Page 43 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

Conscious Self-Talk and Self-Management
Lecture 11

Defense mechanisms and defensive talk may get us through in the
short run, but in the end, they don’t work. On the other hand, learning
to manage our automatic, internal talk and our external responses
to others does work. In this lecture, I offer you several techniques
to interrupt the Àow of emotional reaction and negative self-talk in

dif¿ cult situations and describe a form of problem solving for dif¿ cult
situations that gives you more time to respond. Momentary emotional
self-management and the use of conscious self-talk radically improve
our chances to be heard, understood, and accepted in tough situations.
As a bonus, the repeated use of problem-solving self-talk raises our
sense of self-worth and our sense of control over our lives.

ur self-talk is automatic and constant. It involves self-evaluation and
almost constant evaluation of other people and the world around us.
OIt also involves problem solving and planning for the future. Our
self-talk sometimes helps us work things out, but its constancy is also a
distraction from the reality around us.

Nothing less than years of meditative practice, in a distant monastery, will
enable us to stop the talk in our heads, so we have to take a more practical
approach to this automatic process. If we can’t stop it, we can at least
become more consciously aware of what we’re saying to ourselves. We need
to learn how to interrupt an emotional hijack; slow our internal reactions to
give us time to debate with ourselves the instantaneous reality we’ve just
created; and give ourselves a chance to recover and discover what’s actually
out there.

I’m going to teach you how to calm yourself with something called the
centering breath. This is the type of breath that many religions use to calm
the mind and move the attention to your center of energy. You need to take a
breath that works in your body in just the opposite way an automatic breath
does. You can try this breath sitting upright in a comfortable position, for

30 minutes, in a darkened space. Interlace your ¿ngers and place the tips
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