Ways that Entrepreneurs

Can Silence Negative Self-

Talk
In this article, WNY Holdings discusses five strategies to help silence your inner critic and
overcome the doubts and fears that stand in your way.
Everyone struggles with self-doubt and fear from time to time,
and entrepreneurs experience these emotions more frequently than
others. In moments of doubt, your instinct may be to put yourself
down or question your ability to succeed. It’s important to have an
effective strategy to combat this negative self-talk and get yourself
back on track. In this article, WNY Holdings discusses five
strategies to help silence your inner critic and overcome the doubts
and fears that stand in your way.
 1. Maintain Awareness of
Your Thoughts
We spend all day every day with ourselves and it can be
easy to become unaware of the messages and signals our
brains send us continuously. Your brain often has
motivations and desires that differ greatly from our daily
tasks and goals. Our brains naturally want to conserve
energy, to avoid stress, and to sometimes be outright lazy.
These feelings are normal and part of our evolved
defense mechanisms. Be aware of what your brain is
telling you, as the narrative might be loaded with
exaggerations and rationalizations. Maintaining awareness
of your inner dialogue is key to maintaining control of
your actions and emotions.
2. Let Go Of Mistakes and
Don’t Mentally Replay Bad
Experiences
Entrepreneurs have a typically critical view of their own
performances and decisions that do not meet expectations.
Learn to think like a winning coach — deal with mistakes,
understand them, and then move on. We can be tempted to
replay the mental movie of every bad experience we have. This
experience almost never leads to positive feelings or improved
future performance. Beating yourself up is not useful for
learning or correcting problems. If you are feeling
overwhelmed with negative thoughts about past decisions,
move your mind towards new thinking and consider some
physical activity to direct your attention away from lingering
negative mental images.
3. Look At Your To-Do List
and Tackle the Very Next
Task
Your inner critic has all sorts of ways of distracting you from your mission,
and often your brain is happy to interrupt or stop daily work with thoughts
of future responsibilities. Instead of obsessing oversteps and tasks that are
weeks or months down the road, look at what needs to be done today —
right now. If you can get your mind and body moving forward on a job that
needs to be done today, your inner dialogue will move away from speculation
and stress about things that may or may not happen down the road and will
get focused on what is happening in the here and now.
4. Don’t Hold Yourself to
Impossible Standards
Learn not to compare yourself to others or even
worse, imaginary standards of perfection. If every
basketball player demanded that every practice and
game meet or exceed the level of performance of
Michael Jordan at his best, the continual failure to
meet such a standard will often lead to negative
thoughts and doubts. Understand your true strengths
and weaknesses and judge your daily performance on
how you improve on yourself and not against some
unrealistic perfect ideal.
5. Don’t Let Fear of Failure
Paralyze You
Many times it seems that all we can think about is what will happen if we fail
at some task or upcoming performance. Your inner critic can be incredibly
harsh when it comes to presenting a possible failure as a catastrophic
experience. We are evolved, after all, to avoid danger and our minds are very
good at making almost everything seem dangerous. If you are experiencing
fear or doubt about an upcoming event, think rationally and critically about
what the worst outcome could be — it is almost never the end of the world
or anything that anyone will actually remember very much after the fact.
Don’t let worry and stress unnecessarily affect your confidence and courage
to do the things you are trained to do.