The underlying pattern in your Self-Talk
Did you know that the person you spend the most time talking to is YOU? When it comes to conversations, our inner dialogue rules the roost. According to researchers, we spend around 8 hours of our waking time EVERYDAY talking to ourselves inside our heads. This behavior is called Self-Talk.
Emotions, Self-Talk, and the Inner Voice
Self-Talk is our conscious thought process concerning our life, emotions and actions. We typically “self-talk” at the rate of 4000 words per minute. If we were to express all those words with our voice, it will take one hour! That’s how much information that is being processed as our Inner Voice.
While Emotions are the immediate way we understand sensory information (vision, smell, sounds, taste, etc.), Self-Talk is the transcriber of our Emotions. Self-Talk is how we communicate our feelings and translate them into actions in everyday life. While many overwhelmingly “hear” their self-talk, Self-Talk can be visual as well.
The Covid-19 impact on our minds
Self-Talk has long been this invisible piece of intelligence that has been driving our actions from the background. What has changed though is that, more people are becoming aware of their Self-Talk — especially negative Self-Talk, thanks to Covid-19. Ethan Kross, Neuroscientist, and author of the book Chatter identifies 2020 as the biggest chatter event of the century.
The percentage of people reporting high negative self talk has quadrupled just in the last one year.
According to research, stress, social isolation, and natural disasters all increase our self-talk through cognitive disruption. Well, Covid-19 gave all the three in one go, didn’t it? The fear of losing our loved ones, the stress of managing work and home while being at home, the lockdowns, the doubts on our financial future — the pandemic has been one giant stress-test.
Making sense of our Self-Talk
While negative self-talk has been grossly used to refer to self-talk, Self-Talk is much more than that.
Whenever we go through strong/difficult emotions, we refer to our Self-Talk to make sense of what is going on. This is how an event can trigger emotions translating into actions within seconds. While stressful situations have made our negative self-talk louder, we can train ourselves to build constructive self-talk and gain balance in our Emotional Health.
Four Components of Self-Talk
According to renowned Self-Talk researcher Brinthaupt, our Inner Voice is focused on four different aspects—
The Self-Critical Voice: Self-Talk that focuses on negative aspects of our lives and actions.
The Self-Reinforcing Voice: Self-Talk that reflects on positive memories and statements
The Self-Managing voice: Self-Talk that regulates emotions and identifies ways to progress in any situation
The Social Assessing voice: Self-Talk that focuses on our interaction with others.
While there was no way before to measure our self-talk, Konvos has built a way to track and measure our own self-talk — thereby identifying patterns in our thinking.
A Dynamic Self-Talk Pattern based on the Self-Talk Scale
Based on Brinthaupt’s Self Talk Scale, we at Konvos built a Self-Talk Pattern checker based on common ways we self-talk. Instead of the boring questionnaires, we take you through ten visualized self-talk situations that you might go through in your lives. Since it is easier for people to relate with a depiction, our assessment has high accuracy and completion rates.
A Sample report of Konvos’ Self-talk pattern checker
Based on where you fall in the four Self-Talk types, we identify how exactly your self-talk right now is affecting your mood and what you could do to get a hold of your emotions at this moment. An interesting thing about this assessment is that your self-talk pattern is an indicator of how your emotions are right now. So depending on the context you are going through, your self-talk pattern might be different every time.
Why Self-Talk Pattern Checker?
For us to change something, we need to know what it is. The biggest barrier to making sense and regulating our emotions is that there are too many triggers for us to keep track of. Our worlds have become a minefield of emotional triggers and Social Media has accentuated this problem.
Trying to control our emotions directly has not been fruitful. While food, sleep, and physical fitness can impact our emotions, so does patterns in our thinking impacted by our experiences. While there are a million ways to take care of our physical health, there are very few ways where we can identify patterns in the way we are feeling and thinking.
Now, that you know your self-talk pattern, you can also start taking specific steps to build effective self-talk that helps you break mental barriers. One of the ways we enable you to do this is through our Self-Talk training app.
What next?
When it comes to Emotional Intelligence, one of the biggest challenges has been our inability to track or measure our EQ in reliable ways. Well, not anymore. Self-Talk can be a reliable indicator of our Emotional Intelligence at any point in time. By connecting the results of the assessment to specific Emotional Intelligence parameters like Emotional Awareness, Agility, etc., Konvos can help individuals to keep track of and improve their EQ.