Anxiety, Self-Talk, and Success: Is Your Inner Voice Sabotaging You or Supporting You?

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0:32I can't wait to see you there. Rumination leads to worry. Worry leads to catastrophizing what's not going to happen, which ends up manifesting your worst realities coming true. That is the power of the brain. Friends, choose a coach and not a critic. Do you hear voices? What are they telling you? Do those voices sound like a critic or a coach? Oh, we're going there. You're like, wait a minute. What do you mean hearing voices? Yes. Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show, where we help empower seven-figure founders to scale their business to eight figures. And today we are gonna be talking about the inner voices that sometimes dictate our lives.

1:08Okay, so this podcast episode is basically on the back of me being a total bookworm and doing a lot of work. I do love good fiction. Oh, I love a good fiction book, but I also make sure that I'm tethering it by other things that are gonna develop me for peak performance. One of those books is The Untethered Soul. Y 'all, The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. it's rated 4.7 stars on Amazon and it has like 34 ,000 reviews. It's been published over like three or four million books. Pretty incredible. The second book has been Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It by Ethan Cross.

1:45And so this book, most people would say it's a little bit woo. And maybe it could be, but I found it really great at understanding myself as a human, myself as the soul, or sometimes the words that we say to ourselves. But for now, let's focus on chatter. What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a breakdown of what I learned in chatter, but through the lens of being an entrepreneur. So this is me saying, get the book. But if you want the code as viewed through the eyes and minds of a business owner, this is going to be the episode for you. Okay, so I want to use this to contextualize how we can find a better voice.

2:21And sometimes on the pod, I'll say things like, I'm going to choose a better story. Essentially, what voice am I going to listen to? And as entrepreneurs, there's plenty of voices vying for our attention. And if you wonder why you talk to yourself, if you wonder if your self-talk is toxic or why it might be, if you are looking for the number one way to ease your anxious thoughts, you are in the right place. So the first thing is if you experience a worry, if you experience what Ethan Cross calls worry rumination, thinking about everything that could go wrong all the time, you're normal. And this is normal.

2:58Okay. So we evolved to experience things like worry, anxiety, and negative emotions for a reason. Now, the goal of when we experience worry, anxiety, negative emotions is to grow from those negative emotions. It's for us to appreciate when things are not negative. It's for us to expand as humans. That's going to be the start of the book. So if you experience anxiety, you're normal. But from my perspective as an entrepreneur, we experience a lot of anxieties in a lot of different ways. So how do we get back to a really great functioning place? How do we keep ourselves a priority? How do we, even when we get knocked down, how are we getting back up to our normal state of functioning so that we continue to evolve?

3:42Now, for years, the track in my mind was, why did I do that? Why didn't I make a different decision? Why are you so stupid? You're an idiot. Why haven't you learned this already? That was the voice in my mind for years and years and years. And then I wondered why I struggled so much with anxiety and depression. My gosh, if I walked around and I followed somebody that I cared for and I said that again, and you're such an idiot. Why didn't you learn? Why don't you make a different decision? Why aren't you moving faster? Why is somebody else doing the other things? That person would totally be depressed as well.

4:18That person would say, excuse me, I don't need you in my life. And I wasn't willing to divorce the negative voices in my mind because I felt, I know, listen, it's weird. I actually thought that the negativity was pushing me forward. I felt like the negativity was making me better. I felt like the negativity was like a drill sergeant in my mind to be like, get down and give me 50. And I was like, yes, sir, I'll do another 50. And I just beat myself up thinking I'm beating myself into submission, beating myself into this version of perfection. That only works for so long and it only works until you burn yourself out.

4:47So every situation in my business, I look back and I would say like, what if, what if I had done things differently? What if I got a different result? And when I look back and only said, what if, it kept me small. I only would do things where I was guaranteed to win, which was truncating my expansion. If I was only playing games that I could win, I was never understanding the value of playing games that made me stronger in the long run. And when I was always looking back and wondering what if, it kept me in a loop of never enough. Like, you'll never have enough time. You're not going to have enough money.

