Have you ever stopped and taken a listen to how you talk to yourself?

Do you speak to yourself like your best friend or your nastiest enemy?

A quick word about brains

We have the same brain as humans who lived millions of years ago. Humans may have evolved, but our brains still are motivated by the same factors: increase pleasure, avoid pain, and use as little energy as possible. That means our brains like to think the same thoughts we had during our cave-dwelling days.

The brain has about 60,000 thoughts each day. Unsupervised, your brain is like a toddler with a knife. These thoughts or beliefs are not useful and many are outright harmful.

Self-Loathing Speak

Many of us have perfected an internal monologue of self criticism. It is so well practiced, that it seems to happen without us even realizing it. That’s a good example of the brains desire to run automatically.

These nasty comments in our brains feel a lot like facts. But they aren’t true, they are just thoughts. Unfortunately, many of us believe these thoughts as if they were the facts of our life.

The problem is that these thoughts actually create the way we feel. They are the culprits of self doubt and self loathing. These feelings drive our actions and the behaviours we really don’t want, like overeating, addiction, and self harming.

Changing these behaviours is almost always short lived unless we change the thoughts and beliefs that have fuelled them.

Becoming a Badass Brain Boss

I am on a mission to change the world one brain at a time.

A few years ago I decided I wasn’t going to speak to myself in a way that I would not speak to my best friend Melissa. I just put a hard stop to it. That doesn’t mean my brain doesn’t offer me a myriad of negative rhetoric about myself such as:

  • I eat too much
  • I suck at technology
  • I hate my thighs
  • my business goals are unrealistic

It means I tell my brain “your opinion is noted and dismissed…I no longer believe these thoughts…I believe other thoughts such as:

  • I am learning to stop emotionally eating
  • I can do hard things
  • My body is strong
  • I can achieve any goal I set my mind to

Reprogramming the Brain

Time to draw a hard line in the sand. Notice when you are speaking to yourself in an unkind voice, (which your brain will continue to offer), compassionately acknowledge and redirect. Feel free to borrow my thoughts to help reprogram. Better yet, learn how to self-coach and you will really become a Badass Brain Boss.