You stop negative self talk from running your day by learning when it shows up and deciding ahead of time how you will respond. I call it Defeating the Self-Limiting Voice. The method is to audit the voice, make an agreement with yourself, set a trigger, and take action from your boss voice.
- Two voices compete in your head. One limits you and one champions you.
- Negative self talk shows up at predictable times, so audit when yours is loudest.
- Make an agreement with yourself ahead of time and set a trigger that anchors you.
- Every time you act in the face of the voice, the skill gets stronger.
What is the self-limiting voice?
The self-limiting voice is the negative self talk that tells you to skip the thing that makes you better. Its opposite is your boss voice, the champion for all you want to do. Both voices live in your head and compete every single day.
I felt both of them on day seven of 75 Hard. My alarm went off at 4:57 in the morning. My wife was taking our son to her parents' place for the whole day, and my first thought was, "How about you sleep in for an extra 30 minutes? You earned this." The next thought came from my boss voice: "You have such an opportunity to create so many things today." So I stood up and started my day.
- Self-limiting voice It tells you to hold back, and it creeps in during your weakest moments. Listen once and a single choice can snowball into negative momentum.
- Boss voice This one champions all you want to create. Taking action for this voice becomes a superpower.
It is one single decision in one single moment.
Can you make negative self talk go away?
The voice stays with all of us. Mine pops up every day, and my core value is radiate positivity. What changes is how long it stays. For a lot of people, negative self talk and the anxiety that comes with it can hang around for a day, a week or a year. My name for the work is shrinking the dispersion, which means cutting down how long the negative self talk stays with you.
You also get more accustomed to acting in the face of it. The moment stays challenging, and you move anyway. This is a skill you can cultivate, and it is an inch forward in mastering yourself.
When is your negative self talk the loudest?
Around day 48 of 75 Hard I audited myself. My self-limiting voice was noisiest between 5 and 6 a.m. and again between 4 and 5 p.m. In the morning my mind was just waking up. By late afternoon I had been up for 12 hours and my energy was going down. Your energy has a half life. When your action slows and you fall out of flow, your mind wanders, the voice gets louder, and a story starts looping.
My light bulb moment came at 7 a.m. With my workout done, I felt great and thankful that I had gotten up. The 4:57 voice had told me the opposite. That was my proof that the early voice is untrustworthy, so I gave ownership to the powerful one.
How do you stop negative self talk step by step?
- Audit the voice. Notice the specific times of day your self talk is at its worst. Mine came in two windows.
- Find your proof. Compare how you feel in that window with how you feel a couple of hours later. The gap shows you which voice to trust.
- Make an agreement with yourself. Decide ahead of time that during those windows you will let the negative self talk pass without listening. When it arrives, say, "I knew you were about to come here."
- Set a trigger. Let the negative thought cue one action that anchors you in your champion voice. I reread my notes from coaching programs and old books, looking for a more powerful story to latch on to.
- Take action. The best of the best recognize the voice, smile and say, "Let's go."
Think of B-Rabbit in 8 Mile. He knew what Papa Doc was going to say about him, so he used it to his advantage. Knowing what your voice will say gives you the same edge.
This is a superpower when you can actually utilize your own negative self-talk as an advantage for yourself.
Rob Cressy
How do you turn a red light into a green light?
Matthew McConaughey's book Greenlights gave me language for this. Green lights are the good things happening in your life. Red lights are the things stopping you, including your fears, judgments and self-limiting beliefs. I use a four part process to turn one into the other.
- Awareness Say it to yourself: a red light is happening right now.
- See your innocence Many judgments are stories in your head, like "I'm not enough." See your innocence in them.
- Forgive yourself Drop that story and forgive yourself for the judgment.
- Create the green light Write an "I am" declaration for the more powerful version of you.
To remove scarcity around sales from my own mind, I created the declaration "I am that a conversation with me is a gift." You can build your own with I am affirmations.
Stack green lights early, too. I designed the first two hours of my morning to create nonstop green lights, and you can do the same with a morning routine you love. With that momentum behind you, the red lights that come later are easier to flow through.
Do this today
- Run the audit. Write down the times of day your negative self talk gets loudest.
- Write your agreement. Pick one of those windows and choose the action you will take the moment the voice shows up.
Listen to the episode
Silence Your Critic: Master Your Inner Voice
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Read the full transcript
Do you know what time of the day, every day, your self-limiting voice and your negative self-talk is most active? I do because yesterday I just audited myself and figured out that between the times of 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., my bitch voice is the noisiest.
What's up? It's Rob Cressy. And as I'm going through my 75 Hard journey, one of the things that I'm hyper aware of is anything that does not serve me. Because by design, I am doing a program that's designed to turn me into the best version of myself. So anything that is not in alignment with that, ding, ding, ding, the light bulb goes off for me.
And we all have an ever present negative self-talk that pops up every single day. And for me, the first obstacle that I had to overcome in doing this journey was the self-limiting voice. First thing in the morning when the alarm would go off at 4:57 a.m. that would say, you know what, Rob, let's sleep in a little bit longer.
