What are your dominant themes of self-talk?

When Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor was recovering from her loss of left-brain functioning, she discovered two important values. One was the value of sleep. She needed eleven hours of sleep each day, gradually reducing that down to nine and one-half. The other value was that of having people around her who believed in her ability to recover. She needed people to love her, not for the person she had been prior to the stroke, but for the person she might now become. She was still the same "essence" (soul?), but now she was having different wiring in her brain. She needed to be accepted as she was now, encouraged to set goals and dream dreams. She needed people to celebrate her triumphs, however small they might be, not focus on her disabilities. She needed people to touch her, to come close, not with aggressiveness and anxiety, but with calm reassurances.

At the same time, she needed to be careful of her own "self-talk." Paying more attention to her physiological responses to stimuli, she realized that though it would be easy to allow herself to feel self-pity, self-deprecation, and depression, these emotions had physiological components that she did not like, and therefore, she trained her newly emerging left brain to self-talk differently, limiting those stimuli from taking over and becoming dominant themes.