You Cannot Ignore This Simple Shift in Self-Talk Once You Know It
How the questions you ask yourself will alter your perception of the world.
For the first 21 years of my life, I would check off many of the boxes that conventional wisdom would call “successful.” I excelled at university and played on an Ivy League varsity baseball team. I went on to graduate with my “golden ticket” for a lifetime of high-paying jobs and nothing but bright horizons ahead.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, I spent the next 9 years hovering the legal poverty line while my peers went on to high-paying Wall Street careers for Ivy League graduates. I felt like an enigma.
With the help of hindsight and countless hours of reflection, I’ve boiled this seemingly “lost decade” to a single, deep-rooted question that I would ask myself nearly every day for my first 30 years on our planet. Within 3 months of discovering this shift and having the “aha” moment I was given an unprompted 13% raise at my job, received a $10k bonus that was highly dependent on the work I did in that time frame.
After reading this article, you’ll understand a simple way to rephrase your internal self-talk and shift the way you perceive the world.
“Why me?”
You’ve likely learned that hard work pays off and it will always beat talent (if that talent doesn’t work hard too). Put in the time. Keep your head down. Do what is asked of you. Do all of these things and eventually, you will get rewarded for your performance.
Until it doesn’t.
I worked really hard. I put in the time. But why wasn’t I getting “the results”?
Growing up, the question “Why me?” developed a victim mindset in my subconscious. As a left-handed child, you quickly learn how much of the world feels backward. There is even a store in Detroit, Michigan devoted to the lefties of the world. “Why me?” was the title of a poem my mother purchased for me that devoted its poetic language towards explaining just how special being a lefty should feel. The problem was not in the words of the poem and all of the beautiful metaphors, rhymes, and alliteration it contained. Instead, the problem with this question is how it leads you to believe your internal state is dependent on the external world. It gives too much control to your innate, fear-driven amygdala and does not provide enough direction for the rest of your mind to provide the answers you really want.
Research into how our minds work has revealed that our subconscious minds are constantly active and using resources to make sense of the world around us. As you engage with the world, experience life, and create memories around those experiences, your mind stores that information for retrieval later on.
When someone asks you a question, your mind sifts through your memories to find the answer to that question. When you ask yourself a question, your mind does the same thing and searches for an answer to that question. Understanding this fundamental truth about your mind has profound implications for your self-talk.
Responding to life events with the internal question “why me?” leaves your subconscious mind to generate vague answers. Your mind has evolved to anticipate worst-case scenarios in order to survive. For myself, it was often answered with self-doubt about who I was or what I was good at. I would chalk up my success to luck or my failures to being unworthy.
How to Move From Victim to Empowered
Instead, you want to ask yourself more specific questions and use more empowering language. Let’s take a look at some examples for both positive and negative scenarios:
Positive
- Examples: you achieve your goal, you are rewarded for your efforts, you get a raise, etc
- Why am I so focused?
- Why do I always achieve my goals?
- Why do money and abundance flow so freely to me?
Negative
- Examples: you are faced with an unexpected challenge, you get fired, you do not reach a goal
- Why am I so resilient?
- Why does the right opportunity to grow always present itself?
- Why am I able to handle challenges with perseverance and confidence?
Infusing your self-talk with empowering language leads your subconscious to come up with empowering answers. Empowering answers that arise from your subconscious take the form of empowering self-talk. Empowering self-talk elevates your state of mind and events in your life start to unfold in a way that supports this. Then, when you learn to respond to these events with more empowering questions, the cycle continues and before you know it, your life will be filled with the evidence you need to convince yourself of the empowered individual you deserve to be.
Over the next 1.5 years, I have embodied a new sense of self-worth and have increased my base salary post-raise by another 23.5% (not including the potential 15% bonus compensation I can earn on top of that new salary). Now these figures are definitely atypical and perhaps I really am that lucky (I prefer to ask myself why I’m so deserving of the requisite pay for my skills) but experience and life skills can have a compound interest effect on your success.
Can I guarantee this for you? Of course not. Some of this depends on your career and your industry. These are only the more easily measurable financial results of this mindset shift. The more qualitative and harder to define effects of this process are really for you to experience for yourself. What I can guarantee is that the more empowering questions you ask yourself the more you will begin to shift the way your subconscious mind presents the world and your life to your conscious mind.
Key Takeaways
- The questions you ask yourself will be answered by how your subconscious interprets the world around you.
- When it comes to self-talk, there may not be stupid questions, but there are always questions that can negatively influence the way your life unfolds.
- Reshaping your self-talk around the concept of empowering questions will shift your life towards the reality you want
- Empowering questions take the form of: “Why do I always {insert empowering statements}?” Remember, you always have the choice to use empowered language over victimized language.
- Ask yourself your own empowering questions each morning while brushing your teeth and observe the difference in your life over the following days and weeks.
If you enjoy learning how to leverage subtle shifts in your knowledge for bold changes in your life, sign up for my newsletter. You’ll get the perspective of an English major turned Engineer for a healthy balance of science and practical experience.
