#GrowYourLife #BuildYourBusiness
Life Area: Personal
Topic: Negative Self-Talk
Spanx Founder Tells Us the No. 1 Reason Stopping Our Success
Sara Blakely is known for her revolutionary shapewear product “Spanx” released in 1998. Since then, Spanx has solved the wardrobe woes of women around the world by designing bras, underwear, leggings, and other intimate apparel in a way that has changed the way women feel about their bodies. In the process, Sara became a self-made billionaire.
Sara Blakely’s success lesson.
In a recent interview, the wildly-successful Blakely admitted that she still struggles with doubt and fear. She told her interviewer the one thing she felt was holding back thousands of us from realizing our full potential was our negative self-talk.
“Our negative self-talk is the No.1 barrier to success.”
– Spanx founder, Sara Blakely
Who can’t relate to that? We all have, at one time or another, been held back by the lies we allow to infiltrate our own heads: you’re not good enough, rich enough, talented enough, pretty enough, so on and so forth.
Jack Canfield provides us with this illustrative of the Self-talk Loop. Read more up on it in one of my past blog posts: 5 Ways of Turning Your Negative Self-Talk into Positive Self-Talk [here].
I admire Blakely’s authenticity and the wisdom she imparted. She states she has been able to manage her negative self-talk over the years by continuing to do the emotional work most people neglect to overcome their own doubts and fears.
Negative self-talk is a very real thing–and a very self-limiting thing holding people back. In a 2005 National Science Foundation study, researchers found that the average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. The alarming part? Eighty percent of those thoughts are negative and fear-based!
If you’re struggling with your own demoralizing inner critic, here are three crucial things to help you manage the negative self-talk and overcome your fears.
1. Gain perspective into your situation.
Often, due to failure and rejection, people develop a warped sense of reality where they can’t separate fact from fantasy. When making the entrepreneurial journey or climbing the corporate ladder, failure is a sure thing–you can bank on it.
But when you step back and gain perspective into your situation, you can realize that life will go on and you’re not going to die a horrible death if you get rejected or miss out on an opportunity.
The worst-case-scenario that feeds into our fear or the negative drama we play out in our heads is merely that … drama. Lose the script, put the past in the past, and detach any previous negative outcome from your current reality. Once you start with a clean slate and see possibilities again with renewed insight, you’ll realize that your negative self-talk no longer has any power over you.
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