5:26You'll never have enough success. And that's what those voices of anxiety were doing for me. And over the years, I, you know, I would say I was like the Valley Victorian of overthinking, right? I was the Valley Victorian of beating myself up. And now I simply say, I'm just going to be a detective. I'm going to search for clues that lead to my success. That's it. Can I find clues? Can I learn from my lessons? What's going to get me to success faster? Now, if you want to get clues for your success, this episode will help you because you're going to turn your inner critic into an inner coach. You're going to give you tools to pull you out of that worry complex.

6:04and it's gonna move you from anxiety into action. Now, when I say Dr. Ethan, maybe somebody would call him Ethan or Dr. Cross. I like Dr. Ethan because it makes him professional and friendly. So Dr. Ethan uses the word self-talk. That's sometimes when we might say like the inner voice or what are you hearing in your head? So self-talk. And it means that you are using the ability of a silent language to reflect on our lives. This is a language that only we hear ourselves. So your inner voice is like a Swiss army knife and it's gonna help you in four main ways. Now, please understand that I'm using his book as this framework.

6:42I did not make up these frameworks. This man is a professor at the University of Michigan. He is so brilliant and he's a very strong writer. So I'm just gonna give you the distilled version through the lens of an entrepreneur. So your inner voice is gonna help you in four main ways. Number one, memorizing. We have an inner voice, like back in the day when, I mean, this is before cell phones, but when somebody would say, oh, my number is 949-267-1102, what would you do? You'd bring out a pen, but you're repeating it to yourself. 949-021-012. 949-021. That's your inner voice. That's helping you.

7:14How you memorize is by repeating. Amazing. What a powerful thing that it is. Number two, we simulate. We simulate. In our mind, if we have to give a presentation at work, we have to give a speech at school. If we have to have a conversation with our partner, This inner voice helps us with simulation. How might I sound? How could I say it better? How can I make this person feel heard or seen? Oh, simulation. The third way that their inner voice helps you is by control and motivate. Have you ever been doing a workout and it absolutely sucks and you're like, I can't do this to the rep? And you'll say, come on, let's go, Jasmine.

7:47You can do it. One more. I always say, last one, best one. Let's go, let's go, let's go. That's what your inner voice is. Nobody else in the gym is hearing you talk to yourself, but that's a powerful thing is to control and motivate. And lastly, your inner voice, how it's helpful is that it helps us make sense of a messy world. Those were Dr. Ethan's worlds. So we get into arguments, we get rejected, we get embarrassed, and the inner voice helps us make sense and control things. It's like we're having a conversation to help us move past the uncertainty. Now, your inner voice helps you do everything from memorize a phone number to make sense of the world.

8:23It's pretty dang powerful. Now let's look at this through the lens of an entrepreneur. So we use this voice when we're struggling, but sometimes we don't know how to use this voice. Like how is this voice going to help us get a solution? How do we have the voices that go on our mind hype us up instead of tear us down? How do we use this inner critic who's always saying, are you doing enough? Can it be better? Are you moving fast enough? And instead have a voice that helps us memorize, simulate, controls, and motivates. When we understand how this inner voice works, we could use it to our advantage.

8:59So what happens is specifically with entrepreneurs is it's easy for the inner voice to catastrophize. It's gonna come up with the worst case scenario and then it's gonna stay what he calls the negative loop. You just keep on repeating the worst case scenario. This will be the last client you ever book. This last client that was really disappointed that says they're gonna leave you a negative review, it's gonna be the end of your business. And then we stay there and we can't bounce back. Well, what we want is when we're in that loop of self-beratement, it makes it hard to think or act. So I want us to pause here.

9:29When we feel anxious and we're in a negative loop, and then we wonder, why are we stuck? Or why can't I find a better solution? Or I know I could figure that out if, well, we have to first acknowledge we're in a negative loop, and then we have to find ways to remove ourselves out of it. Your self-talk voice got you in the lower loop, and your self-talk can bring you out of that loop. So at the end of 2020, I had hired a chief technology officer for Social Curator, and we hired our own development team for Social Curator. And it was the first time that I had done anything of this capacity. And I have to tell you, when we first did this, it was 2021, and we had built out the entire team.

