How to Change Your Life and Heal Your Inner Critic Through Positive Psychology: Australian Brain Whisperer Reveals

VICTORIA, Australia October 2014 – The brain is the most complex, multi-layered organ in the human body. At a medical and scientific level, understanding the human brain is one of the most promising challenges facing the 21st century. The most recent research reveals that the human brain delivers the entire human experience of reality to a person, allowing feelings of positivity, negativity or indifference based in part on self-talk. Janette, do you have a website to link this scientific research to?*

Self-talk is the constant mental monologue of a person during most of his or her waking hours, and consists of various thoughts with varying degree of emotion. It can trigger painful emotions – anxiety, anger, sadness and fear – without any direct relation to a person’s immediate circumstances. For example, a person might feel anxious about money, even with plenty of food in the house, the bills paid and payday on the horizon.

The thoughts that have the most impact on a person’s psychological well-being are the ones that recur. Any thought that is repeated often enough becomes a belief, and the latest brain science shows that a person’s brain generally only allows him or her to see and experience evidence to support those beliefs – and nothing else. In other words, self-talk can do more than merely create bad feelings; it can make a person cognitively blind to opportunities for growth, love and happiness.**

Australian Brain Whisperer and founder of Sweet Relief Coaching, Janette Dalgliesh considers human self-talk to be either one of two things: helpful or unhelpful. “Helpful self-talk include thoughts like ‘I’m a great cook!’ or ‘I love reading!’ or ‘I’ve always been a quick learner’. Helpful self-talk feels good and can change your life for the better, so we want more of that!” says Janette. “Unhelpful self-talk – often called gremlin thoughts by life coaches – can be critical, fearful, self-blaming, despairing or a combination of them all. Unhelpful self-talk feels horrible. It’s the unhelpful self-talk that we want to change because it is a barrier to self-love and self-acceptance.” www.sweetreliefcoaching.com

Author of ‘Heal Your Inner Critic’, a free PDF-based eBook on how to heal the critical voices of self-doubt, Janette also offers positive psychology-based private coaching designed to help clients embrace their power to create what they want and to become masterful deliberate creators.

“When we’re little, we have all kinds of thoughts based on what we experience and what we hear from the adults around us. If they’re repeated often enough, those thoughts become beliefs. Some of those beliefs tell us that the world is risky and our gremlin thoughts come into existence to minimise that risk,” says Janette.

“One of the reasons people struggle to change those gremlin thoughts is that they don’t appreciate them. They don’t acknowledge that once upon a time, those thoughts were there to help and protect them. But those thoughts aren’t a part of us; they never were. It’s time to let them know we’ve outgrown them.”

Janette outlines three steps to releasing gremlin thoughts:

1. Awareness: Before dealing with the thought, recognise that it’s there. Whenever a person feels fear or doubt about something he or she wants, there is a good chance it’s a gremlin thought. Remember the gremlin feels it’s doing a good job of protection, so it’s important to be gentle. Let the gremlin float into focus, and then ask the questions, “What is it saying? What does it believe? What is it protecting me from?”. There are no right or wrong answers; it’s just a little like dealing with a terrified three-year-old. She won’t stop screaming until she has been heard.
2. Comfort: Comfort the gremlin thought, just like you would soothe that frightened three-year-old. Thank it for protecting and safeguarding, and honour the job it has been doing for years. Respect the hard work and good intentions of the gremlin thought; but be clear that its advice will no longer be needed.
3. Redirect: This step should not be missed. To avoid returning to the old way, imagine giving the gremlin a new task to do, like writing a song, making a sandwich or creating a new flavour of ice cream! Keep it light and easy, and engage some positive psychology thoughts, like showing appreciation, playfulness or demonstrating mindful sensory pleasure.

Contact Information

Janette Dalgliesh

The Sweet Relief Coach

Sweet Relief Coaching

(61) 0404 595 601

janette@sweetreliefcoaching.com