I very much enjoyed running a training session on Monday last for a local mental health peer support group – Depression Xpression, based in Reading and Wokingham in Berkshire – entitled ‘Preventing and Managing Stress’, and I’m enclosing here a copy of one of the slides from the session, looking at the power of self-talk and self-compassion.
We spoke about how ‘self-talk’ can have a direct influence on our feelings and mood, and the message conveyed by the slide reminds us to be kind and self-compassionate when we may have a tendency to give ourselves a hard time in the circumstances described.
Participants provided some great examples of helpful self-talk when we mess up/get things wrong/things don’t go to plan, including:
– ‘What can I learn from this, so I can do better next time?’ and
– ‘It’s happened/these things happen, and you can’t change it’ (so just accept it as one of those things and move on)
How about you? What’s an example of helpful self-talk that you might give yourself in these circumstances?