My friends, I've come to believe that if you talk to yourself the way I'm about to describe, you'll get everything you want in life. I think you'll love learning about the power of self-talk. I'm Jerry Banfield, and I see myself as a living example of self-talk putting you in the exact position you want to be in. So first, let's define what self-talk is, and then I'll tell you a few stories I think you'll enjoy.
Self-talk is the habits, the language, and the thinking you direct at your ego, your mind, your body, your idea of who you are. For example, self-talk happens when you screw something up. What kind of self-talk happens right after that? The self-talk I have now, if I fall down in a yoga pose, is: that's funny, nice job trying, you're getting stronger. If I upload a video on YouTube that does poorly, my self-talk is: we're going to learn from this, we're going to go get some more inspiration, and we're going to do even better next time. My self-talk when I get upset is: it's okay to be a little upset, you chose to feel this way, and you can choose to feel a different way.
What's even more important than that kind of reactionary self-talk is the deep-down beliefs you carry. These have often been programmed very thoroughly in the past, frequently by other people, but you've accepted them, you've taken them in, and you've reinforced them. In my experience, if you'll take in new thoughts, you can program those as your new reality.
How I came to believe I reprogrammed my health
I set out to see a level of health in my life that I'd never seen before. I made a decision that I'll do whatever it takes to be in the best health of my life. And I have not had one day sick, not a single day sick, since October 2022 — which, at the time I'm recording this in March 2024, is a long stretch.
I can tell you exactly why I believe I got sick that last time. I was about to go help my mother move. On the surface, I was happy to go help her. But deep down, I really didn't want to. In the way I've come to understand it, my body honored my deep-down subconscious unexpressed desire to stay here in my house, do my videos, play my games, be with my family, go to my yoga and my AA meetings, and keep the intimacy with my wife. That subconscious desire said: I really don't want to take a week to go help my mother move in Mississippi. And to me, that manifested as an illness — pure fatigue, no other symptoms, just fatigue — to give me what I was subconsciously asking for.
Once you realize the self-talk you've done in the past — consciously, at some point — you see that once you program it, repeated enough times, it becomes unconscious and unquestioned belief. But if you can get those beliefs out and examine them, I believe you can reprogram your entire reality.
The money story: from "I'm broke" to "I have enough"
Let's talk about money. I used to have a mindset that I'm broke, that I can't afford nice stuff, that everything's too expensive. I didn't focus on how much I did have. I'd look at my bank account and feel like other people had it better than me. My money self-talk was that I don't have that much money, I don't have enough money. If you boiled my self-talk down to its simplest form, it was: I don't have enough money.
So what did that materialize into? Especially after college, I took really low-paying jobs, where my other self-talk was: I don't value my time, my time is not valuable, I don't value it and other people don't value it either. So I'd take low-paying jobs and then resent how little money I got. Meanwhile, friends I went to college with were earning double, triple, some of them five times as much money as me — and I resented them for that too. I expected they should pay for things because I'm poor and they're not. All of that was driven by self-talk.
When I examined my self-talk around money and chose to reprogram myself, I looked around about ten years ago and realized: I am wealthy. I've never had a day in my life where I didn't have enough to eat. I've never had a day where I didn't have a place to live — despite being an alcoholic and a gambling addict and having a few other issues. Not one day have I had to sleep outside. Not one day have I missed a meal. I'm clearly very wealthy. I clearly have enough money.
Even though my external circumstances were the same as they'd been for a while, when I internalized "I have enough money," that started being my self-talk. And I've made more money doing work I love than all the years I worked so-called real jobs combined, multiplied several times over. Just showing up and doing videos on YouTube, saying whatever I think can help you each day, turns out to pay way, way more than anything I'd been able to do before — way better than all the jobs I worked so hard at and risked my life at, like being a corrections officer and a police officer. It pays better than a lot of my friends' jobs too, and some of them are jealous.
So when your self-talk is "I am wealthy, I am healthy, I love myself, I love the world, I have enough," I believe that, ironically, reality reinforces your existing self-talk. If you want to go deeper on the money side of all this, I keep these conversations going in my Money playlist.
Why I think so many people get hurt in crypto
Let's move on to things that operate on that same energy. This is how a lot of people have gotten ripped off in crypto. People come into crypto with the conscious mindset, "I'm going to make all this money." And while some do, many come in with the conscious thought "I'm going to get rich quick." But the unconscious belief behind that is, "I'm poor, I'm broke, I don't have enough." That's why so many people who thought they were going to get rich plowed into crypto and lost huge amounts of money — the self-talk behind it was "I'm broke, I'm poor, I don't have enough."
Consciously you're using something like crypto to try and escape that, but even if you do succeed, the old self-talk catches up with you. Even when I had poor money self-talk, any good opportunity that came along, I'd end up finding a way to waste the money. I'd go to the strip club when I was a police officer and blow two weeks of my pay. I'd wreck my car and then have to work. The first car I bought, I worked a whole summer and used all my savings bonds to buy it — and I wrecked it in a night of drunk driving. It took me quite a while to get enough money together to buy another car.
