Do you want to be happy in your life?  Not the constant blissed out happiness of flower children, but genuine happiness on a day to day basis.  Happiness is only a thought away. 

What do I mean by that? One of the key indicators of how happy you feel is how optimistic you are and one of the causes of optimism is how you talk to yourself. In a previous issue, we talked about your internal guidance system and touched on self talk.  This month I would like to explore this concept a bit further.

When you make a mistake - do you beat up on yourself?  Do you call yourself names like "stupid", "failure" or "idiot".  Do you "should" all over yourself, "I should be doing this" or "I shouldn't be doing that".  When we were born, we did not have these negative critics in our head.  As we grew, we adopted them into ourselves from our parents, teachers and other kids. 

Most of us learnt the art of criticism really well - after all we didn't want to get above ourselves did we? In fact many of us learnt the lessons so well, that we outdid the originators of the criticism.  Whatever they said, we thought it twice as strong and twice as fast.  Sort of like if mum was going to send us to our room for 5 minutes time out for something we had done, however we had already sent ourselves to our rooms and decided to lock ourselves in for a whole year, not eat for a week and remove the TV for good.

So what can you do about it?  Martin Seligman in his groundbreaking book "Learned Optimism" gives some simple tools to turn around your thoughts.

• Listen to your self-talk.  When do you do it most? What do you say to yourself? Would you speak to your small children the same way that you talk to yourself? Are your "shoulds" realistic measures of you or are they setting unrealistic benchmarks for your behaviour?
• Think about some times when your behaviour contradicted the self talk (eg: if you think you are a bad mum, then find some examples of when you were a good mum).
• Find some different explanations for the situation or event.  This is not about justification, it is about finding different possibilities.  (eg: It could be that the person that yelled at you for something you did was having a bad day and their anger really had nothing to do with you)
• Distract yourself from going over and over the bad thoughts.  Tie your worries onto a worry tree or a into a worry basket and come back to them later if you really have to.  Find other "lighter" thoughts to think about. Listen to music