In my previous article I wrote about keeping your mouth shut , something I am doing more day by day.
But the more I think about what I wrote, the more I have thought that I should not have expressed what I said.
In the last twenty-four hours, I have thought about what I wrote.
Should I have said this?
Should I have said that?
What will people think?
I have had this internal dialog, an internal voice going on and on and on. It just would not stop. In NLP we will call this Auditory Digital, see Eye Accessing Cues.
The more I have thought about the previous article the more I have criticized myself, the more I have found fault in what I wrote, the deeper the hole I dug myself.
How often do we criticize ourselves? How often do we build mountains out of molehills? How often do we say to ourselves “I wish I had said this or that”, or “I wish I had done that”.
We keep talking to ourselves. More often than not, our own internal dialog is much longer than the actual incident. And, the incident, the history, never changes, but we make ourselves feel bad about it.
Not only do we talk to ourselves about the past, but we also talk to ourselves about the future. What can happen here, what can happen there. If I say this, then ……. If I do this, then ………
Often people with fears and phobias will practice the fear or phobia before the incident takes place, actually experiencing the phobia as if it was happening, not only experiencing it, but the more they talk to themselves about it, the worse it gets.
If I criticised you now about the style of clothes you were wearing, your hair cut, the food your eat, and I went on and on. What would you do to me? What would you tell me to do?
Yes. Go away, or words to that effect.
Yet we do it to ourselves. We go on and on and on, criticising ourselves, complaining about what we have done, what we shall or could be doing, and making ourselves worse.
Why do it? Why make ourselves bad? Stop it. Stop that internal dialog.
One of the first cures the damaging internal dialog taking over our lives, is to realise that it is happening, that we are talking to ourselves, and then tell that voice to “SHUT UP“.
Change the voice in what it is saying, make it more positive.
Change the tonality. Make the voice into a sexy, sensual voice.
Change the voice into that of Micky Mouse.
Does the critical voice change and the results it produces change?
If that does not work, open the teeth slightly, and push the tip of the tongue between the teeth and bite gently.
What happens to the voice? It stops.
We have a saying in English when we should not have said what we have said, and that is :-
“I wish I had bitten my tongue.” meaning, “I wish I had said nothing.”
A third method of quietening that internal dialog is to push the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, hard.
What happens to that voice now?
It is good to talk to ourselves, often it is the only voice that talks sense from all those other people around us giving us “best” advice. It is good to plan, to review our past, but when it takes over, makes things bad for us, we must tell it to
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