How negative internal dialogue undermines your ability to decide, commit, and act—and what to do about it.
“Talk to yourself like someone you love.”
— Brené Brown
“Your thoughts become words. Your words become actions. Your actions become habits.”
— Unknown
“When I say my goal for you is for you to become the dominant force in your life, I am being very serious.”
— Dr. Wayne Scott Anderson
Sh&t Talk is that insidious habit of creating negative stories about yourself and telling them to yourself, over and over again, and committing them to memory and belief. These stories about yourself damage your ability to work through our process of deciding, committing, and taking amazing action to accomplish our goals and improve our lives.
Why? Because this self-debasement or self-degradation becomes a key barrier to your actually making a deep decision. No decision means no commitment and definitely no action toward self-betterment or goal achievement.
How can you decide, commit, or act if you don’t believe in yourself and your abilities? Negative self-talk does this.
Talking to yourself this way harbors deep insecurity about your abilities. Doubt your abilities, and you don’t fire out and confront the future with the commitment needed from you at all times. It gives you permission to put in reduced effort and say, “Well, I tried.” But did you? Or did you just give up?
Ultimately, such negative self-talk metastasizes regardless of the topic, spills over into other areas of life, and prevents us from developing a healthy mindset.
The good news is this: the voice in your head is not your identity—it’s a pattern you’ve developed to avoid the possibility that you might actually be greater than you perceive. Patterns can be interrupted— but only after you decide and commit to doing so. It takes real discipline to accomplish this, especially if your negative self-talk is a lifelong comfort zone.
You don’t need to silence negative self-talk overnight. You simply need to acknowledge it, challenge it, and replace it with internal encouragement that moves you forward and keeps you from holding yourself back.
This is where real change begins.
When you deliberately modify the conversation, you restore your ability to decide with clarity, commit without hesitation, and act with consistency.
A healthy mindset isn’t blind optimism. It’s choosing language that supports effort, growth, and follow-through—especially when things aren’t perfect.
And once that internal dialogue shifts, momentum becomes possible again.
Talk to yourself like someone you’re responsible for helping. Remember, they are your best client.