Today, even with a car payment, because I have enough money, and because my self-talk is that I have enough money and that I love the car I have, I'm driving a car with almost 200,000 miles on it and I'm not shopping for a new one. I love the car I've got. When you extrapolate this self-talk across all areas of life, you can see how powerful it is.
My worst financial decisions — and realizing I was wealthy anyway
When I was at the depths, in the worst financial situation of my life, my self-talk a year before that had started saying, "I'm broke." Looking back now, it seems so ridiculous, because at the time I had paid off tons of debt and made hundreds of thousands in crypto. But my earnings had dropped drastically when the crypto bull market turned into a bear market, and I felt broke. Externally, you would have thought, this guy made $100,000 in 2018 running his mouth online — and yet I felt broke at the end of the year.
In 2019, I made the worst financial decisions I've ever made. I sent my daughter to a private school and even talked my wife into it. That private school for her pre-K was $18,000 of after-tax money. I then spent over $100,000 on a new startup idea — on credit cards, business loans, and personal loans — and it failed miserably. A year after I'd made over $100,000 in 2018, in 2019 I lost something like $70,000 in my business. And I was sitting at the bankruptcy attorney's office, and I realized: I did this by thinking broke, by self-talking broke. I did this.
As I drove home from the bankruptcy attorney and decided not to declare bankruptcy, I realized again how wealthy I was. Even though I had destroyed my finances — I'd borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, taking cash advances on credit cards to make minimum payments, I had drawn down my wife's investments to bail me out so we could even pay our bills. I was paying the mortgage up until I told her I was taking cash advances on credit cards that collectively had over $100,000 in limits and were almost maxed out. My wife was not prepared for that, and she went through her entire savings and her investments.
Despite all of that, my wife still loved me. Despite all of that, I still had enough money to pay for professional massages. Despite all of that, my daughter continued in private school — we'd already paid the tuition. And I never missed a meal. My kids never missed a meal. We never wanted for anything. And I realized: I'm insanely wealthy. Even with all the stupid decisions I'd made, I still hadn't suffered any real, lasting financial harm.
Today, all those credit cards are paid off. Today I have almost $50,000 in crypto, and all of our family debt may be paid off in the next year or two. I was looking through some of my papers earlier today. Four years ago, we had $600,000 in debt, and our net worth was negative $200,000 or more. I believe I did that by self-talking broke. Our net worth has gone up several hundred thousand dollars since then — and I believe I did that by self-talking wealthy.
Self-talk and your relationships
When you realize that your inner reality drives your outer reality, you can apply this to relationships too. When you feel lonely and disconnected and you tell yourself, "I'm a lonely person, people don't like me, I don't like other people," that self-talk pushes people away. But when your self-talk is, "I love people, I love getting to know people, I am a person who thrives in relationships, I love being a parent, a child, a romantic partner, a husband — I do really well in these roles, I learn a lot, it's supportive," then in my experience it manifests.
The main way you learn self-talk is by what you take in and the people you surround yourself with. As kids, a lot of us got into habits of negative self-talk because we grew up in environments — parents, relatives, friends, school, classrooms, music, movies — that taught us all this negative self-talk. The good news is that today there's all kinds of literature, and there are people you can listen to, including me, who will help you reprogram it.
I'm a person today who only participates in healthy, loving, positive, supportive relationships. If a relationship is based on toxicity, on wanting to change somebody, on somebody not being good enough, I will not participate in it — and I don't care which relationship it is. I only accept relationships full of love and joy, where we're growing together, learning, and enjoying life. Those are the only kind of relationships I accept today.
If you're single and you want to attract somebody, the self-talk is: "I am preparing to receive the partner of my dreams. I'm doing the work today to be ready to be a fantastic husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, or fiancé." When you do that self-talk and you prepare, your mind starts looking for that intentionally. Our eyes take in billions of points of data every moment we're seeing, but the brain filters that down to a picture that's relevant to what we already understand. It automatically filters out what it doesn't think we're interested in, and it focuses most easily on what it already recognizes and knows. So if you want your life to be any particular way — if you want anything in life — I believe it starts with the self-talk. I talk through a lot more of this in my Dating playlist if attracting a partner is where you're focused right now.
The music problem, and looking under the hood
I'm grateful to be remembering all of this today, because it can be very easy to slip into negative self-talk — especially when you listen to music. A lot of the music that's promoted and popular today carries a ton of negative self-talk. If you listen for the "I am" statements in the music, and you listen to the stories, a lot of it is basically programming you to say, "I am a victim, I'm powerless, other people did this to me." When you focus on all that, the self-talk gets programmed in unconsciously and negatively. That's why I avoid listening to that kind of music.
What's frustrating in life is when your conscious mind says one thing and your unconscious says another. When I was trying to date and find a woman to be with, my conscious mind said, "I'm doing everything I can to find the perfect girl, I'm so committed to dating and being happy and having a great relationship." But my unconscious self-talk said, "I'm a sad, lonely, single man. I don't deserve to be with anybody who really loves me." And that stuff is often unconscious — you have to intentionally look into what you actually believe and see what's going on under the hood.