10:08I was excited. I was elated. I was inspired. I literally was just like, oh, my God, the world is my freaking oyster. And shortly thereafter, all of that turned into I'm terrified, I'm panicked and I am such a freaking idiot. What did I just get myself into? And when I was in this state of excitement and elation, anything was possible. The ideas were just firing a thousand miles a minute. And then the minute that I slipped into not aware of it, the minute I slipped into anxiety, frustration, lack of knowing, like what is everybody talking about? How does everybody know tech? And everyone's gonna realize that I'm so stupid and I know nothing about tech.

10:49And guess what? They did. They accepted the job knowing that they were getting a job with a non-tech founder. I couldn't think. I kept on berating myself. It was that negative loop. And in order for me to get out of the loop, I actually had to realize that I was in it. I realized and I said, okay, all I'm doing is talking myself down and I'm not allowing myself to come up with a solution. And so I had to choose a new coach because the critic was too loud. and I said, if I wanted to get better, if I wanted to get a solution, what must I do? Take action. Did I know what action to take? Absolutely not, absolutely not.

11:28I just started Googling, I started asking questions. How do you learn how to start a SaaS company? Like, how am I a SaaS founder? And one thing led to another and I enrolled into something called the SaaS Academy that was teaching me. The minute I took action, I was able to get out of the negative loop and say, okay, I have work to do. and the work led me to hope and the hope led me to clarity and clarity led me to more action and more action allowed me to really step into understanding how to build the business that I had never ever experienced before. And that was powerful. That was how I got out of the loop.

12:03So there are three main forms that negative self-talk takes. Number one, rumination. What we do is we spend a lot of times thinking and rethinking about things we can't fix. They already happened. So when we stay in this state of rumination, we stay in the lower loop, we stay stuck, and all we do is repeat it. So we harm ourselves by doing this because Dr. Ethan says, when we ruminate, it's very hard for us to think of solutions. When all we do is like, I wish it had been different, why did it have been different? We can't think of a solution. And when we can't think of a solution, it makes us worry.

12:39And what happens when we worry? When we worry about the future, when we worry about what ifs, we already begin to manifest and catastrophize a future we're trying to avoid because that's all we're thinking about. We're thinking about everything that could go wrong. And so what do we end up doing focusing on the things that go wrong that actually turns out to be the very things that go wrong? So next thing you know, after all the things go wrong, your life is over, your dream is dead. I have to tell you a few years ago, So JD and I were sitting down and I am telling you in the matter of three minutes, in three minutes, I'm just like, okay, and then this could happen and then this could happen and then you need to get a job or maybe we just go and we buy like a store.

13:25Like I was like, what were those like those, those stores where you can go and ship products? The stores where you have like a PO box. It's like, just like this random, like mom and pop delivery store. Why I came up with this, I have no idea. And I'm like, so then you're gonna have to do that. And JD's like, no, no, no, I'll get a taco truck. And if we get a taco truck, you and Luna can come visit me and I'll make you guys dinner. and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait. In a matter of three minutes, our lives went from like all these things that we're gonna build and now my husband's working at a taco truck.

13:48You guys, it happens, okay? You just let yourself go there and Dr. Ethan says, that serves nobody. Rumination leads to worry. Worry leads to catastrophizing what's not going to happen, which ends up manifesting your worst realities coming true. That is the power of the brain. Friends, choose a coach and not a critic. The second type of negative self-talk is the negative loop. He kind of mentioned this. So you're going to stay stuck in the stories that you're telling yourself. Like I could actually for days could have been stuck in like, I'm going to be like the wife of a taco truck owner. Nothing's wrong with that, but it's very different than the life we live right now.

