Stop beating yourself up

- What's the biggest barrier to creating the self-confidence and mental toughness you need to succeed, you? 70% of our mental chatter is negative, often about reliving things gone wrong. But you can lift yourself up versus beat yourself down with five strategies called the High Five. First, personify your inner critic. We all have one, that inner voice, a nasty criticizer that bullies you into self-doubt. Imagine yours as a real being. What does it look like, sound like? What's its name? For example, my inner critic is a snarling dragon with a condescending tone I've named Vulgar. The point is personifying your inner critic makes it external to you, something looking in and trying to limit you. Thus, you can question your critic's input and create distance from it to gain perspective. Next, label the underlying emotion. Notice and examine your negative thoughts. Ask what's the emotion behind this thought? Suddenly, "I blew that presentation, I'm a failure" is really "I'm afraid I'm not good enough, and I'm embarrassed by what people must think." By naming the emotion, you make the negative thought concrete and narrower in scope. You can then address that specific emotion with reason and perspective. Note, if the emotion you are experiencing is shame, reconsider because shame is the most toxic emotion. With shame, instead of feeling bad about your actions, which is guilt, or your efforts, which is regret, shame makes you feel bad about who you are. It tricks you into forgetting that we're all imperfect in that mistakes are how we learn. Moving on, talk to yourself like a friend in need. Imagine a friend who, needing support, tells you about a terrible meeting they had with their boss. Afterward, would you say, "I've heard you and concluded that you're a complete loser?" No, of course you wouldn't talk to your friend that way. So why would you talk to yourself that way? Up next, replace should with could. So much negative inner dialogue is about feeling sorry for yourself and replaying what you should have done or what should have happened. "I should have done this instead. I should have never taken that risk," you tell yourself. But it's so much more empowering and productive to stop the shoulds and focus on coulds. What could I do better next time? What could happen if I did this next time? Could versus should, a small difference in letters, a big difference in mental strength. Finally, think of mistakes as a science experiment. View your miscues as part of trial and error, a science experiment of life you're conducting, working to get the formula right. In this way, you'll more easily accept your mistakes and see failures as learning opportunities. When something goes wrong, you could detach from it versus feeling like a victim, seeing the experience like a scientific observer, there to record it in your notebook, certain not to repeat it, curious about what you'll discover in the next experiment. So give yourself a high five and the high five strategies to stop beating yourself up.