2025 September 16 Talking nice to ourselves

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Hi, this is Jim Cranston from  7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me tonight to talk about the basics of reenvisioning your life.

If you like what you hear tonight, please send me a like, subscribe, send me a message, tell your friends, get the message out to other people. Tonight we'll be talking about some specifics, including upcoming webinars and challenges. Remember last week we talked that we can change and improve how we interact with life and maximize our satisfaction and enjoyment of all our years—our older years, but our younger years as well.

Tonight we'll focus on two different areas: how we talk to ourselves, and our relationship with money, as the two are interrelated.

Most of us land on having a fairly good relationship with ourselves publicly, but behind the scenes, it often doesn't look very pretty. It can range from little negative self-talk like "That was a stupid thing to do," to major talk-downs where we really take ourselves to task for all sorts of things, most of which aren't really justified.

How do we get into that habit of saying negative things to ourselves or about life and our decisions? Usually it comes from failed expectations, missed goals, criticism or judgment by others, and a variety of sources that we've interpreted in a negative way.

But what about when we really do something not very smart? That, my friends, is called life and learning. I've told many people that if you have nothing in life to be embarrassed about or even ashamed of, you probably haven't been living life to the fullest. When you try to live life to the fullest extent that you're able to, you're probably often doing new things, things in which you don't have a lot of experience or maybe no experience whatsoever.

When you do something new, sometimes you make mistakes and do things that in hindsight weren't really that great, whether it's entering that hotdog eating contest to impress your date or trying to get a suntan in one day just before vacation. Your intentions were probably good, but the results were not all that good. While you may have been criticized and ridiculed about it, and your brain, which is always trying to keep you safe, focused on the criticism, what it forgot was the potentially good intentions with which you started that action.

After you do that a few times, remember that repeated outcomes from actions become beliefs in your brain. And voila, you now have the root of so many common negative self-talk phrases that people use. Things like, "I always fail at new things," "I can't learn anything new," "I'll never be pretty," "I can never be funny." And there's a million more just like them.

But what's the reality? This is really important. The reality is: I took a chance outside my comfort zone for a good reason, and it didn't work out like I expected, and I learned a lot from it. That's a very different way of thinking than something negative.

And the people criticizing you, did they even try to do something new or did they just timidly sit back and look for an opportunity to criticize you to make themselves feel better? Now, who's the silly one? Is it you for trying to improve yourself and learn something new? Or is it all the naysayers who didn't even have the courage to try or to help you?

When you sit back and really look at it, it was you who really took the chance to expand your life, and it's you who's making progress and it's you who's the winner. Because taking reasonable chances is what opens up life's opportunities for us to discover them.

So the first thing is that when you're tempted to criticize yourself with negative self-talk, try to step back a second and remember why it even seemed like a reasonable action. Then learn from that and use that new knowledge to improve yourself.

The next aspect of negative self-talk is the environment. Very often we find ourselves in very negative environments. Maybe everyone at work is mad at something or somebody, or everyone at your club is mad about the new person who joined or that the dues went up. Maybe everyone on social media is mad at everything—but that's a bigger topic we'll talk about separately.

In all these cases, step back for a minute and really listen to see if it's really everybody or just a few loud voices. In most situations, only a few people really drive any narrative, no matter how big or small it is. Don't confuse a loud or frequent message with being true or common. Just because a few people are repeatedly saying it or saying it loudly with great passion doesn't make it true.

Look at the facts yourself, and even if their complaints are true for them, are they true for you? If someone doesn't like the new work schedule, but it's actually more convenient for you, then don't let other people's negativity distract you from the things that you like about a situation.

What's needed is a course in Self-Talk Mastery. Indeed, we're putting one together—just a short course on how to actually get past that because it's gotten really common these days. Social media plays a big part of this, because you can always turn on your computer and immediately feel miserable. We're going to talk about how to avoid that, but more on that later.

