The more time I spend not only with my peers but around kids younger and adults older than me it becomes clear that the way current cultures approaches self-talk has significant impacts on who we become.

My history with self-talk has always been on if I was going to do something that made me stand out as an individual, or what everyone else was doing. What I notice though, is my narrative is so different from anyone else that I know. Ninety percent of people that I interact are speaking negative feedback to themselves, putting themselves down, and choosing to walk in the shame that they are creating in their own head.

A shame that no one else is seeing, thinking, or believing. This shame becomes crippling, very quickly. Suddenly all we can think about it how badly we missed the mark, what we forget to do, or if we did good enough to meet everyone’s standards.

I propose that for a solid 24 hours, we approach self-talk in a more positive way. What I like to call, the Randi way. Instead of speaking defeat, failure, disappointment, and disaster over our lives, we need to define ourselves outside of those parameters. Practically – this looks like making a simple sentence structure change. Taking, “I am a failure,” and turning that into “I failed at…

One disheartening experience shouldn’t have the power to define your life. Learning how to manage your personal dialogue is, in my opinion, the most important mental skill someone can have. When you can tackle the haters in your own head, it doesn’t matter what’s going on around you, you are primed to tackle the day. So let’s start crushing our goals, one at a time.