DAY 37: "Self-Talk = Reality"

ENGAGING THOUGHT

It is no secret to any of us that our words can have a tremendous impact.  Wars can be started or averted depending upon the construction of a single sentence.  Words have the power to attract and to repel; to make a young girl swoon in romantic imaginings or to rally a young man to volunteer his life for a cause.  From childhood on we've been instructed to choose carefully our words when we speak to another.  How many times, though, did someone instruct you to choose carefully the words you spoke to yourself?

Every one of us has the equivalent of an internal tape-recorder that plays certain thought or phrases over and over inside our minds.  These are the things we tell ourselves - often as we perform a task or set out to accomplish something.  Does your self-talk follow a negative path?  "Don't make a mess of things!"  "Careful, you always get into trouble like this!"  "You're not going to make this work."  Maybe you are one who encourages themselves?  "You can do this!"  "This should be interesting."  "Not a problem, I'll figure it out."

Whatever it may sound like inside your head - that is the realty you are creating for yourself.  We've already talked a bit about the phenomena of the self-fulfilling prophecy (Day 12), and the importance of communicating such that we are understood (Days 23, 24 & 25) - but there is more going on than just those elements of communication.  Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, both professors of Sociology, write in The Social Construction of Reality,

 "I encounter language as a facticity external to myself and it is coercive in its effect on me.  Language forces me into its patterns."  

That's really just their fancy way of saying that our reality is shaped by the words we use.  Placed into the context of self-talk it becomes this: what we say to ourselves becomes the reality we believe about ourselves, and eventually becomes our actual reality.

In the pursuit of God's DREAM for your life you'll have many occasions to hold conversations with yourself - some of them over and over and over.  Like it or not, the statements you make to yourself reveal what you believe about yourself.  With that said, however, I truly believe that you have the ability to retrain yourself to speak differently - to record different messages on your internal voice recorder.  Choosing to speak life and encouragement to yourself pays off as it reconstructs your own perceptions and your behaviors - eventually becoming your reality.

"Death and life are in the power of the tongue, And those who love it will eat its fruit."   - Proverbs 18.21

ACTION STEP

Today's ACTION STEP will require you to be brutally honest with yourself.

Make a list of the things you "say" to yourself most frequently.  Good, bad, or ugly - put them down in a list.  When you are finished, take a good hard look at each of the things you wrote and ask the question: Do I want this to be a defining reality of my life?

For each "no" answer write these words after it: "I no longer believe this about myself."

For each "yes" answer write these words after it: "I know this to be true of myself."

Tomorrow we'll plan for those inevitable moments in the pursuit when the pressure seems too much.