Thoughts on Leadership: In Gratitude for Positive Self-Talk

By Gino Blefari

“You are everything that is, your thoughts, your life, your dreams come true. You are everything you choose to be. You are as unlimited as the endless universe.” – Dr. Shad Helmstetter

This week my travels find me starting Monday from my home office, conducting my typical WIG calls. On Tuesday, I participated in the early morning Berkshire Hathaway Energy call then traveled to New Orleans for Wednesday’s creative presentation by Corporate Magic for the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Sales Convention 2024. Wednesday afternoon, I traveled home and this morning, I sat down to write this post to you.

Read more: Thoughts on Leadership: In Gratitude for Positive Self-Talk

If you read last week’s post, you’ll know we’ve officially declared November “Gratitude Month” here in Thoughts on Leadership land, a time to talk all about the ways gratitude can positively transform your business and life.

One important element of gratitude is remembering that the way you talk to yourself can have a huge impact on your mindset.

In fact, you can test the efficacy of your self-talk with a single question. Ask yourself this: “Is the way I use language programming me for success or failure?”

Your answer is your barometer for how positive or negative your self-talk is right now.

When it comes to self-talk, one of the preeminent authorities on the topic is Dr. Shad Helmstetter, founder of The Self-Talk Institute, the Self-Talk Plus App and author of more than 25 books about self-talk. (For a fantastic read, I suggest checking out Dr. Helmstetter’s best-seller, What to Say When You Talk to Yourself.) Prior to his work in the field of human behavior, Dr. Helmstetter was a foreign language interpreter for the U.S. government. It was during this time that he realized everyone thinks and speaks with their own “internal language of success or failure.” He says, “I developed a hypothesis that with the right self-talk, we could actually train our brain to think in the positive, just like learning a new language.”

After extensive research, Dr. Helmstetter’s studies found that the hypothesis was correct. One important way to retrain your self-talk is through gratitude. “Gratitude is the conscious recognition of someone else, or of the world itself, sharing its blessings with us,” Dr. Helmstetter described in an interview for Authority Magazine. “Gratitude is one of the few human emotions that can be experienced in the positive.”

Dr. Helmstetter says that one reason we don’t feel gratitude is because our negative self-talk “literally rewires gratitude out of our brains.”

In scientific terms, those who think in the negative wire their brain’s right prefrontal cortex to be stronger, he explained. Why is that so bad? Dr. Helmstetter says that the right prefrontal cortex is the area of the brain that causes us to feel afraid, to hide or to flee, and he says that people who think negatively all the time grow more neural networks and connections in the part of the brain that turns off gratitude. Conversely, those who feel gratitude and think positively build up the neural connections in the left prefrontal cortex, which is the area that helps find solutions and brings about a sense of peacefulness. If gratitude had a home in our minds, it would be in this left prefrontal cortex, according to Dr. Helmstetter, and when you think positive thoughts, this part of the brain is subsequently strengthened.

You might be reading all this and thinking, ‘OK, I want to strengthen my left prefrontal cortex, feel more gratitude and think more positively but how do I change the language of the self-talk in my brain?’

Well, you could stop yourself from what many call “doomscrolling,” or the act of picking up your phone and taking in a torrent of negative news and content. Psychologist Dr. Susan Albers says the reason many people with negative mindsets doomscroll is because for them, it’s comforting to seek out information that confirms any negative feelings they might be experiencing.

So, you could stop opening your phone and doomscrolling the internet at night. You could also repeat a list of positive affirmations in the morning. Remember, great leaders believe anything is possible because they have repeated that idea over and over again in their heads. It’s a simple idea but one that is often overlooked.

There is real strength to be found in repetition. Legendary sales trainer and my first real estate mentor Tom Hopkins once said, “Repeat anything often enough and it will start to become you.”

When I teach my course on mindset routine, I talk about the nonconscious mind being servile, which means it sets no goals of its own. It doesn’t judge the merit or the value of the request; it just tries to carry out the given order.

Denis Waitley, author of “The Psychology of Winning,” said: “When you talk to yourself, you should be your best coach and not your worst critic.” Waitley studied the effect of psycholinguistics on Olympic athletes and their coaches, and how autogenic training allowed their bodies to respond to what they said in their minds. Self-talk like: “My heart rate is slow and regular … my breathing is relaxed and effortless …”

When these athletes said these things in their minds, their bodies responded. Through repetition and the way you speak to yourself, Waitley explained, the body reacts to what you’re saying and does just that.

So, what’s the message? Brian Tracy (quoting the legendary Earl Nightingale from The Greatest Secret) says the greatest discovery in human history is that you become what you think about most of the time, which is one of the reasons why the more you study leaders, the more likely you are to become an effective leader. Self-talk, at its very essence, is what we say to ourselves all day long and how we say it. I’ll end with this anecdote from Johnny Bench, fourteen-time MLB All-Star and a two-time National League Most Valuable Player: “In the second grade, they asked us what we wanted to be. I said I wanted to be a ball player and they laughed. In the eighth grade, they asked the same question, and I said a ball player and they laughed a little more. By the eleventh grade, no one was laughing.”