We all talk to ourselves like our worst enemy.

We talk to ourselves like someone we hate.

We talk to ourselves like someone we don't believe in.

You never talk to your friend like that.

Now, I'm not saying that you want to falsely cheer yourself up either.

I'm not saying you just want to look at yourself and be like, no, I'm amazing and they were wrong.

But you want to have an honest assessment.

So saying no, you're the best isn't true, and saying you're the worst also isn't true.

The number one health and wellness podcast Jay Setty Jay Shetty, Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose.

I'm Jay Shetty, the author of New York Times best selling books Think Like a Monk and Eight Rules of Love.

And I'm so glad you're here today because i think one of the biggest challenges that I'm hearing so many of you dealing with right now is not the voices outside.

It's not the voice of your friends, it's not the voice of your families.

It's the voice in side your head.

If you've ever felt that you've got a critic sitting in your head.

Twenty four to seven, Finding a way to overanalyze, criticize, complain about every move you make, every thought you have, every decision you're about to make, and you find that that critical voice is blocking you from living your best life, is blocking you from unleashing your potential, is blocking you from making that idea happen.

Maybe you have an idea for a podcast, but the voice in your head always says, don't do it.

Maybe you have an idea about how to impact the world positively, and you've a voice in your head saying you're not good enough.

Maybe you have the desire to build your own business, to start your own company, and the voice in your head says it's a stupid idea.

Whatever it is, we all go through moments in life where we keep beating ourselves up.

If you're someone who wants to silence that critic in your head, this episode is for you.

If you're someone who wants to break through that negative spiral in your mind, this episode is for you.

And if you're someone who wants to stop beating yourself up and start lifting yourself up, this episode is for you.

Let's dive in.

The first thing I want to talk about is that self criticism feels like control, but it's actually sabotaged.

Right when we criticize ourself, we think we're in control, we think we know everything, We think we're correcting ourselves.

What we don't realize is we're actually sabotaging ourselves.

Imagine a top tennis player keeps berating themselves after every missed shot.

Instead of focusing, they actually are just beating themselves up about the last point.

That self criticism that they thought would motivate them actually destroys their rhythm.

There's an incredible speech that was given by Roger Federer at Dartmouth University, and he said that in his career he has missed so many points, He has lost so many points, but he said the biggest skill he had is that he never focused on the last point he missed.

He said, if I'm focused on the last point that I missed, or if I'm focused on the future point that I might miss, then guess what I miss the present shot.

I miss the present moment.

So many of us are beating ourselves up for the past.

So many of ourselves are beating ourselves up for not having the future we thought we were going to build.

What does that do?

It makes the present, lose time, money, energy, everything.

Ask yourself to stop seeing self criticism as motivating in control.

Kristin Nef's research on self compassion from two thousand and five shows that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating studied more effectively for the next exam, while harsh self critics repeated the same cycle.

Imagine that forgiving yourself makes you more focused.

Forgiving yourself allows you to move forward.

Resenting yourself holds you back.

Criticizing yourself demotivates you.

And think about it when you're talking to someone else or when someone speaking to you.

If someone criticizes your every move.

I remember I've not played golf very often, but I took a lesson once and I had a coach who criticized me every quarter of a swing.

So even before I swung and hit the ball, he would criticize every single time, and every time I was about to hit the ball, he'd have another criticism.

It demotivated me.

Think about yourself.

If every time you share an idea with the friend, they just pull it apart, even if they're well intentioned, it demotivates you.

How many of you have called yourself stupid after making a mistake at work, and instead of fixing it quickly, you spiral into self doubt, which means you make more errors.

And what's really interesting to me about this is that it's not just about performance, it's not just about focus.

It's even in relationships.

Maybe you're beating yourself up for staying in a relationship for too long.

Maybe you're beating yourself up for allowing someone to walk all over you.

Maybe you're beating yourself up for allowing someone to mistreat you.

When you beat yourself up for someone already treating you badly, it only gets worse.

Forgive yourself for confusing attention with love.

Forgive yourself for ignoring red flags because you wanted it to work.

Forgive yourself for chasing validation instead of connection.

Forgive yourself for being loyal to people who weren't loyal to you.

Forgive yourself so that you can move on.

Because we don't forgive ourselves, we don't heal.

Healing is not just about forgiving others, about letting go of what side side of ourselves.

It's about saying, you know that mistake I made, that's all I knew, then, that's all the information I had then, and maybe I even knew better.

But guess what I'm now learning that lesson, I'm now applying it.

That will free you from actually blocking yourself from growth.

The second thing I want to talk about is you wouldn't talk to a friend like that, So why talk to yourself like that?

Imagine your best friend failed a job interview.

Would you say you're useless?

You should have prepared better, You never get hired.

Now, you would never say that to a friend ever.

