MY SELF-TALK ORIGIN STORY

Before self-talk became my work, it was the pattern I couldn’t stop noticing — in myself, and in the world around me

Here’s the deal: for most of my life, I had a crap-tastic self image.

Self confidence? Loads of it. But the lens I VIEWED that confidence through – the opinions I formed around it, the things I did to “keep myself in check,” the image of myself I saw in my internal mirror –was all scratchy and blurry, and made me believe that self-confidence was synonymous with narcissism and vanity.

Negative talk was the norm in my life when it came to the women around me.

I thought it was normal to bash your body, downplay your intelligence, and tuck your talents far, far away. And even though it felt vaguely wrong, I joinined in just to connect – just to fit in. I wanted to change the world but would never admit it. That was way too ambitious, and ambition wasn’t relatable. I just wanted to relate. How else would I find my people?

But I wasn’t a cynic and I didn’t loathe myself. I just felt like my brightness was blinding to others. So I stored it away. That way, other people could turn my brightness on and off at their own will — whenever they needed it, and me, most. As I got older, I developed a Hero complex that made me OBSESSED with saving the day. If I could just rescue someone, anyone, from sadness or trouble, I’d be in. It’s a tale as old as time: I became so others-focused that there was no room for myself.

The cost was my self-trust.

It’s ironic that the more I bonded with others over negativity — the more I beat myself down with the “selfless” goal of lifting someone else up by showing them I really wasn’t all that great — the more alone I felt.I was fab at faking a smile and winning people over with my generosity, but ended up feeling even lonelier than before when I gave everyone my all, tried to be like them, spoke their language….and still faded into the background.

What was wrong with me?

In my late teens and twenties, that disconnection got louder. I struggled with orthorexia — a form of disordered eating that can look, from the outside, like discipline or wellness or “having it together.” At the time, I didn’t have the language to understand what was happening. I just knew I was spending a lot of energy trying to manage myself into being “okay.”

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…so usually when you hit this point in someone’s self-written bio, it’s when you get the Oprah-style A-HA moment. But my “story” isn’t about one rock-bottom moment, even though I had a lot of them, and it’s not about a clearly defined before-and-after shot. Those never tell the whole story, anyway.

It IS about continuously choosing to be proactive over being reactive, over and over again.

And in order to do that, I needed to come clean with myself about the language I was thinking and speaking, to myself (and with others).

I needed to be honest about how often I used self-deprecation as a safety net, about the difference between having humility and erasing vital parts of myself, and about how many of my “realistic” thoughts were actually fear trying to sound convincing.

This became the foundation of WANT: Women Against Negative Talk.

What are we actually saying to ourselves?

Where did it come from?

Why do we confuse self-trust with arrogance, self-respect with vanity, or wanting more with being ungrateful?

And what becomes possible when we start rewiring the self-talk that keeps us stuck?

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I first thought of the name “WANT: Women Against Negative Talk” in 2007. I didn’t yet understand the full scope of what I was naming — I just knew negative talk was everywhere, and it felt like a way bigger barrier than people gave it credit for. I knew there was another way to be.

Almost two decades later, I’m still doing the work — only now, I’ve built a life around helping other people do it too.

Despite what you might hear out there, I don’t believe the goal can — or should — ever be to delete negative self-talk forever. We’re human. We have histories, nervous systems, bad days, group chats, mirrors, headlines, inboxes, and entire industries built around making us doubt ourselves. Your self-talk is not always going to sound like a supportive best friend.

But I do believe we can learn to treat self-talk as information rather than something inherently good or bad.

We can learn to notice the language that keeps us stuck and question the stories we’ve repeated for so long they’ve started to feel like facts. We can shift from reactive to proactive, not in a forced-positivity way, but in a way that gives us more agency over how we move through our lives.

That’s the work I do now — through books, keynotes, workshops, coaching, media, cabaret, and conversations of all kinds. And it’s the work I believe we all must do if we want to create the world we say we want to create.

Because when we change the conversation we’re having with ourselves, we don’t just feel differently. We live differently.

And when we live differently, we make different choices — in our relationships, our work, our communities, and the culture we help create.