Talking to yourself (whether talking out loud or using a voice inside your head) is a highly useful tool that most people employ every day. We use self-talk to keep us on track. You might walk into a room and ask yourself, “What did I come in here to get?” We use self-talk to practice difficult conversations, for example, “I need to remember to use a chipper voice when I say, ‘I don’t have time for that today.’” And we use self-talk to motivate ourselves. “Just one more lap, and I will have beat my all-time exercise record! One more lap! One more lap!” Perhaps most importantly, we use self-talk to help us with our own emotional regulation: “Just take a deep breath before you start.” 

When toddlers, whose expressive language is emerging, become dysregulated, we know how important it is to give them models for that language so they can learn to develop an inner voice for themselves. It’s their ability to take and repeat those regulating phrases that is an important key in their ability to self-soothe. They learn phrases such as, “It’s ok.”; “I can come back and play again tomorrow”; and, “Maybe next time.” 

These types of self-regulating phrases are very important for individuals who are speaking at the sentence level or who are conversationally fluent. The Floreo lessons provide banner language that can be read by the Coach to the Learner, and this may provide a bridge from the time that the Learner hears the Coach reading the banner to the time when the Learner can think of the verbal reminder as an inner voice. The Coach can adapt the banner language to provide the best reminders for that Learner. This can work for lessons in the Emotional Regulation skill category, but is also important in lessons such as Unfriendly Greeting , Security Savvy: TSA Search and Questions or Teamwork: Collaboration & Compromise. 

For Learners who are either non-speaking or are using single-word or phrase level speech, this gets a bit trickier. They need self-talk, self-soothing phrases as much as anyone else and sometimes, even more so. They might need you to be their inner voice over a longer period of time. When I have worked with individuals with limited expressive communication, I have found it best to model both single words or short phrases (that they might be able to incorporate into their internal or external self-talk) as well as model longer, more nuanced phrases. The longer phrases can get tricky as well. It takes practice, but when done well, the longer statement ideally would convey compassion for what a dysregulated person might be feeling without overinterpretation. That’s a bit of a high-wire act, but compassion is always a good place to start.  

Self-talk can be very healthy and helpful for all of us as long as we keep it positive. The author, Suzette Haden Elgin, wrote: “What you feed will grow.” We want to avoid focusing on the negatives in our self-talk because it is not helpful and only draws attention to the limitations and disappointments. Rather we want to focus on the positives in self-talk relying on affirming, encouraging statements. And remember, you’ve got this!