Is your inner critic toxic and overactive? I have 3 practices that can help you change your negative self talk and the relationship that you have with yourself.
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About Tertia
I am a certified feminine embodiment coach and embodiment teacher.
In my private coaching and online programs, I teach you to drop from your head into your body so you can take your nervous system out of survive into thrive, clearing the way for you to live a life that fills you with joy and be guided by your inner knowing instead of outside influence.
I trust you found this episode helpful! It would mean the world to me if you could leave the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends. That will help me reach more people. If you have any questions about this episode, I'd love to hear from you, send me a message via the links above.
If you are watching this, then you are probably all too familiar with those mean and unkind and cruel and toxic and unhelpful inner voices and negative thoughts that can be paralyzing and overwhelming. So if you are someone who struggles with a negative critic and you have some undesirable self-talk going on, then you want to watch today's episode. I'm going to share with you three keys on how you can begin to break this negative self-talk cycle. And the three keys that I'm going to go over in this episode are, 1 shifting your energy, 2 creating emotional safety, and 3 changing the words that you use. And by the end of this episode, you're going to have some really practical tools that you can use to break that negative self-talk cycle. So let's get straight into the first one. Shifting your energy. Research has shown us that the way that you speak to yourself, which also is the way that you relate to yourself, the types of thoughts that you have about yourself and your own performance and your own worthiness, has a direct impact on your cognitive functions and your performance. So the more supportive and positive and nurturing your self talk is the more empowered you feel to show up as yourself and the more confidence you have to go after your goals. And I know that this is true. You know that this is true. In my own life I've seen so often when I'm in a particular shame storm or when I have a lot of negative self-talk going on, it does affect my performance. And you can probably relate to that. So something that you might have tried in the past if you have tried to work on changing your negative thought patterns is to follow the advice of monitoring your thoughts and to change every thought that you find, which is negative. For me, I find that to be a very overwhelming practice. We've got hundreds, if not thousands of thoughts that go through our mind all the time.
And the more you focus on your negative thoughts, the more negative you might feel because this is what you're putting your attention to. So I want to offer you something different to try. Rather explore the energy that you embody. So what is your energy, the role or the archetype that you embody as a result of your thoughts? So I really see that there are two archetypes or roles that are very useful for this kind of exploration. And the first one is victim energy. So my interpretation of being in a victim energy is that you really become a prisoner in your own mind. All of the limiting beliefs and conditioned responses which you have accumulated over your lifetime really controls you. You feel disempowered, you feel like you don't have a say over your own life, and you feel like you don't have any choices available to you. You waiting for the bars of the prison to disappear before you can feel free. And this is faulty thinking. This is a fantasy where we first wait for everything in our external world to change before we feel better about ourselves, before we feel more confident, before we begin to trust ourselves. And that is a very shaky, unhealthy, and unhelpful foundation to build your self worth on. Because once something changes in your external world, it changes the way that you feel about yourself. And so in contrast to this, the warrior energy or the warrior archetype is one that I find very useful when it comes to working with your, your thoughts and your energy and your overall mood. So the warrior embodies fierceness. It is not aggressive, and it's not about being blood thirsty. It's really about feeling empowered, trusting yourself and trusting your decisions, believing in yourself. And to me, the warrior is really a symbol of resilience, of taking charge and responsibility of your own emotions, your own inner, inner landscape, and your own wellbeing. Instead of trying to monitor what you are thinking all the time, which keeps you stuck in your mind, begin to notice how you are responding on a physical level. Begin to notice what your energy does and how your body feels. So as you go about your day, maybe even while you're busy doing the dishes or you know, getting the kids ready for school notice what is the energy that flows through you? How are you being? Who are you being? And when you notice that you are feeling compressed and contracted and contained and disempowered like a victim, you can then make the choice to shift your energy simply by asking the question, if I could step into my warrior energy right now, if I could embody this role of warrior, what could I do? How can I step into this experience of being a warrior instead of a victim? And what you'll notice when you begin to play with shifting your energy in this way, it is going to have the effect that you start to think different thoughts. So it's going to support you to think less of the thoughts that you think you are in your victim state, in that victim role. So if you are going to try this, then in the comments write fierce warrior. Moving on to the second point, which is emotional safety. There are very many different reasons why we don't feel emotionally safe. Typically just going around in modern world with all of this external stimulation and all of the demands that gets placed on us through our lives, this can cause us not to feel safe in our bodies. There are also past experiences, cultural conditionings, childhood traumas, and all of these can contribute to us feeling not safe. Now, this is the biggest problem with not feeling safe emotionally. It causes you to not feel safe to be yourself. What are the implications of that? It means that you don't speak up at work. You're in a meeting, you have a great idea, but you don't trust that it's going to be well received.
