9 Thoughts On: What to Say When You Talk to Your Self by Dr. Shad Helmstetter
I recently had my mind blown by Dr. Shad Helmstetter’s “What to Say When You Talk to Your Self”. If you are in search of self-affirmations, this is the tool to buy. Here’s a link to Dr. Helmstetter’s website: https://shadhelmstetter.com
The word “Self-Talk” is huge in this book, and for good reason. It is one of the most powerful ways to motivate yourself and make life improvements.
Here are my 9 Thoughts on “What to Say When You Talk to Your Self”:
- What Do You Tell Yourself About Yourself?
“The opportunities to use Self-Talk are unlimited. If you want to develop better self-esteem, get more done, change jobs, learn a new skill, become more creative, reduce stress, take better care of yourself, stop worrying, overcome depression, break through your limitations, get along better with others, or become more successful at anything, your own self-programmed Self-Talk lies at the root of your success. So, what are you telling yourself on a daily basis?”
Think about anything you would like to improve in your life. Your health, your income, a relationship, you name it. Self-Talk empowers you to achieve that thing. Self-Talk has endless potential. All you need to do is begin talking to yourself, and give yourself the affirmations necessary to achieve that goal.
2. Put Yourself Back In Control
“Look at your attitudes, assess them, examine them, take stock of your beliefs about yourself, and take mental inventory of your attitudes, good and bad, and decide for yourself which of those attitudes will work for you, and which do not. The ones you don’t want to keep, throw them out. Just get rid of them. Keep the ones you like and change the ones that you want to change. Take charge of your attitudes, put yourself back in control. The least that could happen is that you would get a little more of your real self back again.”
Self-Talk can be positive or negative. If your beliefs and attitude towards yourself is negative, your Self-Talk is going to be negative, and you will end up stuck in a cycle of negativity. However by simply changing one thought, attitude, or belief, no matter how small, you begin to find yourself again — helping you become the successful person you were created to be.
3. Things to Say to Yourself That Build Self-Esteem
“I am very special. I like who I am, and I feel good about myself. Although I always work to improve myself and I get better every day, I like who I am today, and tomorrow, when I’m even better, I’ll like myself then too. It’s true that there’s no one else like me in the entire world; there was never another me before, and there will never be another me again. I am unique from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I am me. I would rather be me than anyone else in the world. I like how I feel, I like how I think, and I like how I do things. I approve of me, and I approve of who I am. I am full of life, I like life, and I’m glad to be alive. I’m intelligent. I think good thoughts and my mind makes things work right for me. I like to be around other people, and other people like to be around me. I am warm, sincere, honest, and genuine. I am all of these things and more, and all of these things are me. I like who I am, and I am glad to be me.”
This book is loaded with remarkable affirmations. These affirmations help you find the words to tell yourself about yourself. Every time you say one of them, your self-esteem improves. Whether you did or not before, you eventually begin to believe it, and your behaviors and outlook on life start to radiate the improved self-esteem.
If you have the book, pages 169–170 (partially quoted above) and 192–193 (partially quoted below) are among the most powerful pages when it comes to affirmations.
More affirmations:
“I can do anything I believe I can do. I’ve got it, and every day I get more of it. I have talent, skills, and ability. I set goals and I reach them. I know what I want out of life. I go after it, and I get it. People like me, and I feel good about myself. I have a sense of pride in who I am, and I believe in myself. Nothing seems to stop me. I have a lot of determination. I turn problems into advantages. I find possibilities in things that other people never give a chance. I stand tall. I am honest and sincere. I like to deal with people, and they like me. I think well; I think clearly. I am organized; I am in control of myself, and everything about me. I call my shots, and no one has to call them for me. I never blame anyone else for the circumstances of my life. I accept my failings and move past them as easily as I accept the rewards for my victories.”
4. Giving Life to Your Self-Talk
“If you’re by yourself, stop for a moment, turn back a page or two, and reread those same words, this time out loud. Give yourself permission to suspend your disbelief. Set aside your doubts. Just for a few moments, speak to yourself as though you were the single most important person in the world. You are, you know.”
Talking to yourself can be done in many different ways. If you want to level-up your Self-Talk, do it with conviction, determination, and without judgement — do it without thinking you are crazy, weird, or conceited. Do it for yourself, because if you don’t, no one else will.
5. Creating Your Own Self-Talk
“The best way to begin practicing using Self-Talk is to create new Self-Talk for yourself. To show you how easy this can be, you might like to take a few minutes and write a short Self-Talk script. Our Self-Talk is never exclusive. It includes anything and everything we will ever think about, and any or all of it can be rephrased with a little work.”
It’s okay to talk to yourself. Some might think you are crazy, but that stereotype of craziness isn’t doing anyone any favors. In fact, the idea that “talking to yourself is crazy” is, in itself, crazy. It’s crazy to not want to improve ourselves, our circumstances, our attitudes about life, and even our success.
