148,000: That’s How Many Times You Were Told “No” By Age 18

How Positive Self-Talk Can Counteract Your Negativity Bias, Smash Limiting Beliefs, and Rewire Your Brain

Photo by Francisco De Legarreta C. on Unsplash

The average person is told “No” 148,000 times before they become an adult. That’s a stat from the book What to Say When You Talk to Yourself by Dr. Shad Helmstetter, one of the leading researchers on Positive Self-Talk. That’s an average of 22 times a day for 18 straight years. Let that sink in. It blew my mind and that’s just the average person. If you had really understanding parents, maybe you only heard it 50,000 times. But some people are probably pushing 200,000 or more.

Some of those no’s were necessary — No, don’t touch the stove; No, don’t pull on the dog’s tail; No, don’t cross the road. But there’s another kind of no that isn’t the life-saving kind — No, you can’t play take piano lessons; No, stop making noise; You have no discipline — that limit our potential. They tell us what’s not possible, what we can’t do, and what we’re not good at. For the most part, they’re well-intentioned, designed to help us develop into responsible, successful adults.

But they do something else, too. They become programmed into our minds as negative self-talk. We carry them around for the rest of our lives, whether we’re aware of it or not. Those pathways become hardwired into our brains. But, just as no was programmed into us, it can be programmed out, too. It can be replaced by something that expands our possibilities.

The First Step Is Admitting You Have a (Negativity) Problem

I’m on a Zoom call with a close friend and mentor. We’re talking about this business he wants to start and I’m here to find out if there’s a rol in it for me. He lays out the vision. It’s big, like really big.

That’s when I break the Cardinal Rule of brainstorming — I tell him it’s impossible. I didn’t say it directly. I paused for a while, looked off-screen, searched for the words, and then said it’s impossible but in the form of a question. Like, don’t you think that… You know, the kind of thing ask someone when you want to cut them down but you want it to be their idea.