Week 2 Diagnosis Labelling is a really negative type of self-talk that some of us fall into without even realising we’re doing it. It’s a type of lying, but it’s a lie we tell ourselves. It’s a distortion of reality in a negative way, and it’s something personal. Labelling is a type of overblaming that…
Week 2 Diagnosis You do it all the time. We all do. You’re confronted by a situation and your mind automatically leaps to a conclusion. No evidence. No checking. Just instant judgement. And if you’re feeling anxious, depressed, stressed, or worried? That conclusion you just jumped to isn’t just wrong. It’s damaging. And you’re going…
Week 2 Diagnosis Getting stuck in what you could do is a dangerous habit. A worried mind tends to be indecisive. Anxiety causes indecision. And getting stuck between one thing or another causes uncertainty and more doubt, which is not the healthiest thing for a mind that’s already worried. The trick? Look out for a…
Week 2 Diagnosis Sometimes it’s not about the language you use. Sometimes you’re just lying to yourself. You tell yourself things that, if you stopped for a few moments and actually thought about what you’d just said, you’d know you weren’t telling yourself the truth. But you don’t stop. You don’t think. You just accept…
Week 3 Rewiring I can’t. A simple phrase I hear every single day. And there were times when I used to feel like I was banging my head against a brick wall, especially when confronted with people who can’t do something. Usually, anything that might help their situation or get them out of the problem…
Week 3 Rewiring I’ve spent a lot of time in the previous lessons telling you what’s wrong with your self-talk and the many ways that people get it wrong. All I have is what people tell me. And that’s where I’ve pieced together these patterns, conversation by conversation, over thirty years of clinical practice. Putting…
Week 3 Rewiring Life is rarely black and white. But a lot of the self-talk I hear treats it that way. Perfect or failure. Success or disaster. Good or bad. There’s no middle ground, no shades of grey, no room for anything in between. This is called all-or-nothing thinking, sometimes called black-and-white thinking or splitting….
Week 3 Rewiring This technique does a number of things. It allows you to retrain your mind to look at solutions, not be drowned by problems. The more you use it, the more it works. And the more it shortcuts your brain to jumping straight to solutions. The problem with worries is that you can’t…
Week 3 Rewiring We’ve covered a lot of ground over the last nineteen days. Deletions, distortions, generalisations. Musterbation. Personalising. Labelling. Can’t statements. Rules you didn’t know you’d made for yourself. It’s a lot to take in, and if you’ve been working through this course lesson by lesson, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed by…
Week 3 Rewiring Everybody has a story about themselves. A narrative that runs underneath the day-to-day self-talk, explaining who you are and why you do what you do. Most of the time, you’re not even aware you’re telling it. It’s just there, running quietly in the background, colouring everything. I want to tell you about…