Silence your negative inner voices

Lately I’ve been thinking about voices. You know the ones – the voices in our heads. Sometimes they serve us well. They speak the truths we need to hear and bring to our minds, pleasant thoughts and memories to encourage us at just the right moment. They shout warnings to steer us away from danger and help us to make wise decisions.

But those same voices have a dark side and from there they speak lies. They hammer discouraging messages that limit our progress and keep us stuck. Their veiled deceptions chip away and eventually erode our continued efforts to live lives true to ourselves, our beliefs and our passions. Sadly, we believe the negative stories our inner voices tell us, even when the stories run cross-grain to who we really are and the consequences of that reality.

I confess that although it doesn’t happen as often as it did before, I still fall victim to the negativity from my inner voices. The words they speak throw a heavy, dark, cold, wet blanket on my most ambitious goals. They keep me in a negative state of mind even when I am knee-deep in some positive circumstance and staring success in the face in one area or another. When I make the mistake and listen, I open the door for their negative messages to engulf me until positive realities loom as negative experiences.

When our inner voices are dripping with the negative stories that make us fearful even in the arena where we are most capable, we must silence them. Each of us can devise our own ways to do this, and I share four below that I continue to use to minimize the effect my negative inner voices have on me.

Reveal your true identity.

If you listen to the negative voices in your head for too long, the real you becomes a distant memory. You may have to dig deep or travel backwards to recover your true identity and resume the life you should be living.

Your most significant self-recovery will be found in your spiritual beliefs. From there you can assess the history of the negative stories in your head and adjust them to ensure that they no longer define you.

Raise your true voice.

Refuse to cower in silence while your negative voices rant and rave and spew all manner of falsehood and limiting statements. Your true voice can talk you into stepping out and walking away from the negativity that is keeping you stuck.

Speak to God. After prayer, you will experience a renewed connection to God, a fresh outlook on life, a sprout in your confidence, and a calm facade that mirrors the peace in your soul.

Speak positively to yourself. Our self-confidence plummets the longer we listen in silence to our negative inner voices. Fight negativity with positive self-talk. Speak aloud your accomplishments, your strengths, your blessings and your gratitude. Your increasing confidence will weaken the hold your negative inner voices have on you.

Speak positively to others. Your self-assured voice of reason, experience and enthusiasm will lift the spirits of other discouraged souls. By all means share your own struggles but always follow with lessons you have learned and advice they can adopt to work their way through their own troubles.

Speak up and speak out. Whether it is for your own benefit or a cause close to your heart, resist those inner voices that insist you have no right to speak. Start with one person at a time and share your conviction with confidence and passion.

Reassess your goals.

Very often our negative voices fool us into believing that a person or a particular circumstance is keeping us stuck. They bombard us with debilitating thoughts that we don’t have what it takes to accomplish some of our goals and achieve our long-held dreams.

Is this your experience? Have your negative inner voices been clouding your vision and casting a dark shadow over a path you want to take? Have they been blinding you to obvious possibilities? Have your inner voices convinced you that personal and profession success can never be yours?

Unless your goals are clear, the way there will be cloudy, uncertain and frightening. Re-affirm your dreams. Re-list the goals you’ve been hoodwinked into postponing. Re-think the steps you need to take to make them a reality.

Rouse your passion.

Time and again I see how the lack of passion for something or some endeavour keeps some people in a negative and unmotivated state. Their negative inner voices reign supreme, sending them deeper and deeper into the dark pit of fear, doubt and feelings of inadequacy.

When the flame of your passion for life, your work or your dream dims, flickers and threatens to go out, stir it up again. Fan its dying flames with a mental picture of your dream realized. Imagine clasping it in your hands and doing the victory dance. Rouse your passion and watch the weakening embers glow again.

Don’t wait until your negative inner voices begin to shout their destructive lies. As soon you hear the faintest whisper, silence them and their negative messages with the tactics I shared above. It doesn’t take long to stabilize your fearful heart with prayer, acknowledge who you are, speak some positive words, take a quick glance at your goals and awaken your enthusiasm for life, your work and your dreams.

Silence your negative inner voices and let positive messages speak out loud and clear.