If you are serious about learning how to gain confidence, then you need to be aware of your “self talk”. What is “self talk”? It’s simply the things you say to yourself every day.

Most of us have thousands of thoughts per day. Many of these thoughts are neutral, like “I should pick up the dry-cleaning today” and “What shall I have for lunch?” But a proportion of these thoughts are directed towards yourself. They are evaluations and comments that you make about yourself and your abilities. We call this “self talk”.

People with low self-esteem are usually in the habit of telling themselves negative things.

“I can’t do it”
“I am no good”
“I’m such an idiot”

These negative thoughts create feelings of low confidence. They make you feel bad and often, sadly, you’re not even aware that you’re doing it.

If you want to learn how to gain confidence, the key is to pay more attention to your self talk. You need to be aware of all the negative thoughts that are voiced through self talk. If you are saying things like “I’m such an idiot” to yourself on a regular basis, then this needs to stop right now! The fact is negative self talk can erode your belief in yourself and in cases when you say things like “I can’t deal with this” it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The first step to changing these automatic negative thoughts is to be aware that you are actually saying them. Pay attention to the things you say to yourself. Write down your thoughts if that helps you to focus better. Take note of some of the regular things that you say to yourself. You might be surprised at what you find.

Once you have discovered any negative thoughts, the second step is to replace these with more empowering alternatives. Question some of the things that you say to yourself. Are they real? Or are they just habitual reactions to frustrations? If you can’t find your keys does that really make you an idiot?

When you say you can’t “handle this” is this true. If you look back in your life, you have probably handled many difficult situations. Challenge the blanket statements that you habitually make that have no real grounding in reality. They are not true. You can replace “I can’t handle this” with other more empowering alternatives like “I can handle this”, “I’ve handled worse” or the milder “I can probably handle this”. The last alternative shows that you don’t have to go to Pollyanna thinking to combat negative self talk. All you really need to do is adopt a more realistic view of your life situations.

Write down a list of positive affirmations that replace the previous negative thoughts that you used to respond with. Over several days, direct all your focus and effort towards replacing the negative self talk with your new positive affirmations. This requires vigilance and dedication, but will really pay off in the long term.

Confident people have positive self talk. They speak to themselves in positive encouraging ways. If you want to learn how to gain confidence, you need to banish negative thoughts and focus on more empowering self talk.

Author Bio: If you want to learn how to gain confidence, you need to eliminate negative self-talk. Click Here to learn how to do this with the FREE Ebook: The 10 Minute Confidence Boost. Eednak Nagum is a writer at the confidence website: How to Gain Confidence,

Category: Self Help
Keywords: Self Talk, gain confidence, how to gain confidence