In today’s life coaching article, I will be writing about self-talk and mental programming. Throughout our lives, we have unknowingly received countless negative programs, which are recorded in neural pathways in our brain. This is similar to the programming of a computer. These negative programs were created by negative input. Parents, friends, teachers, television passer by conversations. You name it. (Behavioral researchers have estimated that in the first 18 years of our lives alone, each of us is told no, or what we cannot do, or what won’t work, more than 148,000 times.) And it doesn’t stop there. We continue to receive the wrong kind of programming from others, and from our own old negative programming from the past – our own self-talk.
The Law of Repetition
We receive our programs through repetition. First, from others, and then through our own repeated self-talk. That’s why what others tell us most becomes what we believe about ourselves most. Each time a message is repeated, it gets rerecorded, in the brain, and becomes stronger. Unfortunately, a lot of the programs we got were the wrong programs.
How Self-Talk Works
While we’re growing up, we get “programmed,” every day in dozens of ways. Everything we hear, see, or experience in any way gets “programmed” – much like programming a computer, which means it gets recorded in our brain. Also like a computer, the part of the brain that records all of those messages doesn’t know the difference between something that is “true” about us, or something that is not. Our computer brain just records the programs as we receive as “truth” – and those are the programs that determine every choice we make.
So we grow up getting “programmed,” – in a very natural way – and a lot of the programs we got about ourselves were completely wrong: (“You can’t do this,” “You’re not good at that,” “You could never do that,” “Why would you do that, it won’t work for you,” “You’ll never be good at math,” “You’ll always be a ‘fatty’,” “How could you be that stupid?, ”Can’t you do anything right?,” “You never listen,” or “Who do you think you are, someone special?”) And there were thousands more programs, just like them, that we heard, recorded in our brain, and ended up unconsciously repeating to ourselves and, ultimately, believing as truth.
To know what our old “Self-Talk” does in our lives, all you have to do is listen to the “negative” self-talk of the people around you. You may have even heard yourself say some of these things, or you may have heard these kinds of comments almost every day from someone else: “I can’t do this!,” I’m no good at that,” “I can never remember names,” “Nothing ever works for me,” “I can never lose weight,” “It’s just no use!,” “I never get a break,” “I just can’t seem to get organized,” “Today just isn’t my day,” and on and on and on.
Now imagine having a new internal language of a new kind of Self-Talk – a new set of programs. A new “language of life.” A new, more positive, more successful picture of yourself, one that you believed in, every day. That’s what listening to right, new kind of Self-Talk is designed to do. That’s what it does. Self-Talk replaces old programs about ourselves and actually records new programs in our brain.
When you listen to Self-Talk, your change your programs. When you change your programs, you change how you think. When you change how you think, you change your life.
Note: Self-Talk Cd’s are NOT hypnosis, and they are NOT “subliminal” (something which the brain can not hear and record). Self-Talk is played quietly, in the background, usually while you are doing something else or going about your day but it is always audible. Even played in the background, quietly, while you’re doing something else, you hear it, and you know what it says about you. And it’s all good.
The Incredible Story of Self-Talk –
and How It Is Changing Millions of Lives
The concept of recorded “Self-Talk” was pioneered and originated by Dr. Shad Helmstetter in the early 1980s. Based on his early research in the field of behavioral psychology, and his earlier experience in the field of linguistics, (Dr. Helmstetter was a Spanish/English interpreter for the US Navy and the National Security Agency in Cuba, during the US/Russian Cuban Missile Crisis), he introduced the concept of positively reprogramming the brain through listening to repeated Self-Talk messages, listened to out loud – much like the concept of learning a new language.
Self-Talk creates positive, new, mental programs – and it does it exactly the way the brain was designed to become programmed, safely and naturally, but now, by hearing the right, new Self-Talk messages.
Dr. Helmstetter’s breakthrough concept resulted in the first Self-Talk programs ever produced, and was published as a major 36 session Self-Talk library by Nightingale-Conant Corporation, under the title “Winning From Within,” which met with major acceptance and acclaim.
In the following years, during the writing of his seminal and classic bestselling book on Self-Talk, “What to Say When You Talk to Your Self,”followed by “The Self-Talk Solution,” “Choices,” and additional ground-breaking books, Dr. Helmstetter wrote and recorded several hundred individual subject Self-Talk programs.
In 1991, Dr. Helmstetter made the life-changing choice to write and record a comprehensive series of the most essential Self-Talk that could help and improve anyone’s life in any situation. That quest resulted in the creation of “The Lifetime Library of Positive Self-Talk,” the truly life-changing Self-Talk series that covers the eight major areas of daily life – Self-Esteem, Personal Relationships, Taking Control of Your Life, Health and Fitness, Career Achievement, Financial Success, Personal Development, and Quality of Life.
Because he recognized the life-changing importance of every new Self-Talk phrase and message the new library of recorded Self-Talk would contain, he spent more than five years writing, and then recording The Lifetime Library of Positive Self-Talk. When the “Lifetime Library” was completed, almost six years after its inception, it immediately became the most widely sought Self-Talk series ever produced. To this day, “The Lifetime Library of Positive Self-Talk” is one of the highest-selling and most popular personal growth programs ever produced.
During that time and more recently, Dr. Helmstetter also wrote and produced four additional bestselling Self-Talk programs. These include, “Self-Talk for Weight-Loss,” “Personal and Professional Success,” and the two Self-Talk sets written for children and teenagers — “Self-Esteem for Kids,” and “Self-Esteem for Older Kids,” all of which have become bestselling Self-Talk programs in the United States, and internationally.
When asked, recently, if he would write another new or different set of Self-Talk programs, Dr. Helmstetter commented, “In the Lifetime Library, and the other Self-Talk programs that so many people listen to every day, every positive message you need to hear about yourself has probably been recorded, word for word. Every imagined positive “photograph” of your future, your potential, is in the Self-Talk. It is there, right now, waiting for you to discover it for yourself. If you want to get better, listen to the Self-Talk. When you are listening to Self-Talk, you are actually listening to your future.”
Referenced from: Self-Talk Store by Dr. Shad Helmstetter.