Yet that's how we all talk to ourselves.

We all talk to ourselves like our worst enemy.

We talk to ourselves like someone we hate.

We talk to ourselves like someone we don't believe in.

You never talk to your friend like that.

Now, I'm not saying that you want to falsely cheer yourself up either.

I'm not saying you just want to look at yourself and be like, no, I'm amazing and they were wrong.

But you want to have an honest assessment, So saying no, you're the best isn't true, and saying you're the worst also isn't true.

In The Bug with Gheeto, one of the books I studied as a monk, it talks about how attachment and aversion are two sides of the same coin.

The feeling of I'm the best or I'm the worst are two sides of the same coin.

It's just the ego playing games with you.

When the ego makes you believe you're the best, well, you become complacent, infallible.

When the ego makes you believe you're the worst, guess what, it doesn't help you grow.

It's the honest introspection, the honest assessment that we all need.

Hey, this is what I got right in the interview.

But you know what, I didn't really nail these three things.

You're now not assessing it as you, you're assessing it as something you took part in.

There's research on self talk that found athletes who used positive instructional self talk improved performance, while negative self talk led to choking under pressure.

Think about that.

So we all have self talk.

You can't stop the self talk, but those that were constructive, those that were positive, those that were focused forward, made a difference.

Imagine before a date, you tell yourself, I'm boring, I'm not sure they're going to like me.

So what happens You walk in nervous and awkward.

It's a prophecy you help fulfill, and what happens in that scenario you end up being boring.

You end up feeling more boring.

Now I'm not saying you walk in there and think you're the most interesting person on the planet, but you think, hey, you know what, I've got a couple of things that are interesting to talk about, got a couple of thing in my life that are important to talk about.

Encourage yourself when no one else is clapping.

Validate yourself when no one else is noticing.

Challenge yourself when no one else is pushing forgive yourself when no one else understands.

Believe in yourself before anyone else does.

Push yourself without punishing yourself, because if you don't do it, you'll always be waiting for someone else.

Strong people did the difficult thing when no one was watching.

Strong people did the challenging thing when no one was clapping.

Strong people did the hardest thing when it was just in private.

Do the hard thing, do the right thing when no one's there to know, and you will be able to do it brilliantly when they're all watching on the sidelines.

The third thing I wanted to talk about is how beating yourself up.

Doesn't build accountability, but it does build shame.

Right when you keep beating yourself up, you think and by the way, we do this to other people as well.

Sometimes will be mean to someone or will criticize them, hoping that helps them improve, but it just keeps beating them down.

You can't beat someone down and lift them up at the same time, which is what we're trying to do, right.

We're trying to beat ourselves up so that we do more, are more productive, and more effective.

Doesn't work that way.

Imagine a teenager court cheating an exam.

They feel so much shame and they think I'm a terrible person.

Instead of changing, they hide their mistakes and cheat again.

Brene Brown's work distinguishes guilt I did something bad from shame I am bad.

Guilt drives corrective action, Shame feel secrecy, and withdrawal.

Notice the difference I did something bad, I am bad.

Every time you say I am and follow it up with a negative word, you start believing that is your identity.

Every time you say I did something bad, you're able to recognize it as a habit or a pattern that you can change.

It's a lot harder to feel we can change ourselves than change something we did.

Let me give you a real life example.

Imagine you snap at your partner and then afterwards you feel shame.

You think I'm a horrible partner.

What happens Instead of apologizing, you avoid them because you feel so bad about yourself.

What does that do?

It only makes things worse.

When you just shame yourself as a bad person, you actually want to spend less time doing the good.

It's almost like you get so comfortable in the dark that the light kind of exposes you, so you move away from the light.

We don't want to move away from the light.

When the light comes on, you see things for what they are, and shame blocks us from seeing the way things they are because it's too scary, it's too hard.

I'll give you a really interesting example.

I remember the first time I went to Vegas at night there was all this glitz and glam and all the rest of it.

In the morning, I remember with the lights on the casino floor, seeing people glued to the slot machine, seeing vomit or drinks and popcorn all over the floor, and seeing people passed out like it just wasn't the same sight because the light shows us what's actually there, so we move away from the light when it shows us what's actually there.

But if we cannot let shame take over, we can actually look at things for what they are.

Shame yourself.

It won't change you.

Compassion will.

Don't blame yourself.

It won't change you.

Accountability will.

Don't criticize yourself.

It won't change you.

Action will.

Don't beat yourself up.

It won't change you.

Challenges will.

You don't grow because of guilt.

It just slows you down.

I've come to realize that food is never just food.

It's a memory.

I love language, a way we express who we are without saying a word.

Some of the most meaningful conversations I've ever had happened around a table.

That moment when someone passes you a dish that's been in their family for generations, or when a flavor takes you back to childhood.

