Questioning self-talk

Walk down the street today and chances are that you will trip over a self-development book, CD, or DVD telling you how to achieve your dreams, reach your goals, and cultivate your cuticles. Much of what you will read will centre around the words that you should use to “talk to yourself” and much of that will be based on the need for positivity; believe it and you will see it, create your own reality, and so on. Now however, a new study suggests that our psychic processes might not be as simple or straightforward as we may have thought. For the study researchers asked half of their subjects to spend a minute wondering if they would complete a task while the other half told themselves that they would. “Positivism” would suggest that telling yourself you will complete the task will lead to better results. However, when the subjects attempted the anagram based task it was those who had asked themselves whether they would complete it who fared better. In the next part of the study another group of subjects were again split into two groups; one group simply wrote the statement “I will” while the other group wrote “Will I” before the groups worked on the same task. Again the subjects did better when they wrote the question, “Will I?” even though they did not know that writing the statement related to the anagram task. Again, another group who wrote “Will I?” before writing down how much they intended to exercise in the following week achieved much closer to their aims than those who wrote “I will”. So what is going on here? The researchers say that asking a question increases the motivation of the person but they do not put forward an explanation as to why this might be so. Perhaps it is something to do with keeping you focussed on your goal but challenging yourself at the same time? Whatever the mechanism, it certainly seems from this study that one of the keys to living well is asking yourself the right questions.Meanwhile if you visit Meijer Ad that contains mostly likewise discounts with Winn Dixie Ad you surely have a range like ALDI Ad.