“I wish for you a life of wealth, health and happiness; a life in which you give to yourself the gift of patience, the virtue of reason, the value of knowledge, and the influence of faith in your own ability to dream about and to achieve worthy rewards.”
Jim Rohn
What stops us from becoming the “best us”? The simple answer is ourselves! If we are the people that we wish to become, that’s perfect. If not, we just need to look inside and have a friendly talk with ourselves. How can we do that? Let us examine the ways in which we can talk to ourselves to help us become our “best selves”. But first, let me remind you how our self-talk works.
Self-talk is basically the inner voice that we have in our mind all day long. Most of the time, we talk to ourselves subconsciously about the things we forgot, the conversation we made with our family members or peers, our plans, meetings, anything, and everything. The sad part about our self-talks is that, the majority of the time, it is negative. However, if we do our self-talk consciously, it can have a big influence on how we feel about who we are and who we become.
The next step is to schedule 1-2 hours’ time for ourselves. We can get a cup of hot tea or coffee, a journal, and enjoy time by ourselves, consciously! It is just like two good friends having a conversation with each other. It is time for us to listen to our self-talk purposefully. What is it trying to tell us? This meeting will guide us to our self-development by identifying what bothers us about ourselves. Are we happy? Are we taking care of our minds and bodies? Do we exercise, if so, how often? Are we happy about the way we look, if not, why not? Do we like our job? Are we living the life we wished for?
In these 2 hours, we can ask any questions to ourselves. The hardest part will be answering ourselves honestly. We may not like our own answers, but we cannot keep having subconscious negative self-talk. If we were having a similar conversation with our friends, we would try to help them and try to show them the positive aspects of their life. So, we will do the same thing for ourselves. The main idea is, we need to consciously create positive self-talk while creating a self-development plan to live our best.
We can have this one-to-one meeting daily, weekly, monthly to track our progress in our personal development and get closer to our dream life. Nothing has to be perfect, but we cannot make the same mistakes again and again and keep beating ourselves up. We all have to take responsibility for our happiness. The following quote from Rumi expresses my feelings in a beautiful way, “The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you already are.” So, we can bring to light the best in us. There is no magical solution. We cannot outsource everything. We have to work hard to get what we want. We can pay someone to clean our home, but we cannot pay someone to do a push-up for us.
Moving forward, when we realize that we are talking negatively to ourselves; we just need to stop it, find the reasons for it, and replace it with a friendlier, more positive one. I hope, we all live our lives to the fullest. When our time is up, I hope we all have a smile on our face with a grateful heart for all the beautiful experiences. Jim Rohn summed this up best when he said, “I wish for you a life of wealth, health and happiness; a life in which you give to yourself the gift of patience, the virtue of reason, the value of knowledge, and the influence of faith in your own ability to dream about and to achieve worthy rewards.”
I’m a Project Manager with a deep passion for both professional and personal growth. Designing and building the next generation of vehicles is incredibly rewarding, but it comes with its challenges—especially for someone as emotionally invested as I am!