High-Performance Self-Talk Boosts Your Career Success

Vijay Garg 

 

The silent conversations you have with yourself can make or break your career success, and experts have discovered the self-talk that leads to high career success. Our careers are shaped from the inside out. Negative self-talk can colonize our hearts and dwarf career advancement if we allow it to run roughshod over our professional lives. Or it can lift us to unlimited career heights.

 

We have two versions of self-talk. One is lightning-fast and spontaneous—emanating from the reflexive part of the brain known as the emotional brain. This hard-wired, survival voice tends to be critical and negative and can lead to anxiety, depression, self-doubt and self-sabotage.

 

The second inner voice emanates from the prefrontal cortex or thinking brain which involves higher levels of reflective, intentional and positive thought. This rational voice is important for self-regulation. It is a learned skill that activates your “thinking brain,” mitigating the emotional brain’s dysfunctional mental states and unlocking healthier emotions such as calm, confidence, clarity and happiness—all of which promote career success.

 

High-Performance Self-Talk And Self-Regulation

Career success starts with exercising level headedness, self-control, inner calm and self-compassion at an individual level. And job engagement, performance and satisfaction continue to build over the trajectory of our careers as we widen our resilient zones. The neuroscience of self-talk shows that we can use our inner voice to

 

 

reduce our stress level,

improve our response to setbacks and

elevate performance levels in our careers.

The emotionally reactive monologue running in our heads might tell us we’ll fail if we get outside our comfort zone, eviscerate us for eating another slice of pizza or remind us how inept our presentation was. You can blame your impulsive, self-immersed, non-thinking emotional brain for throwing your positive, thinking brain offline. Once your reflective, objective thinking brain comes back on line, you’re clearheaded and can see a bigger picture of evidence to the contrary.

 

Most people have an inner monologue running through their head at all times. The stronger that inner voice, the better you are at certain tasks. According to a new study in Scientific American, people with stronger inner voices perform better at psychological tasks that measure verbal memory, among other things, than those with weaker inner voices.

 

 

The research of professor Ethan Kross, psychologist at the University of Michigan, breaks down the science of self-talk even further. He has discovered that self-talk is essential for self-regulation and executive functioning, plus it’s a way to disable stress before and after a challenging event when we often ruminate about a performance at work.

 

Kross gave participants five minutes to prepare a speech. Half were told to use only the first person pronoun “I” to refer to themselves while the other half were told to use their names. The pronoun group had greater anxiety with such comments as, “How can I possibly prepare a speech in five minutes,” while the name group had less anxiety and expressed confidence using self-talk such as, “Bryan, you can do this.” The name group was also rated higher in performance by independent evaluators and less likely to ruminate after the speech.

 

Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems Therapy, reports similar clinical findings. He explains that when you use the first person pronoun in your self-talk, the emotion—anxiety, worry or frustration—blends with you, and when you “become that emotion,” it can disable your actions. In other words, you get emotionally hijacked and lose your objectivity in the moment. But when you acknowledge the emotional part of you with friendly self-talk and allow it to be there, you separate from the emotion and have more self-regulation.

 

Scientists at the University of Toronto report that using your calm, inner voice while performing tasks gives you self-control and prevents the reflexive emotional self-talk from making impulsive decisions that lead to errors and mistakes. The findings also show that without being able to verbalize messages to yourself, it’s difficult to employ the same amount of self-control as when you can talk yourself through the process.

 

 

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For example, when you use the first-person pronoun “I” in your self-talk, you continue to identify with the negative, emotional voice. But when you use third-party language like you, he or she, it neutralizes the rumination and helps you gain impulse control, especially during climates of threat, uncertainty and unrest like we live and work in today.

 

A study at Michigan State University found that brain scans of people using third person self-talk (such as you, he or she) while watching disturbing images (such as a man holding a gun to their heads) were better at regulating their emotional distress, and their upset decreased when they referred to themselves in the third person. Additional research shows that distanced self-talk gives dieters, compared to non-dieters, a self-control strategy that encourages healthier eating, plus non-dieters make healthier food choices using the same self-control strategy.

 

This simple act of talking to yourself in the third person, much as you talk to others, helps with self-control. It requires no more mental effort than first-person self-talk, and the benefits of calm, clarity and confidence are well worth the effort.