The basics are really what we said above: Don't let others control your feelings about a situation. Don't get fooled into thinking something is more common than it is because a few people are complaining loudly and often. Don't be overly hard on yourself when you are honestly making a good effort to do something and achieve something new, but it didn't work out quite like you expected. Recognize that mistakes often happen because you're trying new things or new ways to do things. Celebrate the knowledge and learn from it. Don't be ashamed of it.

Self-talk mastery comes with practice and like all life changes, it takes some time. But it is entirely possible and it'll help lay the foundation for all the rest of the steps towards happiness and feeling content in your life.

While we have been talking about negative self-talk in general, since we're creative humans, we always come up with new ways to beat ourselves up. We usually have a wide variety of topics we're self-critical about. It could be health, relationships, and especially financial and money-related negative self-talk.

They all follow the same patterns for the same reasons, and they can be addressed in similar ways. But financial negative self-talk deserves a special mention because money problems are so common that they're responsible for roughly half or even more of divorces.

Clearly, this is something we're really good at when it comes to being negative on ourselves, and we'll devote one or more episodes to the financial aspects of negative self-talk and ways to approach, mitigate, and reduce it. It's also really important as we age, because usually at that period of time, our incomes are going down and so it's very easy to second-guess ourselves and double down on the negative self-talk.

The very quick overview is that most often issues arise because we aren't comfortable talking about money or our financial situation. This leads to unexpected revelations, which lead to stress, and that's generally a bad outcome. The first rule, as always, is to try and treat money like any other awkward subject. Just start talking about it as soon as you can and as honestly as you can.

In many cases, you realize that it isn't the money, per se, that's the issue—it's a priority issue. This naturally ties back to our core topic of reenvisioning your life and goal setting. When you've defined your vision and started setting goals towards your vision, then it becomes much easier to review your actions, including spending of money, in terms of whether something you're considering is consistent with your goals and vision or not.

Once you are able to do that, suddenly many money spending issues will start to get smaller because you realize that the expense really isn't worth it to you once you consider it in terms of its real value to you. Like I said, this is a big topic and we'll not only cover it, but we have some great speakers lined up to be interviewed on the show, which I'm really excited about. It also ties into the whole subject of the psychology of money and financial therapy.

The big takeaway for tonight is to manage your negative self-talk. Two of the best ways to do that are to remember that most things with negative outcomes started off with good intentions. Remember the good intentions and the lessons that you learn when things didn't go quite as you expected. Try to avoid or manage situations and environments where negativity is common. You can't always avoid them—sometimes you have to be there like at work. But when you do have to be in them, remember to be discerning about what you accept and what you discard from what you're hearing. A lot of people say a lot of things, often in anger. It doesn't mean that all of it's true and you don't have to accept it all.

Your homework tonight is to think about one or two common things that you say to yourself that have a negative slant to them. Write them down so you become aware of them. Do a "best two or three" list, and extra points if you remember how they got started. Look at them and say, "I wonder where that came from. Why did I start saying that to myself?" Then try to rephrase them as a positive, emphasizing what you've learned from them and how you can avoid making those same mistakes again.

We all make mistakes and the natural reaction is to be critical of them and of ourselves when they happen. But we can unlearn that behavior and learn to do different things in its place—say something positive and redo something that we're not happy with the outcome.

Please remember all the many difficult situations in the world, the wars going on, and stress. UKR7.com is a link to places that support the people of Ukraine—very important. And of course, World Central Kitchen (WCK.org) works in disaster areas, usually one of the first if not the first organization providing food and services to local people. They're a great organization.

Remember there are always charities and services and groups around you to help people in your local community as well. It doesn't have to be a big national organization. As we always talk about, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others.

Even if right now you don't feel you're able to give time or money, or you're just not in the mindset to do that, just do something simple. See somebody in the street, smile at them. Just wish them a good morning. Just recognizing somebody can change their day, can change their life, possibly in ways you can't even imagine.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along and please subscribe and hit that like button. Drop me a comment as to what other topics you'd like to hear.

Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.