To celebrate turning 40, I’ve challenged myself to blog for each of the 40 days leading into my birthday. This is post number 15. You can read all the posts here.
Brooke, my Let It Be co-host, has spoken often on the podcast about her inner-mean-girl (the voice in her head that tells her she’s a bit shit).
We all have this voice in our head to some degree. For some (many?) of us, the voice is loud and plays a huge part in shaping the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves.
Brooke’s inner-mean-girl voice is loud.
To counteract it, she took to finishing her daily meditation by saying – to herself – “Hey, I love you”.
One day that daily ritual caused her to burst into tears because, for the first time, she actually believed it.
—
Positive affirmations are often seen as lame.
Telling ourselves we’re ‘great’, or ‘doing a good job’, or daring to articulate the big dreams we have goes against much of our social programming.
Negative affirmations, however. We don’t seem to have a problem letting those shape the way we see ourselves.
We quietly accept the voices (internal or external) that say to us, “You’re a bit shit”.
Stop for a second and ask yourself, Why is that?
Hopefully, upon some reflection, you’ll see the madness in it.
Accepting the stories those voices are telling us is a form of self-sabotage.
Changing those stories requires meaningful action.
The simplest form of meaningful action is to do exactly what Brooke did. Tell yourself a really simple but (positive!) story.
Take three seconds to tell it to yourself every day.
You won’t believe it on the first day.
Or the second.
Or even the thirtieth.
But one day you will.
And it will change everything.