How did I get into this mess?
How the hell am I going to get out of this?
Why is this happening to me?
This is what we call a Key Question.
These key questions pop up very quickly and are of course spoken to you by your own self-talk inside your own head only. They can be very quiet so you hardly notice them. However, they are powerful, and the nature of them are very unhelpful – inherently focusing on the past and on the negative and not moving you forward at all.
The solution to getting out of these types of funks is to pay attention to your key question in the back of your head, and change it. We want to focus on a future step that’s positive. So any of the above examples could be changed to:
What’s my plan to get out of this?
What’s my next useful step?
Who can I talk to that can help me with this?
Key questions need to be open and start with a what, how, who, how much, and not lead to yes or no answers. And remember, you don’t need to KNOW the answer! It just helps your brain focus and begin to find a useful answer for you.
Try it and let me know how it works for you!
As always, any questions, you know where I am.
Love Charlotte.