I hope I’m not alone in having my external language – you know, how you speak to friends and family, the nice, censored version of stuff, the one that filters the appropriateness of what you’re saying most of the time to the situation you’re in, so you don’t start screeching at the little old lady in Sainsburys; and my internal language – you know, the one that has a very different filter as all the good stuff seems to get fined out, leaving just the negative versions of any story.

In our external language we tend to find a nice way to say things. We worry that we might offend with a poor choice of words. We sometimes walk on eggshells to avoid upsetting others.

Internal language? None of that. We beat ourselves with the worst of it. “You’re a failure”, “you’ll never achieve that”, “why even start?”. Would you EVER say these things to your friends? Almost certainly not.

OK, so we know we can speak nicely. We do it externally every day. So the next step is to start speaking nicely internally as well as externally. Rather than always going to the negative, start looking to find positives. Think about how you’re phrasing things. For example, “you’re a failure” can become “that didn’t work out quite as I planned, but I can learn from it”; “why even start?” can become “give it a try, it’ll be fun”; and so on.

What I find interesting is when internal and external language sort of meet up. I hear it a lot “I should get fitter”, “I should lose weight”. Should is a failure term – it’s using someone else’s external language to justify our internal failure. How about “I want to get fitter”, “I am going to lose weight”? Suddenly they sound so much more positive, so much more achievable.

Have a listen to what your internal language usage is. See if you can play around with it. See how much better you feel when you start using the positive language internally… Go on… Try it…