Persuasive Communication doesn’t only refer to how you communicate with others, it also refers to how you communicate to your self. To change the results you get, you start by taking control of how your mind thinks. This is done by asking yourself the right questions.
Changing you
Has there ever been a time when you told yourself, “Why can’t I do this” or “Why am I such a failure?” Your mind is created to function and tic a certain way. When you ask your mind a question, it will ALWAYS look for an answer. So by asking yourself negative questions, you’ll get negative answers. What I’m about to share with you CAN be something that will dramatically change your life forever. Think about it, if you ask yourself negative questions, you get negative answers. So if you ask yourself positive questions, you get positive answers! Imagine if you asked yourself questions like, “How can I get stronger?” “How do I get smarter?” “What should I do to make money now?” Do you want to know the answers to those questions? I know I do which is why I ask myself those questions all the time! As I ask myself empowering questions, I eventually figure out the right answers.
Disempowering Questions
- Why am I a loser?
- Why does this always happen to me?
- What is everyone against me?
- How come no body likes me?
- Why am I so shy?
- Why don’t girls/guys like me?
- Why doesn’t anyone like me?
- Why can’t I be smarter?
- Why am I always wrong?
- Why do I always fail?
- Why doesn’t anything good ever happen to me?
- Why do I always get these problems?
If you notice carefully, a lot of the times when you ask yourself negative question, you tend to generalize. It’s as if you aren’t beating yourself up enough already, you have to lie to yourself to make you sound even more pathetic to yourself. This doesn’t have to happen; in fact it’s really easy to change. You know a great exercise you should do but probably won’t: write down all the negative questions you have in your mind. Spend some time and really think hard about every negative question you’ve asked yourself, vigorously write them all down. Now take that piece of paper and crumble it up. Flush it down the toilet, burn it, or just simply throw it away. Poof, now these questions have vanished away like smoke(literally if you burned it 😉 ).
Empowering Questions
- What are my goals?
- How do I become stronger?
- How do I become smarter?
- What must I say to be more persuasive?
- Why am I such a powerful person?
- Why am I amazing?
- Why do I consider myself to be the best?
- What makes me feel real good right now?
- What do I really want out of my life
- How do I solve this problem that I have?
- Who can I talk with to help me grow?
- What steps must I take to reach the outcome I want?
- What should I do different next time?
- What am I committed to right now?
- Who’s in charge of me?
- What can I learn from this experience?
- How do I become more enthusiastic
- How can make more money?
- What should I do to live a healthier lifestyle?
- How can I become more consciously aware of my life?
Would you like to know the answers to these questions? Start asking yourself questions like these everyday! I promise and guarantee that you’ll eventually figure out the answer. It’s better you figure out the answer to, “why am I powerful,” compared to, “why am I a loser?” Wouldn’t you agree?
There is an infinite number of empowering questions you can ask yourself so please enlighten me with what one of your new questions…
If people truly realized how powerful their words were, especially their inner dialogue, they’d never speak a harsh word again to themselves.
It reminds me of Louise Hay in her movie “You Can Heal Your Life” when she says, “This is the best decade of my life! I say that every decade.”
Another time, one of her friends used the old cliche “Kill two birds with one stone” and she asked, “Why would you want to kill two birds?”
Our language is the key to our success. Change our language, change our life.
-Chris
The Coffee Video – Inspiring 1,000,000 People
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Inner dialogue is usually overlooked…which is unfortunate because it’s clearly more powerful.
why would you kill a bird…lol thats true 🙂
The mind is magnetic. If you think about positive things, all the cells in your mind (and body, too) will focus on positivity and it will move you towards your positive goals. So, when you think about something negatively,you send negative signals to your mind and the rest you know what will happen.
Nice blog by the way. When I have time, I will come here 🙂
Thank Orik, and yes your right the mind is like a magnet. It kind of goes with a whole philosphy of you attract what you think of most of the time which was orignally said by Earn Nightingale I believe.
Good post AJ. Power of positive is infinitely more empowering.
btw: there is a typo on list item 10 for empowering questions: “How do I solve this problem them I have?” possibly should read “How do I solve this problem that I have?”
Thanks Harnish, got it taken care of!!
In addition to all you discussed.
Its important to try and figure out a way of solving a problem or getting out of e nefarious situations rather than spending time on regrets, or blame allocation, or blame storming.
Point is, when in an untenable situation, – ask yourself, – How do I get out of here? or Whats the best way to solve this problem? Never ask yourself, Why me? (or anything along that line).
Yes, very true. I won’t deny that I occasionly say “why me” varitiations when stuck in a bad situation. However, since I’ve trained my self to become consciously aware, I’ve fortuantely been able to manipulate my questions to my favor, enabling me to “solve the situation” in one form or another.
Great article A.J. I had a neuropsychiatrist tell me that my negative self-talk was killing me and that I needed therapy. I had never even thought about something like that before. He told me that if I was consciously aware of 10 instances of negative self-talk in a day, that I probably had 10,000 instances of sub-conscious instances in that same day. That scared me. So the patient decided to heal himself.
Thus I would add to your article that if we are asking ourselves negative or positive questions consciously, we may be asking 1,000 times as many negative or positive questions sub-consciously.
Thats insightful Stephen
Yes you very right. Subconsciously, we have millions of bits of information processing so it’s almost impossible to control all of it. However, before getting too detailed into the subconscious portion of things, I wanted people to understand what they can do consciously…you get what I mean?
But yes what you say is very valid and I will surely write about it 🙂
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I love it!
thanks
Thanks, I look forward to your future comments!
Yes,pretty well .Everything said about the magnet of the mind and the conrol is right.But it takes some time and practice to learn how to control the the thoughts.When I read John Kehoe’s book and thought over the words we say.Each word either adds a dollar or takes it away from your personal account.The balance will be the result of your life.The saying is persuasive,isn’t it?
wow…I like that! Yes it does take time and training, even I haven’t perfected it. It all starts with being consciously aware.
The more you ask questions the more likely you get the answers. You just have to ask the proper question and understand the answer which pops up. Your brain doesn’t tell you exactly what the answer is, you have to figure out what the answer means to you.
Right. That is exactly why you must ask the ‘right’ questions to yourself. Because your brain will try to figure out the answer regardless of it being a positive or negative question.
Hi AJ,
Some nice questions there. Something to make them even more effective: try changing some of the “will”, “might”, “should” words into others, eg:
What should I do to live a healthier lifestyle?
What could I do to live a healthier lifestyle?
What must I do to live a healthier lifestyle?
What WILL I do to live a healthier lifestyle?
You can get an awful lot out of changing just a few words 🙂
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Great list of empowering questions and ones that people don’t really appreciate just how powerful they can be.