Ep# 89 - How to stop Negative Self-Talk and stop the Bitch Talk

Feeling precious? Me too. In this real, unedited chat (recorded on Halloween—yes, with the blow-up dinosaur costume is on the sofa), I share a life update and a lesson I want every woman to learn: how to stop negative self-talk—aka the “bitch talk”—and create emotional safety on the days you feel precious.

This week I talk about navigating grief after a client’s sudden passing, period vulnerability, and the big leap my husband and I have taken into self-employment. Underneath it all is the skill that changes everything: speaking to yourself with kindness. You’ll hear how I name my primal brain “Sue,” why telling your body “I’m safe, nothing has gone wrong” works, and how to practice compassionate self-talk without fluff or fakery.

In this episode:

Why feeling vulnerable isn’t a problem (and what your nervous system actually needs)

The evolutionary reason negative emotions feel urgent—and how to calm them

“Bitch talk” vs. kind self-coaching: same words, different intention

Simple, no-BS steps to stop the inner critic in real time

How practising self-kindness helps you hold other people’s emotions, too

Try this today:
Catch the first nasty sentence in your head and interrupt it: “Uh-uh-uh, we don’t do that anymore. I’m learning to be kind to myself.” Then place a hand on your chest and tell your body: “I’m safe.”

If you’re ready to build calm, confidence and emotional resilience—with loving, no-bullshit support—get in touch. I’d love to help.

You can also watch this episode on YouTube with Captions - https://www.youtube.com/@TheWorkingWomensLifeCoach

If you'd like to have a chat about how I can help you further, please don't hesitate to click here & book a time with me, I'd love to meet you.

You can also follow me on IG @NickyBevan_LifeCoach

Transcript

Welcome, welcome, welcome to this week's podcast. It's been a while, hasn't it, that I have spoke to you directly, because for the last few weeks, I've had guests on, and I've got more guests coming up, because I really wanted to bring more expertise into the podcast that I don't have. But today, I'm going to give you a little bit of a life update, a little bit of a kind of what's going on with me.

I'm going to be really honest with you. Today I'm feeling very precious. Very precious. And I don't use precious lightly. It's not a word that I ever use to describe myself. In fact, quite the opposite. I would say I am not a precious person at all. I am not easily offended. I’m very level-headed, I'm not dramatic, I'm none of those things.

And then every now and again I have a day, or a couple of days, where I just feel precious, and that's where I am right now. And it's for a number of reasons. The first reason is that I have my period. The first few days of my period, I always feel very vulnerable. I feel like I just want to hug my womb, and like, hold my fanny and just curl myself on the sofa. I'm laughing at that! But a few years ago, I really judged myself for feeling that way. Now I just accept that's how I'm feeling, and it's not a problem.

I can still go about doing my essentials in the day, but actually, there's less tension attached to that when I just let myself feel like it. When I maybe give myself a little bit of space in my day to sit on the sofa, cuddle up without judgment and without shame.

So that's one reason. Sorry, my nose has just got really snotty, so I'm sorry if you can hear that through the recording. And definitely, you're going to be able to see me blowing my nose now on YouTube. But you know, this is all about real. I don't edit my podcast because this is real life, right? And I'm here for real, I'm not here for fake. Hence why I've just also realized that my son's Halloween costume is screwed up on the sofa behind me. If you're listening to this on your podcast provider, maybe come and see it on YouTube, because you can see it's all screwed up. It's actually a dinosaur, one of those blow-up dinosaurs. It's Halloween, I'm recording this on the 31st of October. So I'm here for real.

The other thing that's making me feel quite precious today is yesterday I went to a celebration of life. I work with a local business; I life coach their staff. They have about 250 members of staff, and I've coached up until this point about 80 of them. One of my very regular clients that I've had since I started coaching there had a heart attack and died very suddenly.

It was a real shock, incredibly sad. He was the same age as I am and such a lovely person. I was very, very honoured to be invited to his celebration of life yesterday. Because he worked in their local office, which is a while away from where I live, a number of the people that worked out of that office were there, and I have coached them.

