Reprogramming the Negative Self Talk to Self-Love

Our body serves as a mirror into the self. It tells the whole story, even when we cannot, or when we don’t understand the meaning behind our decisions. This is why changing your embodiment powerfully impacts how you live life. To create meaningful change, we need to understand our emotional system, and how to work with it – not against it. Each body has its own pace of healing and learning. We can’t force it. If we push forcefully on a body to learn or change, it will lock up by tightening up or going numb. It requires our empathy – the root of our self-love, and being gentle with ourselves. For any change to stick over time, we also need to work on our cognitive side. If not, the somatics can easily regress back. 


What we hold in our minds is very powerful and impacts the somatic.

The inner critic is an ingrained voice that you have internalized over the years from criticism you’ve heard from your surroundings and caregivers. It could be a parent, kids in school, a teacher, or more. As children, we want to be loved, accepted and have a sense of belonging. As a result, we assume that what we’ve been told by the people we love, or the group we want to belong to, is the absolute truth and we adopt it, even when it’s not, so we can gain the love we desire. 

A parent who abandoned you might have made you feel that you will never be worthy of love. Bullying in school might have taught you that vulnerability is a dangerous thing. A parent making fun of the size of your nose might have made you feel like you are not enough. A popular group in school might have made you feel ugly when in fact you were gorgeous. These experiences turn into limiting beliefs and somatic blocks that limit what is possible for you in life and impact the results in business, love, relationships, and more. By reprogramming the limiting beliefs inside us, we can free ourselves from the harmful beliefs so we may go after what we really want while feeling our own self-worth and self-love. 

You can reprogram negative sentences you tell yourself, such as, ”I am not good enough,” “I am fat,” “I’ll never be loved,” or whatever is the “truth” you internalized as a child. You can reprogram the negative self-talk by creating an inspiring sentence to counterbalance it. If you are always practicing that you’ll never have love, then your  new sentence might be, “I am totally lovable!” It needs to be magnificent and really reverse the core of what you feel. 

Even if at first you don’t believe it. Negative thoughts arising are very common, especially among female change-makers, After years, even decades, of repeating negative statements to yourself, it will take some time to reprogram new positive affirmations. Creating a powerful new habit takes time, patience, and dedication with consistency. Have patience. You are a work in progress.

Here’s one simple practice that I use with my executive clients to cultivate their self-love. If you’ll practice this daily for a month, you’ll notice a big shift in your confidence.

Every morning and every night, while brushing your teeth, look at yourself in the mirror and find something that you love about yourself – internal or external. i.e. I love my hair, I love my courage, I love my smile. Now go deeper and describe how it makes you feel. i.e. I love my hair because it flows so nicely and makes me feel sexy. Or, I love my authenticity because it connects me to others and makes me feel good about who I am. Get into the beautiful details of how what you love about yourself makes you feel. The golden rule is, there are no BUTs and no criticism allowed, only what you love about yourself. Then just be with it and breathe into it. Let it sink in. It might feel fake at the beginning as you’ll try to come up with what you love because you actually believe this “truth” about yourself. With practice, you’ll eventually notice how your new powerful mantras change the way you experience yourself at the core.

Don’t forget to journal this experience and the insights you gain. Journaling helps us become more aware of the process and notice over time the change. Keep at it. It takes constant work at the beginning to reprogram negative self-talk until the new habit becomes second nature.