HOW TO NIP NEGATIVE THOUGHTS IN THE BUD

Everyone has negative thoughts. If you’re human you can’t help it. Even the most positive and inspirational people you know have the similar kind of negative thoughts that you have from time to time. Believe it or not they also make harsh unconscious judgements about people, things and events too! They criticise and self deprecate – but that doesn’t stop them being generally positive and inspirational, does it?

The truth about what goes on in our heads is that we don’t always get to choose the types of thoughts that take place. But we DO get to choose which of those thoughts we pay attention to and do something with.

The majority of the dialogue, imagery, ideas and scenarios that plays out in your thinking is just the stream of background noise your unconscious mind makes as it does its job of making sense of the world around you. It is absolutely harmless. All the time you just leave it be and let it get on with what ever it wants to think about (in which ever way it wants to think about it) there can be no reason for you to get disturbed. It is only when you inject life into a thought and give it wings - when you consciously ‘pick-up’ on innocent background negativity and bring it to the fore by consciously making it louder and potent to your senses - that things start to get a bit messy.

Here’s the thing:

The problem is not that you have the negative thought; the problem is that you take it seriously, like it actually means something.

One of the fundamental keys to having a more positive experience in any area of your life is to stop thinking your thoughts are telling you the truth, or even that they are telling you what you actually believe, for that matter!!!

This is my really simple model to NIP your consciously negative thoughts in the bud.

NIP stands for: Notice – Interrupt – Positive

This is how it works:

NOTICE - The first step is to catch yourself in the act of talking negatively with your internal voice. The very moment you realise you are ‘doing it again’ you can instantly move on to the next step.

INTERRUPT – This means doing or saying something deliberately different in your mind to break the flow of the negative thought. I’ve found one of the best ways to do this is to shout “STOP” in a forceful tone of voice (remember this is using your internal voice – you could get some rather strange looks otherwise!!). Another great way is to imagine you have a volume dial for your internal dialogue and hear the voice quieten all the way down to silence as you turn it.

POSTIVE – Once you’ve interrupted the negative voice you’ll notice there is a moment of silence. Use this space to generate choices for how you could view the thing you were thinking about in a positive way.

Example:

“I really don’t want to give that presentation tomorrow…. It’s taking up so much of my time and I’ve got other more important things to do…. And I’m rubbish at presentations anyway….. I’m going to make a real hash of it, I know it…. My boss’s boss is going to be there…. Everyone will think I don’t know what I’m talking about…………” (Notice)

“STOP!!!………..” (Interrupt)

“OK. Let me just imagine for a moment that the presentation goes perfectly…. Right, there I am standing confidently and talking clearly, making great eye contact. Just relax…. It feels a whole lot better when I visualise the positive and engaged looks on their faces… This could actually be quite a good opportunity for me to raise my profile…..” (Positive)

Try it out. Have fun playing around with that voice in your head, after all it IS yours and you can do what you want with it!!