How to Conquer Your Negative Self-Talk

5 Ways to Train Your Inner Critic to Achieve Better Outcomes

5 min readApr 7, 2020

Your negative self-talk will prevent you from achieving what you want, if you are not intentional about dealing with it.

Everyone has negative self-talk. The intensity and the power it has depends on factors such as your early childhood programming, your beliefs and your environments.

What is Negative Self-Talk?

Your negative self-talk is the little voice in your head that is often critical and judgmental. Its main function is to keep you safe.

To keep you safe, that voice will question your motives and decisions, and also make things worse than they are. It will blame and criticise you and also catastrophize things.

Your negative self-talk can become powerful and not allow you to see things from a positive perspective.

The Effects of Negative Self-Talk

If you don’t deal with your negative self-talk, the consequences include:

Lower self-confidence.
Reluctance to take risks.
Inability to expand your thinking.
Mental fatigue and higher levels of stress.
Not willing to make positive changes in your life.
More strain or pressure on your relationships.
Not being in a positive frame of mind consistently.
Generating more negative thoughts.

The ability to manage or redirect your negative self-talk to the outcomes you want is something you need to develop if you want to achieve new results.

5 Ways You Can Conquer Your Negative Self-Talk

Dealing with negative self-talk is an ongoing practice. While it’s unlikely you will ever completely get rid of it, there are things you can do to reduce its impact.

Here are five ways you can conquer your negative self-talk so you can give more attention to the outcomes you want to get.

Accept you have negative self-talk. You are not the only person who has negative self-talk. Instead of denying or pretending you don’t have them, acknowledge you have them. That will help take the power out of those thoughts, which means they won’t have as much intensity.
Identify what its purpose is. You will generate negative self-talk when something has changed. It can include your desire to achieve a new goal or when you have done something that you should not have or could have done better. It is helpful to know why the negative voice has surfaced now.
Have a dialogue with that voice. When you know the purpose behind your negative self-talk, you can have a conversation with it like you would with another person. Even though this is unusual, the reality is you are having a dialogue with yourself anyway. This is about getting to the core of the real issue without resisting your negative self-talk.
Generate thoughts that will move you forward. The more you understand that voice and the reasons for your negative self-talk, you can generate thoughts to get you what you want. The most obvious thing to do is to form positive thoughts in your mind that will move you closer to what you want.
Apply practices to quieten your mind. To reduce the power of your negative self-talk, you have to adopt certain practices. These can include mindfulness techniques such as meditation, positive chanting and deep breathing. Using different releasing techniques will also help reduce the intensity of your negative self-talk.

Final Thoughts

As your conquer your negative self-talk, you will feel lighter, be more energised and have a positive attitude. When that voice comes up again, and if you practice reducing your negative self-talk, it won’t have the effect it had previously.

Taking the power out of your negative self-talk will allow you to create the results and live the life you want.

Action Step: Give yourself at least ten minutes every day to quieten your mind, which will help overcome your negative self-talk. Whenever you have unproductive thoughts, use the ideas suggested above to deal with it and continue moving forward toward the outcomes you want.

Question: What are more ways to conquer your negative self-talk?