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If you are facing difficulty to overcome procrastination then it may have a strong connection with your limiting self-talk. Basically, self-talk is your inner voice & active 24X7. While you may not focus on your inner dialogue with intention, you’ve rehearsed self-talk throughout your entire life. It’s your mind’s running commentary playing on autopilot in the background. It influences and creates how you see yourself and the world around you.
Internal negative self-talk is damaging. It leads to a self-defeating cycle of procrastination that lasts for decades.
If you think you’re helpless to defeat your procrastination habit, you will act like it, talk like it, and then it becomes a part of your internal programming. Self-talk is powerful because it forms your reality. It solidifies our beliefs and is the architect constructing your mind. So, it’s critical that you monitor your self-talk.
The reason we cannot take control of life is that we fail to take control of ourselves. This begins with breaking down the negative messages that are trapped inside your head.
Replace Negative Self-Talk with Empowering Words of Confidence
Your self-talk is convincing. It has been operating in the back of the room like a silent intruder that has broken into your home without you realizing it. It feeds you lies and false beliefs that are built into your subconscious and streaming from the past.
This is not what you are, it’s what you do, and because it’s a behavior and not a condition you’re born with, it can (and will) be changed. Stop living as a person who avoids doing things & become an action taker. Your action will become a positive energy in your life.
Kill your identity as a procrastinator. In its place, implement a string of confident language. For removing the negative discussion in your mind setting you up for sabotage, here are the self-love phrases which you can use:
● “I’m a person who gets things done.”
● “When I wake up, after my morning routine, I do the hardest thing first.”
● “When I do hard things first instead of last, I am calm and relaxed.”
● “I love doing hard things because it challenges me to grow and break my glass ceiling.”
● “I love myself, and my life is amazing.”
You have been feeding into the negative self-talk habit day after day, hour after hour. Like any habit, the more you feed it, the stronger it grows until it becomes an unbreakable steel chain. But habits can be broken. It begins when you stop feeding into it.
Like any muscle, it weakens when you don’t exercise it. But this is one muscle we want to kill off. In its place, you will implement the desired or intentional action habit. This is the habit of doing hard things first without any delay. Just as you used to delay tackling the hard things, now you will take intentional action to complete these tasks.
Empower Self-talk Into a Daily Action Habit
Be aware of the language you are creating in your own mind. Monitor your internal conversation. Write down the thoughts you have. Your self-talk is a string of language you have been telling yourself over and over and over again. You’ve performed this repetition to the point that negative self-talk becomes your mind.
Be still for fifteen minutes in the morning. Begin your day by reprogramming your internal software. Listen to the surrounding silence. Bring yourself into the present moment. Stay there as long as you can. Feed your mind the ideas and thoughts you want to have. Shut down the self-talk set to autopilot.
Identify negative self-talk traps. Certain scenarios may increase your self-doubt and lead to more negative self-talk. Work events, for example, maybe particularly hard. Pinpointing when you experience the most negative self-talk can help you expect, prepare, and act to overcome them.
Surround yourself with positive people. Whether you notice it, you will adapt to the outlook and emotions of the people around you. This includes negative and positive outlooks and emotions, so surround yourself with positive people whenever you can. We don’t always get to choose the people we share an office with or live within our own homes, but we can choose the way we react to people’s negative behavior.
Monitor Self-Defeating Excuses. Procrastination begins with internal reasoning. You have many excuses for not doing this thing today. What excuses do you frequently use? Excuses build your belief system. You tell yourself the same excuse hundreds of times per day, strengthening the justification for putting off hard tasks.
Create a list of Positive Self-Talk Quotes. The key to mastering your mind is taking control of the dialogue feeding into it. One strategy that works is keeping a list of positive language nearby. Think of this as your new script for reprogramming your mind.
Here is a list of quotes you can start with:
“Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives.” – Sidney Madwed
“Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think.” – Dale Carnegie
“The person who sends out positive thoughts activates the world around him positively and draws back to himself positive results.” – Norman Vincent Peale
“With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose.” – Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
“You have powers you never dreamed of. You can do things you never thought you could do. There are no limitations in what you can do except the limitations of your own mind.” – Darwin P. Kingsley
(Excerpt is from ‘Do the Hard Things First: How to Win Over Procrastination and Master the Habit of Doing Difficult Work’ by Allan Scott)