That's connection, that's presence.

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When we look back on our lives, we rarely remember what we had for lunch.

On a random Tuesday.

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A moment with someone we love, a conversation that opened our heart, a reminder of where we came from.

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Imagine sitting at a dinner where the chef doesn't just cook, they share.

They tell you where the dish came from, what it means to them, and how it shaped their journey.

That's what it's really about, not just tasting something new, but stepping into someone else's world for a moment, and maybe understanding you're your own a little better too.

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We sometimes forget the part that slows down, that listens, that feels.

With Chase Sapphire Reserve, you're not just making a reservation.

You're creating a memory, a moment of presence, a moment of purpose.

The four point today is your brain is wired to focus on mistakes.

How many times have you had this?

You do something right and your brain will barely notice it.

You do something wrong and your brain will think about it all day.

Let's say you were great in a meeting today.

At work, you'll forget about it in the next meeting.

You say something sloppy or made a mistake at a meeting, and work you're now thinking about for the rest of the rest of the week, thinking that's all anyone can think about.

Your brain is wired to focus on mistakes.

Imagine this, a musician finishes their concert.

Hundreds of thousands of people are clapping.

One person frowns, one person isn't happy.

One person posts on social media that they want their money back.

Guess what the mind obsesses over.

It obsesses over the negative comments.

You may even see this on your social media.

You'll have ten of your friends respond.

One of them doesn't in the group chat, and you're thinking about that one friend.

Why didn't they respond?

Don't they like me?

You're forgetting about the ten people over here who responded immediately.

It's your birthday.

Seven people show up to the party that you wanted to see, three people don't show up, whereas your mind go to the three people who didn't show up.

One study showed that negative events wag three to five times more heavily in our minds than positive ones.

This is known as the negativity bias.

So what do we do with that?

Here's what I've learned.

You remember the bad times more than the good times because when things go well, you celebrate for a night, but when things go bad, you cry for a month.

We're used to going deeper into our harder emotions than we are into our happier emotions.

We've got to learn to rewire our mind.

How do we do this?

When something good happens to you, share it.

When something good happens to you, or someone does something good to you, share it, talk about it.

You're training your mind to spot what will change it positively.

I could look around this room and I can think about all the mistakes in how the furniture is placed and what I need to change.

That's important.

But at the same time, I can look around and see how beautiful it is.

That's also important.

It's valuable to know what needs to change in your life.

It's valuable to know what's not going in the direction you want it to go in your life.

But if that's all you have, then you'll just create more of it.

There's something known as the frequency illusion.

How many terms have you said to yourself, I really like that color, or I really like that shirt or pants or whatever it is, and now you see them everywhere.

Everyone's wearing them.

Everyone's wearing that color.

Or you want to get a car and you want to get a black car, and now you see black cars everywhere.

It's not like there's more black cars on the road, or more people are wearing those skirts or shirts or whatever it may be.

It's just that you have a heightened awareness of it.

This is why gratitude works so well.

Gratitude doesn't work because it's magic.

It's that when you become grateful for something, you notice more things to be grateful for.

Right now, your brain is wired to spot negative things, So you spot more negative things than you do positive, not because there are more negative things in the world, just because you're trained to notice it.

One of my favorite quotes from Wayne Dyer is this, you don't see things as they are.

You see things as you are.

When you are focused on the negative, you see more negative.

When you focus on the positive, you notice more positive.

This isn't positive thinking.

Positive thinking is pretending like the negative doesn't exist.

Noticing good things is learning to tune yourself in to higher vibration and frequency.

Point number five is that progress is not linear.

Thomas Edison tested over one thousand prototypes before the light bulb worked.

If he saw setbacks his failure, he'd have quit after attempt number ten.

There's an amazing study that talks about the stages of change.

Model shows that relapse i e.

Slipping back into smoking, for example, isn't failure.

It's part of how lasting behavior change happens.

Think about this for a second.

You commit to running three times a week.

One week, you only manage once, and what usually happens is you quit.

You got I messed up this week.

Next week I won't run it all.

But what happens you actually lose track.

Whereas when you recognize that that's part of the process of change.

When you set a new goal, when you set a new habit, you are going to have days that you fall back.

When you break up with someone.

You might feel healed in a month, and then in seven months you're going to be sitting there thinking about your ex.

That's part of the healing journey.

When you realize that healing is three steps forward, two steps back, four steps forward, three steps back, sometimes one step forward, four steps back.

When you realize that's what healing looks like, you're actually free to heal when you want it all to happen today, When you want healing to all happen tomorrow, it will last forever.

So when we fall off track, we beat ourselves up.

Oh I did three times last week, but this time only went to the gym once.

I was eating really really healthy, but last night I just crash.

Guess what, the week doesn't matter, right, How many times have you done that?