You don't trust that it's the right time to share this, or you just doubt that people will actually hear what it is that you have to say. So everyone else speaks up. Everyone else shares what's on their minds, but you keep quiet and then you feel bad and you judge yourself. If we don't feel safe to be ourselves, then we fall into this habit of people pleasing. We do things to have other people validate us. We place the opinions of other people above our own opinions, and we rely on the opinions of other people to inform us how we should feel about ourselves. So if someone gives you a compliment, if someone is very supportive and they give you good feedback, then this can make you feel very good about yourself. And when you don't get that external feedback, or if the feedback that you get is critical, then this contributes to your negative self-talk.
We really want to find a way to create that emotional safety within so that we can feel free to be ourselves. When you feel free to be yourself. When you have that emotional safety, I see this as one of the most important and key ingredients that will change the nature of your self talk, and it will change the way that you relate to yourself. I cannot stress this enough! Now what I often see is if you don't feel emotionally safe, your inner girl doesn't feel safe. So this is a very good starting point then to build emotional safety, to go through your inner girl, to really build that relationship with her and to make her feel valued and understood and loved. And often the first step in this is to simply connect with her. So I've created an inner child meditation, which I'm going to link for you in the description below. And go and listen to that meditation if you want to begin to develop that relation with your inner girl. And if this is the practice that you're going to choose, then drop in the comments inner girl. And now let's move on to the final key, which is change the words that you use. This is quite obvious that if you're going to use nasty words, the impact is going to be much different to using kind and loving words. If you are in the habit of using very condescending, mean and very strict language with yourself, then listen up. Instead of saying every time that you make a mistake, oh, I'm such an idiot, try and use another sentence such as that was not a very smart thing to do. And that sounds like a very simplistic solution, but it actually does work. And here's why. Our subconscious mind takes everything literally. So when you constantly say things like, oh, you're such an idiot, you can't do anything right, why do you even bother? Your subconscious mind really takes this as the truth. It doesn't go, oh, you know what? You've had a really hard day, so that's why you're beating yourself up. But I know that it's actually not true what you mean. No, it goes, ah-huh, okay, got that? Yes. Alright, I'll make a note. So this is the way that things are. It actually becomes the filter through which you view yourself and your life and the world. So this is what keeps that victim energy that I spoke of earlier that keeps it alive. So how do we get out of this? How do we get out of these patterns that we unintentionally put into ourselves? We use the power of our conscious mind, that part of your brain that does the thinking, that is aware and that can make decisions. So you use awareness and conscious application to change the way in which you speak to yourself. So if this is the practice that you want to try, then write in the comments, different words. Now, if you want to go a little bit deeper, you can download this free self-love audio that I will link for you in the description as well. And this has been designed to connect you to your heart, to connect you to your self-worth, and to really open you to developing that great and nurturing relationship with yourself. So I'd also love to know how this episode landed for you. Let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed it, you can let me know by giving it a thumbs up. I also want to invite you to subscribe if you haven't yet done so. I'd really love to have you on board. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.
