Communication Can Change Your Thinking
Did you realize that your communication can change your thinking? One of the biggest factors for how we think is our communication; specifically, our communication with ourselves.
If you haven’t noticed yet, take a little survey of how often you communicate with yourself throughout your day. If you’re like most people, you have a constant running dialogue — a voice that speaks inside your head throughout the day that comments on what other drivers are doing when you’re in traffic, what your friends were thinking when they posted that picture to social media, and what your life is like at any particular moment.
The truth is, we communicate with ourselves more than anyone else and just like any dialogue, our inner dialogue can be either constructive or destructive — it can change your thinking both for the good and for the bad.
Communication Breakdown
Sometimes, negative thoughts are a result of certain underlying brain processes and other times they relate to our communication. If you’ve ever gotten into an argument with someone, you can understand how quickly communication can break down and become destructive.
Maybe you’ve been in a relationship and it seems like every conversation turns into an argument. Regardless of the topic of the conversation, you and your partner always seem to find a way to argue. For many people, this can lead to frustration, anger, and ultimately it can destroy the relationship. This happens as a result of recurring communication patterns in our conversations — URP’s or Unwanted Repetitive Patterns.
Unwanted Repetitive Patterns
A URP takes place when one person says something to another person, the other person gets defensive and responds in a habitually bad way that causes the first person to get defensive and respond back and so on until the situation becomes an argument.
Many times in these types of conversations, our brains operate on autopilot and we are unaware of what is being said to us or what we are saying in return and how our messages might be interpreted by the other person. These URP’s are habitual, destructive, and difficult to break.
Of course, the first step to conquering them and improving our communication and our relationships is to be aware of them and when they are taking place in our conversations so that we can intervene and change the conversation. If you change the conversation, you can change the outcome.
Destructive Communication
This type of situation happens in our intrapersonal conversations as well. Intrapersonal communication is the dialogue that we each have with ourselves every day.
This type of communication helps to define our purpose, determine our confidence, and develop our perspectives of ourselves and the world around us. Unfortunately, these mental constructs have many times been formed by what people from our past (teachers, parents, friends, etc.) have said about us.
Those labels stick and provide the lens through which we see ourselves. Those labels along with destructive patterns of intrapersonal communication structure our internal dialogues and define our self-perception.
Communicating With Yourself Better
Just like with URP’s in our interpersonal dialogue, the first step to correcting this problem and changing our thinking patterns requires an awareness of these patterns in our internal dialogue — recognizing how we communicate with ourselves and then taking intentional action to communicate with ourselves in a more constructive way.
What we say to ourselves and how we say it matters. If you find yourself speaking destructive messages to yourself or if you find yourself speaking words that do not build you up and are not constructive, take a step back.
Examine your internal dialogues and see if you might find some habitual patterns in how you talk to yourself.
Self-awareness requires that we see those patterns for what they are, that we recognize their effects, and that we work to intentionally change what we say to ourselves. Changing your internal messaging can change your thinking and can transform your life.
If you change the conversation, you can change the outcome.
Go Deeper
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