If you look at the movies you watch, the music you listen to, and the people you hang out with, you'll often find a reflection of your self-talk. Married guys tend to hang out with other married people. Single people tend to hang out with other single people. Sober people tend to hang out with sober people. Drunks tend to hang out with drunks. The people you surround yourself with are often a mirror of your self-talk.
Aligning your conscious and unconscious self-talk
Where peace usually comes in is when your unconscious self-talk matches your conscious idea of what you're trying to do. When you're trying to manifest money and you already feel wealthy and know you have enough, things line up. I logged into MEXC today and found $1,600 sitting there that baffled me — I had no idea how it got there. When your conscious self-talk is "I am wealthy, I have so much financial abundance, life easily supports me in doing what I want to do," and at the same time you're consciously asking, "How can I give people value? How can I help people and then give them avenues to give back and support me?" — when your self-talk, the people you spend time with, and your conscious mind are all aligned, that's when the magic happens.
I know it's frustrating when your conscious self-talk is going one direction and your unconscious beliefs are going the other. If you feel like you're having a battle in some area of your life, the real battle is usually your unconscious self-talk versus your conscious self-talk. This is the same idea behind how I believe I hacked reality to get anything I want — it always comes back to lining up what you say with what you actually believe underneath.
Stepping back from my mother, and digging up "you're a bad son"
I recently stepped back from my relationship with my mother, and I felt some turbulence. Consciously, I was saying: I will not have anyone in my life where I have an unhealthy relationship, where we argue and fight, where they're in active addiction and mental insanity. Consciously I was saying, "I will not tolerate this in my life anymore. I will not have anyone in my life who doesn't take care of me, who isn't themselves, who has that constant negative self-talk." I'd said that to everybody in my life, including my mother, many times before I actually let go of the relationship — because I know the relationships I want in my life are loving, positive, supportive ones where we're growing and helping each other.
But my unconscious self-talk was: "You're a bad son." That's where the conflict came from. When my relationship with my mother got to a place where it didn't fit what I'd committed to, my unconscious self-talk conflicted hard with my conscious decision.
So what I did is I started asking everybody for advice. A lot of times you can't figure out your unconscious self-talk without other people's help. I asked my wife, my kids, my AA meetings, my yoga friends — I asked everybody about my situation with my mother. The consensus was: if you can't have a relationship with your mother where you can just be with her, where you find joy in being together, where you trust her and accept who she is without trying to change her or save her, then the most loving thing you can do is step back and say, "Look, I love you, Mom. I'm over here. If you want what I have, I'm over here. I don't want what you have, so I'm going to stay away — but if you want what I have, you can come over to my house and get it. I'm just not going to go over to your house and be in that insanity."
Because everybody was telling me that, I asked myself, "Okay, so what's the resistance, then?" And I realized my unconscious self-talk was: "You're a bad son. If you were a good son, you'd put up with your mother no matter what she did." Once I pulled that out and could see it clearly, I said, "No, I'm not." I talked to other people I thought of as good sons and daughters, and they'd had similar experiences and had stepped back from their parents too. From my point of view, they weren't bad children for refusing to keep going into situations that were destroying their own sanity — for some of them, a parent in addiction, or a mother in a nursing home who couldn't remember them anymore and where every visit just hurt. The way I dug up my own unconscious self-talk and modified it was through seeing other people's experiences and getting their help.
I told myself: "You are a great son. You're a son your mother would be proud of." I even had a vision of being five years old. My mother was such a great mother to me growing up — she held the family together, made a living for everybody, and helped my dad get sober. I imagined asking her, at five years old, "Hey Mom, what do I do thirty-some years from now, when you've gotten really sick and I can't stand to be around you anymore without trying to save you or change you?" And I could picture her saying, "Just don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Enjoy your life, enjoy your family. If you don't want to hang out with me, that's fine — you're a grown-up, it's fine." I cried. That big emotional experience, along with everybody else's help, reprogrammed my unconscious belief.
Now my self-talk is: I am a loving, caring son. I'm a son who very much loves and cares for his mother — and the most effective way for me to love and care for her right now is to not be near her. When I'm near her, I think about what's wrong with her. From a distance, I love her, and I'm very glad for the life we've had together. If you've ever wrestled with guilt like this, you might recognize it in loving your mind even when it thinks insane thoughts.
Grief, willingness to change, and where I am now
Grief is often the secret to really making those unconscious changes — letting go of how things used to be and saying, in order for me to grow, I let go of the past. "I'm willing to grow. I'm willing to change." That's an affirmation that's been extremely helpful for me, and that self-talk has made a huge difference across my life. When I was in the depths of my financial suffering, I started affirming constantly, "I'm willing to change." That willingness to change is what allows the conscious and unconscious beliefs to actually shift. And from where I'm standing now, the whole world is just wonderful and amazing.
So I hope this has been helpful for you. If you want to dig further into the inner work behind all of it, I keep sharing it in my Life playlist. I'd also love to get to know you better — you can hop on a one-on-one call with me and chat any time.