“Don’t believe everything you think.” – Allan Lokos

Do you ever have days at work or in the gym where you feel like a superhuman and can excel/do anything thrown at you? What about days where you just feel like a failure and incompetent and then ask yourself, “Why are you doing this?” Unfortunately, you are your own worst critic because we have thoughts every day that we believe 100% and let them dictate what we can and can’t do. Fortunately, that’s not true because our thoughts are not always correct. On average, a person has about 60,000 thoughts a day – a majority of them are repeats and a big chunk of them are negative thoughts. Can you imagine if we believed and acted on every single one of our thoughts that we have each day? There are some we can just have and let go, but then there are some that we just get so stuck ruminating on how to get rid of the thought or control it, leading us to view ourselves in a negative way.

So how do we control our negative self-talk? We don’t. We actually can’t control our thoughts (and emotions), but we can change the way we react to them by bringing awareness to these thoughts and challenging them. By doing this, we can also uncover the positive thoughts that we do have each day that are masked by our negative thoughts. Sometimes our negative thoughts get the best of us while we’re at work, at the gym, in social settings, etc., because our brains are actually wired to pay more attention to the negative vs. the positive. These thoughts get us into a stuck and unmotivated place at times preventing us to keep up with all of our work and life tasks throwing our balance off, but if we just notice our thoughts and practice not allowing all of them to dictate what we can and can’t do, we can create a healthier and more effective mindset to apply to any challenges we face in life.