And I'd overcome that and the light bulb moment for me was when I realized at 7 a.m. when I was done with my workout and I was home, I didn't feel the same way about my self-limiting voice as I did then. That I actually had my boss voice and the champion voice for me. I was feeling great. I was thankful that I had woken up early.
And eventually, the light bulb went off for me where I said, oh, I don't have to trust my voice that is telling me not to do something first thing in the morning because it is not trustworthy because I have proof at 7 a.m. I don't feel the same way. So it's like 4:57 a.m. self-limiting voice, very noisy. 7 a.m. powerful voice. Therefore, let's give ownership to the powerful voice. So it took me probably 30 days of being on 75 Hard before I actually got that.
So the next thing that was on my mind is I started to notice within the first hour of me being up, since my mind is just waking up and it's fresh. And yes, I'm drinking a cup of coffee and I'm reading a personal growth book. So I'm actually doing the positive habits and I'm already doing my gratitude and I'm saying today's going to be a great day. So I'm doing all of the things that I preach and teach on a daily basis for how to start your day in the best way possible.
But that doesn't mean that my negative self-talk wouldn't pop up in the middle of me reading a good personal development book. And there it is. Now I can feel the anxiety in my body and in my stomach. Now my mind's starting to drift away. And I was like, what is up with this? This is dumb. This is not the best version of myself right now. So how can I create a lens of the world where I don't give this power?
And yesterday I'm sitting there and I realized, I was like, wait a second. When is this voice most active for me? Like, let's get hyper aware of this. And I was like, well, it really happens two times a day. First thing in the morning. And then at the end of the day, between 4 and 5 p.m., when I've been up for 12 hours as a highly productive, high performer, business owner, entrepreneur, dad, coach, everything in between.
So my energy is going down. And we all know that there is a half-life for your energy and your being. So boom, that's starting to go down now. And oftentimes when your action slows down or you're not in the flow of something, now your mind can wander. And that self-limiting voice can start to be a little bit louder. And if it's grabbing onto something that's highly emotional for you, now all of a sudden it starts looping in your head. And now this is the story that we're telling ourself.
And if this story is one that is ever present with you every single day, well, now Houston, we have a problem. So I'm like, you know what? I don't want this to be a part of who I am. So in auditing the specific times in which my self-talk is the worst, I quickly realized once again that I know when not to listen to my self-talk.
So my negative self-talk becomes a trigger for doing something that will re-anchor me in the positive side of who I am. And this is an inch in the name of self-mastery. And I've already shared a lot about the creation of overcoming your negative self-talk. But I'm living this in a real world experience going through 75 Hard.
So like everybody else, I have negative self-talk on a daily basis. And I'm so committed to showing up as the best and most ideal version of myself every single day that I want to and I get to create a lens of the world that says, all right, what am I going to do to create myself in a more powerful way where I can literally drop this off the table?
And this doesn't mean that I'm no longer going to have negative self-talk. What we're doing here is shrinking the dispersion for how long that negative self-talk stays with us. Because for a lot of people, that negative self-talk and that anxiety and that gut that they feel can be ever present. It can be there for a year or a month or a week or a day or an hour.
So how about we chop the head off of that thing and say, all right, I'm aware of when this is going to happen. Very similar to B-Rabbit in 8 Mile where he knows what Papa Doc is going to say to him. All of the things about how he grew up in a trailer park and all of that. And boom, he uses that to his advantage. And this is a superpower when you can actually utilize your own negative self-talk as an advantage for yourself.
Because you know it's about to happen more than likely at specific times. If it doesn't happen between 5 and 6 a.m. and 4 to 5 p.m., cool. We're all good. But if and when it does come up, you say, oh, I knew you were about to come here. And I've already created an agreement with myself that says, during this time, if negative self-talk pops in, I'm not listening to it.
Then the next level of this would become you create a trigger that says, all right, well, what is the thing that I'm going to do to anchor myself in the champion voice for myself? So for me, what I've been doing is going back and rereading my notes from the coaching programs that I'm a part of.
So whether it is Arete with Ed Mylett and Andy Frisella or Apex with Ryan Stewman or the coaching programs I've done with John Patrick Morgan, whatever it is, or my old book notes, all of them. I'm just looking for a more powerful story that I can latch on to and say, no, you know what? This is actually my truth. And I want to share this with you because as we speak, I'm on day 48 of 75 Hard.
And this is turning into a major epiphany in my life. And I'm going to be doing a lot more content on the epiphanies that have been created in my life, the light bulb moments that have drastically changed the lens for how I see the world, because I truly want to help you on your journey.
And this is one of the reasons why I'm doing 75 Hard is because I'm the opposite of perfect because my negative self-talk pops up every single day. And this is coming from someone whose core value is radiate positivity. So I'm about that good vibes life, but it doesn't mean that I'm immune to fear, judgment, self-limiting beliefs, obstacles, challenges, and adversity. And that's why I do programs to prepare for what's difficult when it's easy to make myself better.
Transcript cleaned up for reading.