14:25I could have stayed there. We have to actively choose something else so that we get manifest build and take action towards that very thing. So you become consumed with the outcome you want to avoid? How about choosing being consumed with the outcome you so desire? It changes everything. Now, the third type of negative self-talk is self-beratement. This is where you become very critical of yourself. And when you're critical, when you're critical of yourself, it feels like death of a thousand paper cuts. I was on a walk with my sister a couple days ago, and she said, no, Jasmine, that's a real thing.

15:01It's a form of torture. It exists. Death by paper cuts. It's the slowest form of death that's just tolerably painful, but could actually kill you. I thought to myself, that's self-beratement. It slowly kills a dream before the dream even had a fighting chance of taking off. I have good news. Okay, Dr. Ethan says that all three of those types, everything I just described, my life and journey of a thousand paper cuts death, of owning a taco truck, of telling myself that it just wasn't smart enough to make it happen or good enough, or like there was a bar and I just couldn't meet it. Dr. Ethan says it's normal.

15:42That kind of conversation is normal. And what I would venture to say is all the entrepreneurs I am able to speak with and consult and help build businesses, dang, it's normal. So if it's normal, every day we have to make decisions. As entrepreneurs, we have to make big decisions with very limited information. And when we make decisions with limited information, what we want to do months later is tell ourselves how stupid that was, or we should have done differently. Listen, did you do the best you could with the information you had? If you did, you can't ask yourself for anything more. And that's very hard.

16:19I understand it. I understand that we always want to make the right decision, but we have limited information. And so if we have limited information and we're making the best decisions that we can, then the only thing that we could do for ourselves is give ourselves grace and say, well, don't do that again. Get back on the horse and ride faster now. So we are the few and we are the rare and we are the crazy ones who decide to take a bet on ourselves, on our dreams. Most people don't do this. And statistics show that 90 % of people who actually do decide to take a bet on themselves, their business is done within seven years.

16:53So if you are taking a bet on yourself, why not? How not? Guess. Build yourself up. If I'm going to give myself the best shot at making this thing work, am I going to make myself miserable? Am I going to talk so negatively to myself? Or am I going to give myself the best stinking shot I have? I am telling you the best athletes we have ever seen hardly have coaches that are on the sidelines screaming at them, telling them that they could do better, that they should do better. You want the coach is doing? Silently watching and amending things slowly one shot at a time. Dr. Ethan lists a lot of things in his book that he says, these are small things that we could start doing to change the narrative immediately.

17:30I believe there was a list of 12. What I want to do is I'm going to take a list of three things that I thought were perfect for entrepreneurs that you could take action on today to start easing some of the anxiety and changing your critic into a coach. Okay. Now, Dr. Ethan, I think I'd mentioned this before. He is a professor and researcher at the University of Michigan, and they conducted a study. And they conducted a study around what would be the most effective thing to reduce anxiety. You want to know what it is? Journaling. Journaling is the most effective way to reduce anxiety. And do you want to know the least used form, function, methodology of reducing anxiety?

18:12Journaling. It's the most effective and it's the least used. So they started trying to understand and research why, if it's so effective, do people not do it? What they discovered was that it made people feel too vulnerable. When you wrote it down, the words existed. And people would rather live in their head than see it written on a paper. So if you're an entrepreneur and you're struggling with a lot of anxiety or negative self-talk, the kindest thing that you could do to yourself, and he even went as far as right, like this doesn't have to be I'm spending two hours every day journaling. It's literally writing down everything and getting it on paper.

18:51Now, what he wants to say too is that journaling is not a magic pill. There's no such thing as a quick fix. You don't have anxiety or struggle with this type of worry. And then the next day it's gone. Not at all. But what he talks about is mixing tools. Do you need to journal every day? No, would it be good? Sure, but can you do it once in a while in addition to some of the other tips that he recommends? Let's just start there. Now, Dr. Ethan gives a very helpful prompt. So I'm gonna share this with you as an entrepreneur. Write down your thoughts and feelings. He says set a timer. Write down your thoughts and feelings for 15 minutes.

