Friday, December 29, 2006

Changing Negative Thoughts into Positive Thoughts

"Creating a new image begins with changing how you talk to yourself each day."


Where Negativity Comes From

As children, each of us live with the barrage of commands from the adults in our lives: stop fidgeting, pay attention, sit up straight. For some, those commands became a consistent source of pain, maybe you heard words such as "You're stupid" or "You're lazy." As we grow into adulthood, we don't leave these remarks behind us, but instead, we continue them on our own, telling ourselves over and over again how inadequate we are.


Our negative thought patterns have the ability to reap havoc on our lives. Sometimes, we create our own reality by what we say to ourselves each day. For example, if we have one or two lousy things happen to us in the morning, we tell ourselves what a terrible day this is. Throughout the day, as we repeat this over and over, we begin to focus only on what has gone wrong. By the end of the day, we have convinced ourselves it was the worst day ever. If instead, we had accepted that the morning started off poorly, but the rest of the day looked promising and repeated this to ourselves all day, we would view our experiences differently and look for the good in what was happening.

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