Rewrite Self-Talk

Take stock of how you talk to yourself. Are you an inner critic, or your own inner coach?

Our subconscious mind acts as an objective data recorder. It stores every message we feed it. When we fill our internal dialogue with negativity, unease, and limiting beliefs, our subconscious tends to accept these as facts
When I was in the thick of musician’s dystonia symptoms, my inner critic ran the show. I constantly heard thoughts like:

"Why are you wasting your time? You’ll never get better."
"You’ll never return to performing again."
"This recovery training doesn’t work!"

Some mornings, I felt trepidation about musician’s dystonia training and interacting with my trumpet before I had even gotten out of bed, and was greeted by a barrage of sabotaging thoughts. These fed the anxiety and panic I was experiencing—a dysfunctional pattern that I had unknowingly bought into and was feeding.

When you are rewiring your brain and body, you need all hands on deck and united in your success. Think about your own internal conversations. What do you tell yourself after a “failed” audition? How do you react after a subpar performance? What thoughts pop up when you approach a difficult measure of music that you dread because you don’t believe it will ever feel solid? What do you say to yourself before a musician’s dystonia training session? How about afterwards?

Awareness is the first step to making change, and recognizing my own deep-seated pattern of negative, self-critical chatter marked a major turning point in my recovery journey. To create an optimum learning environment and start calming my nervous system down, I had to intentionally forge a new path. I started monitoring my thoughts throughout the day and used two specific strategies to program a new mindset:
A three-to-one ratio: For every single negative thought I caught—or word I spoke out loud—I deliberately stated three positive things that I could buy into. These were grounding, intentional truths like:

"I am making progress."
"I love the physical feel of the mouthpiece."
"I love sharing music with others."

Visualization: When a destructive thought surfaced, I imagined blowing it up in my mind and watching it drift down in harmless pieces, like a popped balloon. Then, I’d add my three positive thoughts.
You may find other strategies that work best for you. The important thing is to observe what’s happening and implement a plan to change negative dialogue. This has to be approached as technical work that you do anytime, anywhere. The brain would rather stay on the current, aberrant path, which includes the negative thinking that is so often intertwined with other focal dystonia elements.


Once I got the hang of monitoring and revising the critical chatter, I felt a distinct shift. What started as a forced, conscious effort transformed into a natural habit of positive, nurturing self-talk. It was simply a matter of becoming aware of what I was doing and taking action to develop a new dialogue with myself—one that set the stage for learning and recovery.