Students often talk down to themselves, speaker says
by Paul Branch
reporter

   Negative thinking, common today, brings people down and keeps them from achieving their goals, South Campus students learned the week before Spring Break.
   Flo Stanton, South Campus coordinator of health services, presented Positive Self-Talk, the second of a three-part series for the Women in New Roles Health Forum.
   Stanton offered her audience members what she calls a more positive way of communicating to themselves.
   Stanton said it is important for students to be aware of their language to themselves.
   “[Self-talk] reflects our behaviors as a child and our esteem as an adult,” she said.
   Stanton gave students three objectives: identify language uppers and downers, listen for destructive thinking and practice constructive thinking.
   These objectives should help students understand how their own language determines how they feel and how it affects their own lives.
   “[The goal should be to] promote constructive thinking and behavior by saying something positive,” she said.
   Language downers, according to Stanton, are those words like can’t and should have. Such down words have a direct outcome on how people feel about themselves on a daily basis, Stanton said.
   “They are words that either restrict you or make you regret,” she said.
   Stanton said such behavior is very destructive and lowers productivity.
   However, positive (constructive) self-talk builds confidence and helps people gain control of themselves by not restricting what they can do.
   “There is nothing wrong with our feelings; it’s what we do with them,” she said.
   Negative language not only affects the individual doing the thinking but leaks out to the people she comes in contact with every day.
   Stanton said families are especially affected by this negative talk.
   “We tend to be hardest on ourselves,” she said.
   If people have the right attitude, they can achieve many things they never realized.
   “Attitude is 90 percent of the job,” she said.
   Student Tammy Black said she benefited from the presentation.
   “It got me to put things in perspective on how to approach my family, and it got me to thinking differently,” she said.
   A registered nurse, Stanton said she originally created this talk for the WINR program to teach students how to stop criticizing themselves and to start encouraging themselves.
   Stanton will present Laughing Your Way Through Success, the last discussion in this series, Wednesday, April 7.