By Travis Bradberry
Your inner dialogue—the thoughts you have about your feelings and experiences—can play a decisive role in your professional success or failure. When you make a mistake, these thoughts can magnify the negative aspects of the experience, or help you turn a setback into a valuable and productive lesson.
Negative self-talk is often unrealistic, unnecessary, and harmful. It can pull you into a negative emotional spiral that is difficult to escape.
Understanding Your Inner Dialogue
Every internal conversation is rooted in a set of deeply held beliefs about yourself. Its influence on success may not always be obvious, but it can be powerful. Your inner dialogue can motivate you to pursue your goals, or stand in your way and prevent you from reaching them.
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.” — Henry Ford
After assessing the emotional intelligence of millions of people, I found that 90% of top performers have high emotional intelligence.
These successful individuals share an important skill: they can recognize negative self-talk and keep it under control, preventing it from standing in the way of their full potential.
The Role of Emotional Intelligence
On average, these high-emotional-intelligence performers earn about $37,000 more annually than their counterparts with lower emotional intelligence. They also receive more promotions and better performance evaluations. The relationship between emotional intelligence and income is so strong that each additional point in emotional intelligence is associated with an increase of $1,700 in annual salary.
When it comes to inner dialogue, we have identified several common thought patterns that hold people back more than others. Recognizing your tendency to fall into these patterns can help prevent them from undermining your career.
1. Perfection Means Success
Human beings are inherently imperfect. When you make perfection your goal, you will always be left with the nagging feeling that you have not done enough. You will spend your time regretting what you failed to accomplish instead of appreciating what you have achieved.
2. My Fate Is Already Decided
Many people give in to the irrational belief that they are destined either to succeed or to fail. But make no mistake: your future is in your hands. Attributing repeated successes or failures to forces beyond your control is simply a way of avoiding responsibility.
Sometimes life deals you a difficult hand; at other times, the cards seem to fall perfectly in your favor. Ultimately, however, your willingness to make the most of the hand you have been dealt is what helps determine whether you succeed or fail.
3. I Always Fail—or I Never Get It Right
There is very little in life that you always do or never do. You may do something frequently, or you may not do it often enough, but describing your behavior in absolute terms such as “always” and “never” is a form of self-pity.
This way of thinking makes you believe you have no control over your actions and that you will never change. Do not give in to that belief.
4. My Success Depends on Others’ Approval
Regardless of what people think of you at any given moment, one thing is certain: you are never as good or as bad as they say you are.
You cannot prevent yourself from reacting to other people’s opinions, but you can learn to treat their judgments as opinions rather than facts—and avoid giving them more weight than they deserve. This allows your sense of self-worth to come from within, regardless of how others perceive you.
5. My Past Determines My Future
Repeated failures can erode your confidence and make it difficult to believe that you are capable of achieving better results in the future.
In many cases, these setbacks happen because you have taken risks and attempted something difficult. Remember that success lies in your ability to get back up when you fall.
Anything worth achieving will require some degree of risk. You cannot allow failure to stop you from believing in your ability to succeed.
6. My Feelings Are My Reality
If you have read my new book, you know how to look at your emotions objectively and separate facts from illusions. If you have not read it, you may want to consider doing so.
Otherwise, your emotions may continue to distort your perception of reality, leaving you vulnerable to negative self-talk that can prevent you from reaching your full potential.
Moving Forward
I hope these lessons prove as useful to you as they have been to me over the years. As I write them, I am reminded once again of their power—and of my own determination to put them into practice every day.
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