Self Talk Style
Self Talk Style
When good or bad things happen, how do you explain them to yourself? What kind of self talk goes on in your head? We often identify as being fairly optimistic or pessimistic in our lives, but what we may not be so aware of is the extent to which we really perpetuate this based on how we describe events to ourselves. Language is a powerful thing, and can really determine our thought processes and feelings about particular events.
Martin Seligman, who has done a great deal of work in the area of positive psychology, identifies that there are particular factors that determine how we explain things to ourselves: how permanent they are (“this always/never happens to me”), how pervasive they are “this affects everything in my life/affects very little in my life”) and how personal they are (“this is because of me/this is because of things outside of me”).
Optimists tend to describe positive events as permanent, global and internal – “I’m successful in all the projects I work on, in all areas of my life, and is because of my own hard work” – whereas more pessimistic people might describe positive events as temporary, specific and internal – “Good things like this almost never happen, this doesn’t change much in my life, and is because of circumstances out of my control anyway”. The same occurs in reverse for negative events.
Simply changing how we describe these types of events to ourselves can subsequently change how we start to feel about positive and negative events, as well as how easily we recognise them in our lives. I challenge you to monitor your self talk for a period of time to notice how you describe positive and negative events in your own life, and if need be, see if you can start to change your own self talk language.
More next time!