19:21Now, don't worry about grammar. Don't worry about punctuation. Don't worry about your penmanship. It's just, just get it out. And he says that you'll be able to write for a few minutes and you're gonna struggle getting all of your negative worry, anxiety out. So 15 minutes is a long time because it feels like a lot more in your head than it's out on paper. So once you do that, he asks you to read it and then says, what's revealed? When your mind and hand starts going, the truth is revealed on the paper. And what he says is that those points acts as guides on the next decision to take. How we move past anxiety is to get out of the negative loop.

19:58When we journal, it's guidepost to what action to take next. And he said that after you journal, if you were to go back to your journal a couple days later, it's as if you're reading the story of somebody else. It's your story. And in the moment, it's real. You go back a few days later and you read it like it's a story of somebody else. And oftentimes studies show that we can give advice or recommendations to other people better than we can give it to ourselves. It's called Solomon's paradox. So Solomon was a wise king from biblical allegories and stories. And people would travel the world to visit King Solomon for his wisdom.

20:37But if you were to look at King Solomon's life, it was speckled with mistakes and bad decisions and terrible outcomes. So Solomon's paradox means that we're able to give advice to others that we can't really give or understand ourselves. But there is an exception to this. if you were to write a letter to yourself when you were 18 years old, you could go back and give such rich wisdom because you've gone through it and that version of you isn't the current version of you. So if we apply the same theory, what would it be like for you to write yourself a letter, pretend you're 85 years old, giving advice to yourself today?

21:18What would that look like? What would it feel like? What do you think that person, who's writing this letter to you, what do you think they're going to say to you today? That is what Dr. Ethan advocates for. That is a Solomon paradox because we can give better advice to ourselves, looking at ourselves from a different point in time. Now, the first of these three tools that I wanted to dive into was the first was journaling. And the second is distanced self-talk. Now, can you think of a time where you have coached yourself through something by using your own name. I did use an example before, like sometimes I'm at the gym.

21:56I was like, you got this, Jasmine. You got this. Distance self-talk works mostly because Dr. Ethan studied in his lab what I had just mentioned was the Solomon's paradox. It's that distance self-talk. Ever since reading this book a couple months ago, I found myself talking to myself in third person. And to be honest, I've been doing a lot of it. I think I've been doing okay, except last night, Jadie and I are driving home and I turned to him. It's dark and we're driving down the 4053 way. And I feel like very tired. And I turned to him and I'm like, I think I'm tired of talking so positively to myself.

22:31Like, I think I'm tired of being like, you got this girl. Fight on. It's another day. You got this. It wasn't what you wanted, but it was the lesson you needed. And I was like, I feel like I just want to stop with the hype and just be like, dang girl, you did it. You hit your goals the way exactly you wanted them. And I was like, is there going to come a point in time where I could just take a break from the negative self-talk and then just look to spit out some facts, like, look at what you did. Ain't that great? And he said, I don't think so. I think the ability for us to have distance self-talk in a very positive way is what continues to embolden our progress upwards and onwards.

23:06And I was like, it's too late. I want to have this conversation. I just want you to say like, yeah, girl, I want you to hit those 10-figure goals. Let's go back to Dr. Ethan. When you use distance self-talk, you're using language to automatically shift your perspective. When you say, hey, your name, when I'm saying Jasmine, you got this. Jasmine, dig down deep. Jasmine, do that last squat. Jasmine, don't close this computer until this funnel is done. Jasmine, that conversation that you have with a teammate. Jasmine, that SOP that you know you don't want to build, but you absolutely know that it should because it's contingent on the growth and scaling of this company.

23:38Jasmine, you're going to do this. I'm coaching myself. Same situation, different perspective. We can become our own coach. Now, the third most effective ways of talking ourselves back from anxiety. Now, just to recap, negative self-talk is normal. For entrepreneurs, I'm saying it is amplified. We are worried about a catastrophized future. So whenever this happens, Dr. Ethan says we can peel back that anxiety by 12 different things, three that I thought were very pertinent to entrepreneurs. Number one was journaling. Number two was distant self-talk. And number three, rituals. So we have rituals for grieving when somebody dies.