Progress can either be slow-moving or not moving at all because we tend to self-sabotage ourselves out of it. It can even be tricky sometimes because we don’t know we’re doing it. In this episode, host April Shprintz helps you stop sabotaging your mindset. She dives deep into the inner voice and critic that keeps us from moving forward and how to overcome them in three steps. It is time to drop the negative self-talk and start treating yourself better. Tune in now to learn how to speed up your progress.

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The #1 Way To Stop Sabotaging Your Mindset And Speed Up Your Progress

I am so glad you’re here. I had an audience reach out with a question that is going to be so beneficial to you. The question that she had was, “I’m working on my mindset. I’m working on reframes. I constantly feel like I’m not getting anywhere and I’m not doing a good job. I don’t feel good about it.” In being able to voice message back and forth, I was able to understand where this was coming from. It is a way that we all tend to self-sabotage ourselves, not just with our mindset but in other areas too.

It can be one of those tricky things that can happen when you’re working on your mindset that will impede your progress and you don’t even know what’s happening. That tricky little thing is your inner voice, better known as your inner critic. I’m talking to the people who know that they can be super negative in their self-talk or hard on themselves or hold themselves to such an incredibly high standard but if you’re like, “That’s not a thing for me,” I might be talking to you too.

The reason is that we do not always notice how critical we are with ourselves because our inner voice or inner critic is in the same voice that we think every other thought we think. It’s in the voice that we think, “I need to take out the garbage,” or the voice that we think, “I love that outfit she’s wearing,” or if you’re one of the guys, “I can’t believe that we didn’t win the World Series.” It is that same voice that you say everything to yourself. The reason that is so important and the reason that can hide this self-sabotage from you is because you’re used to it.

You can become used to airplanes flying over your head. If you live near a train station or you happen to live near a landfill and it doesn’t smell that great in your neighborhood, you get desensitized to those things over time. If you find yourself, no matter how much you’re working on your mindset and how many times you’re leveraging your reframes, still not making the progress that I keep talking about people making or that you expected to make, I want you to pay attention to your inner voice and see if that is what’s holding you back. There are three steps to do this.

The first is I want you to ask yourself how you feel because if you’re working on your mindset over time, you should be feeling better. You’re still going to have those situations where you have a crappy day. That’s life but it will be very situational and it will be based on, “My mindset went in the ditch. I’m going to pull it out. I’m going to be in a better place.” If you find that you are regularly feeling at a lower level than you expected to and there isn’t anything to explain it, then you’re probably speaking to yourself in a way that is undermining everything else that you’re trying to do.

 

Here’s how you figure it out for sure. I want you to start if you are either alone talking out loud or if you aren’t, I want you to write your thoughts. When you are not feeling good about things, I want you to write those thoughts down. Whether you write down those thoughts or you take the time to talk them out, I want you to ask yourself. Would you say what you’ve said to yourself to the person that you love most in the world? Would you say what you said to yourself to your best friend? What about your son or your daughter? Chances are you’re going to say, “I wouldn’t speak to anyone this way.”

If that’s the case, you know that inner critic is what is sabotaging your progress on your mindset and probably your progress in a lot of other areas. It may not be that you’re not making any progress but it’s like walking around with an anchor on yourself. This is something that you can take moves to fix. This is something that you can take steps to fix and get better at over time but the first crucial step in this three-step process is to recognize if you’re doing it.

 

The first step is to recognize what is going on. The second step is going to be to remind yourself, “How would I say this to an insert with a best friend, child or person I love? How would I reframe this for them?” Once you’re aware of the way that you’re speaking to yourself, you can start to speak to yourself in a better way. This is your habit. It could take a while. You could find that when you’re under stress, you don’t do this as well and you don’t take that time to pause and respond to yourself instead of having that knee-jerk reaction. Taking the time to be kinder to yourself in the way that you speak is going to speed up all of the work that you’re doing on your mindset.

Once you're aware of the way you're speaking to yourself, you can start to speak to yourself in a better way. Share on X

It’s going to help you relate better to other people as well. It’s not just going to help you relate better to them in the way that you treat them. It is also going to help you understand people better because all of a sudden, you’re going to realize that the person that is so quick to react or that person who is always so critical and negative is likely fighting an internal battle with their inner critic that they are not aware of either. A lot of times, we have adopted these voices from authority figures in our lives and we have become so immune to them that they are a part of our everyday life.

 

Taking that time to not only take stock of how we feel, understand the way that we are reacting and take that pause so that we can respond to ourselves in a better way is going to speed up all of your progress. You will see it not just in your mindset but in other areas of your life too. Try this out and let me know how it’s working for you. You can leave me a message as this audience did. Let me know how it’s working for you or what your next mindset question is. I am more than happy to help. Here’s to your success.