Fortunately, Johnny was willing to drive me there because it was four and a half hours to get there, because the M25 was shut. It only took us two and a half hours to get back, but he loves driving. I mean, I love driving, but I would have been very tired. I wouldn't have been able to drive back, I would have been very tired. But it was a really beautiful opportunity to celebrate him and also to meet people that I've only ever seen on a screen.

When you meet someone in person and you get to feel their energy, it's such a beautiful moment. I am so very privileged in my position as a coach because you really get to know somebody. People say things to me that they wouldn't say to anybody else in their whole life. I see this as a huge privilege — the fact that I'm able to hold space for them is a real privilege.

I had the privilege of also coaching his wife, who I got to meet in person yesterday. One of the things I loved about James, the person that died, was how much he loved his family and his children. So today, I just feel very sad, very privileged, very honoured to have the skills that I have, to have been able to give people the space that they needed for whatever they needed in that time.

Up until this point in my career, I've now coached for thousands of hours across hundreds of people of different ages. The youngest person I've coached was 12, the oldest person I currently coach is 82. There isn't a topic that I haven't yet coached through, and it kind of all boils down to the same thing — we are not taught how to deal with our emotions.

When we experience a negative emotion, society's conditioning tells us something's gone wrong. But nothing has. Because I've learnt this skill, and I hold space for people going through this, and I teach people how to do it, and I practice it myself, there's a peace on the other side of being okay not being okay. Whereas when you're always trying to be happy and positive and joyous, there's no peace.

Having experienced that yesterday — the deep sadness and also the deep joy of seeing these people that loved James so very much — being able to experience both of those extremes has left me today feeling vulnerable.

This isn’t a mind-management thing, this is emotional management. This is giving your body the safety that it needs to feel how it needs to feel. Back when we lived in caves, any negative emotion literally meant danger. Anxiety enabled us to get up and look for food. Guilt kept us part of a tribe. Fear made sure we were looking out for something that might eat us.

Our negative emotions had an evolutionary advantage when we were that primal. But we're not primal anymore. That part of our brain hasn't changed, so when we experience a negative emotion, that part of our brain thinks our life is under threat. Then our body is ready to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Because I know that, I know my body and my nervous system just need comforting.

Comfort looks different for you than it does for me. For me, I just tell myself I'm safe. I'm safe. Nothing has gone wrong. And you can see if you're watching me on YouTube, I'm just placing my hands on my chest. I remind myself that this is okay, that life is not actually under threat right now. We're safe. That's all the body really needs to hear, and it just needs time to feel it without judgement, without shame.

And then the third thing that's happening at the moment: if you've been following me on social media, you will know that my husband handed in his notice, and his last day as a policeman was last week. So he has fully stepped into self-employment. There has been lots of fear, lots of shame, lots of self-doubt around this process. There has also been lots of excitement.

It fascinates me how my intuition around this whole process is a deep knowing yes — this is exactly our next step as a couple. Him leaving the perceived safety of an employed job to go into the unknown of self-employment and not knowing exactly how next month's mortgage is going to be paid was a big leap for us to take.

A big leap, because we have children. We don't want to lose our house. We want to keep safety and provisions for our boys. Everybody makes it sound so positive and incredible, and I think the other side of this 100% will be. But we're not the other side of this yet. We're right in the middle of all the crap emotions — the fear, the shame.

So when I feel frightened, I'm able to comfort myself. When self-doubt shows up, I'm okay with that. I'm safe to experience this emotion. I’ve done this work deeply on myself and on others, so I know exactly where it's coming from. I know that all of those sentences in my head aren't accurately predicting the truth. Therefore, I know it's all made up and not necessarily the reality of what we're moving forward into.

When my brain starts to go, “We're never gonna have any money! We're gonna die!” — we're not going to die. Even if we couldn’t pay our mortgage, even if we had to lose our house, that doesn't actually kill us. That's not going to happen, because we’ll figure something out before that. We'll do whatever it takes to make sure our house is secure and our children are safe. So we're not going to let it even get to that.

When I'm talking to myself internally, I'm talking to myself with so much kindness. And I have to tell you, I am so fucking grateful that I have done the work and learnt how to be kind to myself. That has been what has enabled me to move through all of these emotions without added drama.

