Transforming Negative Self-Talk: Practical, Effective Exercises Paperback – July 30, 2012

Ever notice what happens when you try to fight your negative thoughts head-on?

Chances are you find yourself in quite the power struggle where the negative thoughts get even louder and louder. In this book, Steve Andreas offers an alternative approach for turning down the internal negative chatter:

"The overall goal of this book is to teach you how to transform a troublesome voice into something much more useful and supportive, but not to eliminate it...First you will learn how to identify the inner voices that have been causing you trouble, and how to listen to them carefully. Then you will learn a variety of ways to rapidly change both the words, and how you say the words, to make your life work better. You will also learn to recognize what kinds of changes will actually improve your life, and what kinds of changes might appear to be useful but would actually cause you more trouble in the long run...They are elegant and graceful ways to change your experience that you can do consciously, despite the fact that they work in a way that is largely unconscious." (pp. 23-24, 9, 56)

Each of the eleven chapters offers specific techniques for transforming negative self-talk:

1. Changing location
Imagine moving the critical voice to different locations in your body (stomach, kneecap, heart, etc.) and locations outside your body (2 feet in front of you, 30 feet in front of you, on your right side, above you, etc.); experiment with changing the volume of the voice as well.

2. Changing tempo and tonality
Experience the effects of adjusting the tempo of a thought: typically a faster tempo is associated with urgency and a slower tempo with relaxation; also notice how changes in tonality of the thought (i.e., pitch, melody, timbre, hesitations, accent, etc.) impact the effect the thought has on you.

3. Adding music or a song
Pair your thoughts with different types of instrumental music or songs to elicit different feeling states.

4. Talking to yourself positively
Create sentences that shift your attention from complaints and problems to what you can enjoy in the present moment; for example, ask yourself "What else can I enjoy right now?"

5. Adding a voice
Replace troublesome, critical voices with resourceful and supportive ones; to avoid creating conflict with the two voices, try linking together the apparent opposites: "Even though I have failed repeatedly, I can learn to succeed."

6. Auditory perspective
Broaden your perspective by moving from "tunnel hearing" to the "big sound."

7. Starting your day
Change the way you talk to yourself first thing in the morning by focusing on desired outcomes and adjusting self-talk.

8. Generalizations, evaluations, presuppositions, and deletions
Detect common negative patterns of thinking and replace them with more balanced and less troublesome thoughts.

9. Negative messages and positive outcomes
Shift your thinking by attending more to positive desired outcomes than to negative undesirable problems.

10. Asking questions
Create core questions that help you direct your skills, attitudes, and abilities in enabling and powerful ways; for example, when in a difficult situation, ask yourself "How can I make the most of this situation?" or "How could I make this better?" or "What's most important?"

11. Transforming a message
Experiment with literally, phonetically (and playfully) transforming negative thoughts:
"I'm no good." → "I am. Know good."
"I am not worthy." → "I am noteworthy."
"It's just so awful." → "It is...Just so...Awe full."

So, stop fighting and start transforming...and take a positive step towards managing negative talk.

This book has some of the most effective ways to transform self talk that I have ever encountered. I am a hypnotherapist, and not so many self help techniques work for me, but some of these do. I've been using the techniques with my clients successfully, as well. Steve Andreas has developed and presented exercises that are remarkably sophisticated and powerful in ways that are easy to understand and apply. He offers ways to use humor to ease and eliminate negative self esteem and habits that bypass resistance completely.

NLP savvy readers will recognize many of the principles in play in both the exercises themselves, and in how the examples are presented. So, this book will be useful to professionals as well as the general public.

Like all Steve Andreas' books, "Transforming Negative Self-talk" is very useful. In a simple, elegant way, it goes deeply to the core of the process, making it clear and resourceful, even to NLP experts. The way Andreas leads the reader to feel what he is telling as a proof of what he is telling is quite a magic thing that turns the reading into a living experience. you don't have to be an expert to get the better of it.

This book helped a lot with shutting down internal attacks which have been plaguing me for years-- it's worked much more than a lot of things I've tried. Andreas says that his methods don't work for everyone, but this book is at least worth looking at if you have a problem with negative voices.

The general approach is to observe and vary various aspects of your internal voice-- the location, volume, speed, pitch, etc, plus a chapter about playing with the punctuation, alternate meanings of words and such of a habitual negative message until it either becomes positive or turns into nonsense.

I worked through most of the exercises in the book, and felt somewhat worse and figured that it was just another thing that didn't work-- but within a day or two, I found that the internal attacks were not affecting me as much-- the voice was still there, but at a lower emotional intensity. Now (a few weeks later), the voice isn't nearly as frequent either.

As an NLP Practitioner and Trainer in private practice, I have recommended this book to numerous colleagues and clients. In Transforming Negative Self-talk, NLP expert Steve Andreas explains how to alter the elements of internal self-talk to change it's meanings and perceived influence over behavior and emotions. In NLP language, we learn from this book to modify the auditory submodalities of internal self-talk to depotentiate it and make it less compelling. I have applied the methods in this book with clients and with participants in NLP workshops with positive results. This approach has nothing to do with affirmations. The method is to change not the content but the qualities of self-talk (tempo, location, pitch, etc.) or to even change the modality (make it visual instead of auditory) to render the content irrelevant. Negative self-talk affects most of us at one time or another, resulting in unwanted states and actions. The things we say to ourselves and the way we say them matters in terms of our adaptability, resilience, self-esteem, and well-being. Negative self-talk can range from scolding to "down in the dumps" statements - anything we say to ourselves that is self-defeating. If you want to change your negative self-talk, this is the book to read. If you are a helping professional (coach or psychotherapist, for instance) read this book and teach these methods to your clients.