How to Talk to Yourself

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One of the very basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is Positive Statements that are used to replace negative statements once they are identified. On the internet, in the self-help space as well as the New Age community, these are known as affirmations.
However, I believe those practicing Affirmations can learn a bit from CBT and related therapies such as DBT, and expand the way they talk to themselves. The idea is to give themselves evidence of what they are telling themselves.
The simplest way to do this is to add ‘BECAUSE’ after the affirmation or positive statement you are repeating to yourself and improvise from there.

For example, if your statement
“It's easy for me to eat healthy food”, just add ‘because’ after it…so it becomes
“It's easy for me to eat healthy food…because”….eg “I understand the value of health” or “I enjoy healthy food” or “I enjoy taking care of my body” and so on
There is really no limit to how many statements you can have after ‘Because’. You can keep on going by adding another ‘because’ or simply saying ‘and’. I believe one should stop when the statement really hits home and the behavior being sought comes easily.
Another example can be
“I can give this presentation…because..I know my material…and because everyone likes me anyway….and I don’t have to be perfect…and I have done this many times before…and its easier than I think”….and so on

This can also be used to come up with solutions to problems or at least getting into a problem-solving mindset. So you invert the problem into a solution and work backwards eg if your business has a sales problem, you say
“ I can increase my sales…because….I know my customers well and…if I reach out they will respond….and I have recovered from low sales by reducing prices”…etc, etc, etc
Be as crazy as possible, as improvisational as possible, stop whenever you want but it's great to stop when the points hits home!
This is what psychologists already believe is one of the gold standard ways of changing your thoughts and beliefs, for good.


Umair Usman is a Rapid Transformational Therapy practitioner, a businessperson, and a blogger. You can know more about him at https://buff.ly/2zmc9rj . To book a free consultancy session, please fill the form https://tinyurl.com/y6n2vv8w


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