Here’s another amazing quote by Eric Berne:
“Because people who talk to themselves are thought to be crazy, nearly everyone has an injunction against listening to the voices in their head. This is a faculty which can be quickly recovered, however, if the proper permission is given. Then almost anyone can listen in on their own internal dialogues.” — Eric Berne
We, as a collective, need to get back to a place where we tell ourselves that it is okay to talk to ourselves. If anything, we are doing ourselves a disservice by not talking to ourselves.
Talking to ourselves is a key foundational piece of success that we must tap into.
6. 30 Years of How-To’s
“You may not be aware of the kinds of self-help topics I’m talk about in case you haven’t spent a lot of time improving yourself reading self-help literature during the last 20 or 30 years. The literature says, to become more successful, you should: believe in yourself, keep your priorities straight, think positively, feel good, control stress, work hard, be honest, etc.”
There are so many self-help books for each of the topics mentioned above, but what you almost never find in many of them is the power of Self-Talk.
Self-Talk is severely underrated. The great irony is that Self-Talk and those affirmations can change the very foundations of our success. Its popularity, however, is beginning to resurface as more and more individuals realize the unlimited potential Self-Talk has for creating a desirable life.
7. The Self-Management Sequence
“Five steps that control our success or failure:
The step that most directly controls our success or failure is our behaviour. It’s what we do, or do not do. Behaviour means our actions. How we act, what we do, each moment of each day, will determine whether or not we will be successful that moment or that day in anything that we do. The right series of the right actions will always end up making things work better than the wrong series of the wrong actions. In most cases, if you do the right thing, you’re going to achieve the right results.”
There are five steps, but I want to focus on the first one: Behavior. It is one the most fundamental steps to achieving success. Our thoughts affect our behaviors, and if our behaviors are those that warrant success, then that is what we will get. If we behave in the wrong way, we will get the wrong results. This ties into another article of mine on Gary Keller’s “The ONE Thing”, in that doing the right thing at the right time is more important than being self-disciplined from top to bottom. So do the one right thing, and you will achieve the right results.
8. The Motivation Myth
“There are different kinds of motivation and different kinds of motivators. One of the most popular kinds of motivation consists of an audience of anxious listeners sitting enthralled while a dynamically enthusiastic speaker weaves for them a web of pure magic, the spun gold of riches and success. For an hour or two, he will imbue his listeners with a new sense of destiny, a grand new vision of their unlimited selves, and all be capable of scaling to the highest mountains of their imaginations if only they believe that they can. Members of the audience are given a new lease on life. The only payment required is that they begin the next day as the new person conquering all odds, laying waste their limitations, focusing on the goal, and going for it. If you have ever attended a motivational talk such as I am describing, you know that I am being somewhat polite in kindly understating the magnitude of the mesmerizing that takes place. Companies and groups of all sizes and descriptions rely on that kind of motivation to pep up their people, give a high point to their conversations and sales meetings, and then send the troops away, ready to go out and fight the dragons, close more sales, fix problems fast, and reach new heights of achievement. For the most part, these motivators do a good job. They get people thinking, they paint pictures. The gallery of suggested dreams would show others what can be, what they can do, that they are pied pipers of success, leading the average would-be achiever towards something better. They stimulate minds, inspire new ideas, and reaffirm the resolve to get at it; get something done, accomplish something worthwhile, set some goals, tackle the problems, and move forward. But there is a problem with that kind of motivation — it is external, and it does not last.”
The power of Self-Talk is so valuable because it differs from the kind of inspiration you receive from an external source, such as a motivational speaker. When the inspiration is external, it does not last. Self-Talk is internal. Self-Talk is the motivation that lasts.
You can attend every motivational speech ever given, at the end of the day, nothing compares to the strength of Self-Talk.
9. Recording Your Own Self-Talk
“There had to be a better way . I knew how well Self-Talk worked, and I had watched it work for me, and I had witnessed its results for others, but I knew that there had to be an easier way. It wasn’t long before friends and clients of mine began to ask me to record a Self-Talk tape or two for them. When I did, they began to relate to me the same kinds of results that I had experienced in my life and I was starting to hear from others. Suddenly, there was a method; a technology that combined solid self-programming principles with a tool anyone could use, and yet would work as well, or better, than any of the other techniques I found. In addition, it was a technological tool which functioned in a way which proved to be directly naturally compatible with the way the brain worked. Since I first began to recommend that people use cassette tapes as a programming tool for their subconscious, I received responses from the users which surprised even me. I knew it worked, but by receiving letters and repeatedly hearing the same kinds of results from others, I became resolutely convinced.”
By recording his own “I am” affirmations and sharing them with others, Dr. Helmstetter was able to help others to achieve similar results in their lives without recording their own affirmations. This lends itself to the idea that self-confidence is contagious. If you are confident and radiate positivity, share your affirmations with others, they will become more confident and radiate positivity as well. This ripple effect will continue to spread as they interact with others.
I was a Self-Talk believer before reading this book, and now I’m an even bigger believer. Many of these affirmations have become a part of my practice, and I hope the same for you. Get out there and start talking to yourself.
“You don’t have to be crazy to talk to yourself.”
