There is a lot of chat out in the world about the importance of building relationships and improving emotional intelligence for personal growth. But there is little talk about how building relationships first starts with you internally.
The foundation of social skills is related to emotional regulation, which usually starts with your inner voice. The voice that you talk to when you're alone. The one that you argue with when you're upset or confused, the one that you look for when seeking personal validation or encouragement when you get cold feet. Or when you play a whole scene in your head to hype yourself up...whether a fake argument that you're going to win or simply to give yourself a boost of confidence before going to an interview...or date.
Your Inner Voice is Linked to Your Subconscious Thoughts
Your inner voice connects you to your subconscious thoughts. It helps you get clarity when seeking internal truth about yourself, whether that's mentally, spiritually, or emotionally. It is a biological mirror, mentor, criticizer, and cheerleader all at the same time.
When you have conversations with yourself, while it sounds silly and embarrassing to admit out loud, it actually helps you in so many ways.
Engaging in monologues, or self-talk, has an effect on how you see yourself and how you make decisions. It gives you a sense of self-worth, confidence, and internal emotional resilience. Self-talk is your inner voice.
How Self-Talk Affects Relationship Building
When building positive relationships, you need to be self-aware of your emotions and how to regulate them. You need to be able to communicate how you feel, and how you see things and be vulnerable enough to exchange those feelings or thoughts with someone else.
Relationships require conversations and understanding. It requires you to put yourself out there regardless of whether a relationship is romantic, platonic, or professional. So, in reality, having conversations with yourself can be a very healthy practice and a gateway toward building healthy relationships.
Through self-talk, you have the ability to build confidence and self-esteem. When you're confident and have strong self-awareness, you're able to take better control of social areas in your life.
In order for self-talk to be raw-fully awesome, it needs to be positive. Only then it can help you with relationship building and self-awareness.
The Cost of Negative or Toxic Self-Talk
Positivity is a price (or catch) because we're so conditioned to remember the bad stuff over the good stuff, especially our thoughts and feelings. Some of us can have a bad habit of constantly replaying our mistakes and getting stuck in the "what if" conversations. We tend to be our worst critics and talk down to ourselves by saying we're horrible at a specific skill or task, "we're not good enough" or "always have bad luck"... or anything that revolves around not being able to do anything right.
When we talk down to ourselves, we're actually holding ourselves back from our personal growth. We do the very same thing to ourselves that we don't like others doing to us.
WHY?
Engaging in negative self-talk means that you're squashing your desire to live on your own terms and truly be the best version of yourself, outside of the stereotypical feminine box that our society has squished us in.
Self-talk can be toxic if not used with the right intentions. Toxic and limiting thoughts cloud our judgment with negative bias. We tend to see bias as our truth even though it isn't. When we establish bias as a"fact", it becomes our reality, and then it seeps into our self-confidence, awareness, and how we regulate our emotions...like venom.
Treating Toxicity in Self-Talk
When self-talk becomes toxic, it becomes a venom that hinders our ability to connect well with others. It separates us from meeting and getting to know some really awesome people that can take us to the next level.
To treat this internal venom, the antidote lies in shifting the way you talk to yourself.
Now...FULL DISCLAIMER - This is hard A...F.
Especially, if you've been talking yourself down for a very long time. But like everything else, it comes a long way with lots of practice.
Shifting the way you talk to yourself is typically referred to as "reframing". What you're actually doing is looking at a situation (or yourself) from a different angle than you typically would. This practice gives you the opportunity to minimize tunnel vision, especially when you're being especially harsh on yourself.
Practicing active consciousness opens your mindset and brings in other realities within a situation that you might not have considered due to tunnel vision. Active consciousness is much like active listening but within yourself.
Seeing things from a different angle at an internal level doesn't mean ignoring or dismissing feelings of pain, hurt, betrayal, etc. It means tackling setbacks in a more open and accepting way. It means acknowledging feelings because they're real, but being constructive about how to work through them in order to move forward.
Reframing Your Monologue with Forward-Thinking Language
Nurture yourself and be nicer. If you're accepting of others' flaws and struggles because you care for them (whoever they are), then I dare you to do the same for yourself. You're worth the same level of acceptance that you give to others. Be kind to yourself.
If you find yourself in a situation where negative feelings are happening, validate them. They're there. Don't hide them or ignore them to try to convince yourself that everything is fine. It is okay to not be okay so long as you work through it.
Instead of dwelling on "I suck at everything" and "I'm horrible at life", challenge those negative thoughts by treating them with kindness when practicing self-talk.
For example, "I suck at everything" can be reframed to be more constructive. In other words, you can say "there is definitely some opportunity here to learn and grow in this skill or situation".
Instead of saying "I'm horrible at life", you can reframe it so that your inner self can say "challenges are a part of life but every challenge is a teaching moment...what can I learn today?"
When you're more thoughtful of how you talk to yourself, you're giving your inner voice the respect that it deserves. Funny how you expect others to respect you but you're not respecting yourself in moments of internal conversations. Be mindful of these bloopers in self-talk and don't be afraid to challenge your inner critic.
Reframing your internal monologue allows you to be intentional in the way you can help yourself move forward. It gives you a sense of purpose and direction, which in turn you can use when building a relationship with someone else. This is because you learn to actively listen, pay attention and connect better.
6 Practical Tips to Adopt More Positive Self-Talk
Use self-talk as a growing experience. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence are essential when connecting with others. Below are some practical tips to improve how you nurture yourself so that you can nurture and be kind to others.
1. Talk to yourself soothingly and compassionately. For every limiting thought you throw at yourself, think about how you would say this to someone you want to encourage. Not only will you learn to nurture yourself, but you will become more mindful in your word choices when communicating with others.
2. Be curious and learn your triggers. If you get flustered with emotion, learn the why and the how behind that frustration. Explore what caused you to be triggered so that you can be more alert in the future should it happen again. This will condition you to stay alert (not on edge) when you foresee conflict with others.
3. Establish a trigger escape plan. To regulate triggers, there needs to be a plan on how to work through biases and emotions. A plan starts with "how can I make a step forward?"Having a strategy on how to work through a challenge helps with conflict management in social settings.
4. Know your boundaries and when to set them. In a world where everyone is overly sensitive and social media amplifies insecurities, know what lifts you up and what brings you down. Give yourself permission to remove anything and anyone that drains you. This will minimize the risk of building toxic relationships that serve you no purpose.
5. Give yourself permission to be selfish with self-love for the purpose of self-care. Fill your cup with anything and anyone that empowers you. When you feel empowered, your confidence level boosts up and you can conquer the world! Empowerment is contagious and you'll want to pass it on to people you care about and value.
6. Challenge your inner voice when it's becoming a diva. Dare to ask yourself questions to determine if you're jumping to conclusions or if you actually got the receipts to back up your criticism. Leverage unnecessary bias by reflecting if your thoughts and beliefs might be faulty at the moment. See if you can do anything else to change how you're feeling or going about things. Keep your diva in check (even if you need to give her a Snickers when she's not being like best self).
Remember, when you're stuck in a cycle that lack self-nurturing, dilute the potential for internal toxicity by catching yourself in the moment. Only then, you can redirect yourself towards social positivity.