This book takes a very different approach. By reading these pages, and doing the simple exercises offered here, you can learn how to change your own inner voices to enhance your life, and make each day a more positive experience. First you'll learn how to identify the inner voices that have been causing you trouble. Then you'll learn a variety of ways to rapidly change both the words, and how you say those words, to make your life work better. You'll also learn to recognize what kinds of changes will actually improve your life, and what kinds of changes might sound good on the surface, but would actually cause you more trouble.

The developments in this book are based on the field of Neuro–Linguistic Programming (NLP) a field that has made possible a leap forward in personal growth and development. You can read a brief description of what NLP is in the appendix at the end of this book if you are interested. Or you can simply read on, and experience the application of these understanding to the topic of negative self–talk, and experience the benefits.

Refocusing Attention

When you have an unpleasant internal voice and you feel bad in response, it is natural to want to escape it so that you can feel better. One very ancient way to do this is to learn how to attend to something else, allowing the voice to recede into the background. At any moment we attend to only a very small portion of our experience. For instance, as you have been reading this chapter, you have probably not been paying attention to the sounds around you, some of which may have been quite loud or repetitive.