A highly successful executive — supportive and encouraging to her team, yet harshly self-critical. "I tell myself I'm not good enough, not fast enough, not smart enough. It's so automatic."
Drawing on John Gottman's research on the positive-to-negative ratio in relationships, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, we applied the same principle to her self-talk. The exercise: each time she caught a self-criticism, she paused and replaced it with three genuine positive statements about herself.
The win-win: criticize yourself a lot, and you get lots of practice affirming yourself; criticize less, and you lighten the load either way. "If you stop calling yourself terrible names, you won't need to do so much extra work!" — she laughed in agreement.
The most important conversation we have each day is the one with ourselves.
Days later she felt noticeably "lighter": elevated mood, more authentic leadership, greater self-belief.
