What is self talk? Something we all do. You are telling yourself things all the time, and your unconscious mind is listening without arguing. What you tell yourself affects the quality of your life, and your abilities as well. Don’t you think you should pay more attention to what that internal dialog is about?
Which are you primarily using, positive self-talk or negative self-talk? Look at the example below of some of the things that positive and negative people say. Notice the difference, because when you do, you’ll start to understand how “mere words” can affect your life.
Examples Of Negative Self Talk
Negative self talk often involves explaining bad things by internalizing them (“There I go again.”). It treats bad things as permanent (“It’s always the same.”). It generalizes (“Work sucks.”). When explaining good things, negative people often externalize them (“That was just lucky.”). They consider them temporary (“That went well THIS TIME.”). They see them only in a specific context (“Well at least that part went right.”). Some more examples of negative self talk:
“I always screw up when I meet someone new.”
“This is fun for now.”
“This place is great, not like mine.”
“Well, at least THAT meeting went okay, I guess.”
“I picked the wrong lane like I always do.”
Your mind power is not your IQ. It is not the innate potential of your mind, but the actual and habitual use and development of that potential. In other words, it isn’t how smart you are that counts, but how you use it. Here are three things you can do to make your mind more effective.
Brain Exercises
Regular use and “exercising” of the brain has been shown to generate new neuronal growth, and even halt the decline of mental function that often comes with age. Try numerous brain exercises, and when you find the ones that you enjoy, make doing them a habit. A study will someday prove that old people who do their crossword puzzle every Sunday morning maintain their mental function longer. Some other ways to increase that mind power:
- Do mental math while driving.
- Look around at things and redesign them in your mind.
- Sing a song, inventing the lyrics as you go.
- Learn a memory technique and use it daily.
Discipline Yourself
A recent study, reported in the journal Psychological Science, found that while IQ level did correlate with academic performance, there was actually a much stronger correlation with self discipline. Those students with high self-discipline have much better grades than high-IQ students. They also found that there was no correlation between IQ and discipline (they varied independently).
Invent new ideas, exercise your brainpower, and have fun while you’re at it! There are many problem-solving techniques and idea-generating techniques you can use. One of the easiest, however, is to simply find new applications for existing ideas, products, services and systems.
This technique can be used to come up with new ideas in any area of life. Take an existing product, like a raincoat, for example. It takes just a minute or two to come up with new applications. How about a line of raincoats for dogs and cats? Raincoats for cattle? Maybe they lose valuable weight burning calories to stay warm during cold rains.
Evaluating the new ideas you come up with is another process. It is best left for later, if you don’t want to stifle your creativity. You only need one or two good ideas to make the effort worthwhile, and having a hundred ideas to choose from makes finding a few good ones more likely.
I saw an ad for a company that uses a dog to find mold in your house. Dogs can sniff out almost anything, and it reminded me of the news story from a while back, about a dog that could detect if you had cancer. My next thought was, “I wonder what else they could be used to find?” One idea that came to mind was to use dogs to find people’s lost pets. They track lost criminals so well, so why not a service to find lost pets? A sniff of the lost cats favorite rug, and the dog is on the trail.
Creative problem solving is about finding the solutions that might normally get missed. Why are they overlooked? Often it is because we are trapped into a certain approach by the assumptions we are making. When we challenge these “hidden” assumptions, we find that there are many creative solutions that never occurred to us before.
An example will help here, but first a question: Have you ever been in Los Angeles traffic? I have been in bumper-to-bumper traffic there, trying to get to the airport at 10:30 at night. If you have had a similar experience, you can understand the following problem.
Joe had an audition for a movie role at eight the next morning in Hollywood, and he lived on the other side of the city. The news of the audition came late, and now – at one in the morning – it occurred to him that he had a problem. It could take as much as four hours to get through the morning traffic, plus he needed some time to shower and get ready. This meant getting up by a little after three that morning.
