Self-Talk

[tconnor]

Relationship Tips #59
Self-Talk

Relationships are either getting better or they are getting worse. They are dynamic entities and do not remain the same. Therefore, if your relationship is not getting better, it is more than likely getting worse in some way.

One of the critical issues that determines whether a relationship is getting better or worse is the focus of the people involved. Every relationship has some positive as well as negative stuff going on. You can choose to focus on the negatives or the positives. There are five ways in which we do this.

1. Our internal self talk.
2. Our external behavior that focuses on what is working or not working.
3. Our expectations of the other person.
4. Our perceptual interpretations of the other person's behavior.
5. Our obsession with the other person's behavior.

Let's look at the issue of self talk this week.

Self talk is your unedited ongoing internal dialog that you have with yourself every waking minute of your life. Whether this self talk continues during sleep is anybody’s guess. Each of us has a variety of mental filters that let some information into our consciousness while rejecting other information.

There are two concepts that have an impact on our self talk. They are: 1 There is a medical/psychological concept that says that all of the information .that finds its way into our unconscious must first pass through the Medulla, a small switching device in the brain. It is believed that over 70 percent of what we are exposed to never reaches our conscious mind and directed to our unconscious automatically. Therefore much of what we hear is registered in our mind for future recall. 2 The unconscious mind can't differentiate between what is real and imagined.

Combining these two principles, much of our thinking as well as self talk is nothing more than recycling old information over and over again. If this self talk is negative we will bring to our conscious mind other similar negative experiences or feelings that have been stored for future reference. The same is true on the positive side. If our focus is on the negative through internal negative preoccupation we will tend to filter even positive actions or words from another person through this negative filter. You can begin to see how this negative preoccupation tends to bring even more negatives into focus.

The key is to only permit positive thoughts into your active consciousness, by rejecting any negatives. This doesn't mean that these negatives do not exist. They are very real, but we can choose what we allow into our moment by moment thinking. One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the repetitive exposure of only thoughts, ideas, feelings that you want to have resurface. You have conscious control, if you take it. Most people do not. They feel that their thinking is not within the domain of their active control.