My husband — we're going to do a podcast on this together, so look out for that — hasn’t really learned that skill yet. So when he gets angry, or when I think what’s happening is he feels vulnerable, he protects vulnerability by getting angry and frustrated. He talks evil to himself — not even in his head, out loud. You can hear him growling at himself.

You imagine his body, and I’m sure you know how this feels as well, because this is what I used to do. You're feeling vulnerable, you're feeling precious, and then you're beating that part of you up for feeling that way. That does not create safety — that creates a fuckton more discomfort and fear.

The difference has been being able to talk kindly to myself. Being able to go, “Okay, Sue” — that’s my primal brain’s name — “I'm not gonna let that worst-case scenario happen. I’ll go and stack shelves in Tesco’s if that’s how I have to pay my bills.” It’s not actually going to get to that point.

But I’m saying that with so much kindness, because that part of me is freaking out. If I said the exact same words in a frustrated, angry tone, it would sound like, “I'm not gonna let it get to that point, Sue! I’ll go and stack shelves in Tesco’s!” No safety, no calm, no kindness. Exactly the same words — very different intention.

When you are experiencing any form of negative emotion, regardless of what it is — grief, shame, embarrassment, nervousness, anxiety — if you then talk to yourself like a complete bitch, you create more fear, not less.

And I really feel that if everybody in the world learned that they had a choice, that they can shift how they talk to themselves, life becomes so much nicer. And I don’t mean that shit doesn’t happen, because it does. People die, people lose their jobs, it’s natural to have concerns about money. We can thank that anxiety because that’s what makes us move towards getting money coming in. We don’t have to beat ourselves up for that.

Feeling vulnerable is not a problem. We don’t have to beat ourselves up for that.

The way I started doing that was really simple. I started to acknowledge when that bitchy voice started to come in. I started to hear, “Oh God, Nikki, you’re so useless. Aren’t you pathetic? Look at you. No one wants to hear what you have to say.” And I would literally, in my head, go, “Uh-uh-uh. We don’t do that anymore, remember? That is no longer how we talk to ourselves.”

And I just started there. I just started there. I didn’t engage in any form of shitty bitch talk. But it takes a decision — a very conscious decision — to decide that you don’t talk to yourself like that ever again.

And you will fall into it. And that’s okay. When you fall into it, you catch yourself and go, “Oh, remember, I’m learning how to be kind to myself. I am learning how to be kind to myself.”

Please don’t just listen to this podcast thinking, “Oh, that’s really nice.” Listening to this and not actively practicing what I’ve just taught you means you’ve pretty much just wasted half an hour of your time.

If you’re going to give yourself half an hour, then also give yourself permission to take a couple of seconds when your bitch talk comes in to learn not to do it. That’s where the transformation comes in. It’s not coming and talking to me one-on-one. It’s not listening to a podcast, it’s not reading a book, it’s not consuming YouTube videos.

What makes the difference is you going away and practicing. It’s like going to a gym, chatting to your mate for an hour, not doing anything, walking out and going, “Well, the gym’s a waste of time. I’m not getting fitter or stronger.” No — because you’re not practicing the things.

It’s like cooking. You don’t learn to cook and then all of a sudden, meals just appear in front of you. You have to cook every day in order to have food. Managing your mind, managing your emotions, and learning to stop talking like a bitch takes practice.

I really feel the best and quickest way to learn that skill is by having someone support you — a coach, a therapist, or that really loving, no-bullshit friend — and actually listening to her. Because you’ve probably got people telling you that you’re talking bollocks to yourself; you’re just not listening to them.

So if you’re ready to invest in yourself and ready to create that calm version of you that can actually deal with life when it happens, please get in touch, because I would love to help support you and teach you through that process.

Have the most amazing week. I will be back again next week with a guest. It might even be Johnny — I can’t remember, I didn’t look. I really want to get a podcast in with him talking about what we’re currently going through, because I think it will be fascinating for everybody to hear the truth behind the shit part of growing a business and life in general, and how you can then hold other people through their negative emotions.

When you realize your emotions aren’t a problem, you realize other people’s emotions aren’t a problem. Then they don’t need to change — they’re just there for you to love them. I really want to share that story with all of you.

Have a wonderful week. I love you so much. Bye-bye!