And it all happens because you beat yourself up.

You don't fall back into bad habits because you're lazy.

You fall back into bad habits because you beat yourself up.

When you have a bad day.

Don't turn a bad day into a bad week.

Don't turn a bad week into a bad month, and don't turn a bad month into a bad year.

Let it be a bad day that's okay, But tomorrow pick yourself up and make it a great one.

It's when you don't beat yourself up that you keep the power of turning a bad day into a good month, a bad day into a good week.

I hope that resonates with you.

Next time you set a goal, a change, or whatever you want to do and you fall off, know that that's part of it.

Give yourself grace and you'll be able to get back on track much quicker.

The sixth thing I wanted to share with you today is that rest is part of progress, not the opposite of it.

So many of us think that rest means we're not moving forward.

My monk teacher used to say, if you want to move three steps forward, you have to go three steps deep.

So if you're struggling to move forward, ask yourself if you've gone inward already.

Elite athletes schedule recovery days as strictly as training days.

Serena Williams even naps before matches because rest is strategy, not laziness.

For most of us, though, rest isn't something we plan.

It's something we end up doing when we're exhausted.

When you're resting when you're exhausted, that's not rest.

That's survival, that's recovery.

That's why it's so stressful.

Whereas the highest performers in the world have scheduled rest, that scheduled rest is what helps them perform at their best in all the other times.

On the podcast, I've into Matthew Walker, who has done a lot of research on sleep, and his study on why We Sleep from twenty seventeen shows deep sleep consolidates learning and strengthens memory.

Without it, performance and creativity drop.

Some people think, oh, oh sleep when I'm dead, Oh our sleep when I'm tired.

That sleep is the reason you can be so productive.

That sleep is the reason you can be proactive.

That sleep is the reason you can be so effective.

So no, don't beat yourself up for wanting to rest, don't beat yourself up for wanting to take a break, don't beat yourself up for wanting to slow down, And don't beat yourself up for wanting to have your own time.

Allow yourself to slow down, give yourself permission to be still.

That's where your power is.

Let me give you an example.

You work late every night to get ahead, but you're so burned out you're starting to make sloppy mistakes.

A rested version of you would finish faster with fewer errors.

Working more doesn't achieve more.

Losing sleep doesn't achieve more.

Trying to do everything doesn't achieve more.

Sometimes you achieve more by more rest, more stillness, and more calm.

Point number seven is that self kindness builds resilience more than self criticism ever will.

Navy seals in training who used encouraging self talk were far more likely to complete Hell Week than those who tore themselves down.

Now, for those of you who don't know, Hell Week is the most grueling training that a Navy seal goes through.

I interviewed David Goggins, and if you want to know more about it, you can go back to that episode and watch and listen to what that week actually entails.

It's a five and a half day period during the first phase of seal training.

Candidates average about four hours of sleep for the entire week, less than one hour per night.

They're constantly exposed to cold water, mud, sand, physical drills, and team challenges.

Training goes day and night, running information, carrying boats and logs, swimming in the Pacific obstacle courses.

The goal isn't just to push the body.

It's to test the mind and spirit under exhaustion.

Instructors want to see who breaks under stress, who stays calm when freezing, exhausted and in pain, Who can lead and support teammates when everyone is suffering.

About seventy to eighty percent of candidates quit during hell week.

Those who survive don't necessarily have the strongest bodies.

They have the strongest mental resilience because their self talk is not negative.

They found that breaking down the week into moments to get through the next meal not survive five days.

Nephan Jermer in twenty thirteen found people who practice self compassion meditation increased resilience, life satisfaction, and reduced anxiety.

Imagine, after bombing a presentation, you tell yourself it's one talk, not my whole career.

Next time, I'll be sharper.

That mindset keeps you moving forward instead of giving up.

You don't get stronger by beating yourself down.

You get stronger by giving yourself the same kindness you'd give to any one you love.

I really hope that this episode is able to help you quiet that inner critic.

It's not going anywhere, it's not going away.

We're not trying to get rid of it.

What we're trying to do is that we make sure we have the new scripts in our mind that have positive self talk, that focus on what we can be grateful for, that look for opportunities more than problems, and that when they look for problems, they look for systems and solutions, not criticism, not shame.

Thank you so much for listening.

I hope you'll share this with a friend who struggles with this too.

I hope you'll discuss it with them, and I'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks for being here.

I'm forever in your corner and I'm always rooting for you.

If you love this episode, you love my conversation with doctor Joe Dispenser on why stress and overthinking negatively impacts your brain and heart and how to change your habits that are on autopilot.

Listen to it right now.

How many times do we have to forget until we stop forgetting and start remembering.

That's the moment of change.

No one cares how many times you fell off the bicycle if you ride the bicycle, now you ride the bike.