What do you say to yourself?

When you talk to yourself, what do you say? It was a tremendous relief to me to find out that everyone has a little internal voice too! We all give ourselves feedback, perhaps after a presentation or important phone call. The problem is that we give ourselves too much criticism, apparently we give ourselves 15 times more negative messages than positive ones! We say things like “You made a real mess of that!” or “You’ll never get the orders you need if you don’t shape up”.

And these negative messages can pop up before you’re due to visit or call a potential client too and damage your confidence. Before you know it, you put in a poor performance and prove that your negative ‘voice’ was right!

Fortunately the opposite is also true. Whenever you catch yourself saying something negative, stop and change the message to be more positive. You could say “That wasn’t like me at all. What do I need to change?”, “Next time, I’ll remember to ask that question” or “OK, this is going to be much better than the last call”.