Patience is a virtue. We’ve all heard it. Many of us try our best to be patient with others in our lives. There may even be some people in our lives that we have a seemingly endless amount of patience for. Oddly enough you can have patience for the whole world but not when it comes to yourself.

One problem that often arises when people don’t have patience with themselves is that it leads to negative self talk. Maybe you had a presentation and you practiced all week but when it came time to present you got nervous and stuttered and forgot at times what you were saying. This isn’t exactly great for one’s confidence but it can be even more harmful if the person starts verbally bashing themselves as a result. If the person has had a problem giving presentations before they may tell themselves that they’re incompetent or never do anything right or that they should do themselves a favor and never talk again.

The best response with that scenario would be to make note of what went well, what didn’t, and what can be done to improve your public speaking skills.  Unfortunately  when people bash themselves they may not even get to that approach. They’ve torn themselves down and then do nothing to grow from the situation. They weren’t patient with themselves so they didn’t even bother looking at what went right.

Of course you can use positive talk to boost your confidence before performing a task you’re nervous about. It’s good to be able to be your own hype man but positive self talk isn’t just telling yourself you’re great and moving on. Positive self talk is also telling yourself that even though you are struggling with something in your life you will work to find a way to overcome it because you know you’re capable. The next step would be to actually work on finding ways to overcome whatever obstacle is in your way. Positive self talk isn’t very beneficial if you lie to yourself about having intentions to do better.

Some who struggle with positive self talk may look to an NLP Practitioner to help change that. NLP stands for neuro linguistic programming and NLP Practitioners try to change the way your brain is programmed by changing the way you talk about things including yourself. There is some contraversy about just how much an NLP Practitioner can do for you but there is evidence that how you talk about things affects how you perceive situations and if you can grow from them. Negative self talk hinders you from bettering yourself. When talking to yourself you should treat yourself the way you would treat a friend. This should help you use less severe words and display patience for yourself. You can also look at the situation as if you were not involved in it and are just observing it. There are a number of methods to help improve self talk for those who struggle with speaking positively about themselves but none of them are overnight solutions.  Making this change takes work but is very beneficial in the long run.