The way you speak to yourself is the most important way anyone in the world will ever speak to you - fact.

It was at a talk once that I attended a few years ago that a mind-set expert (she worked with the CEO of Google) told me your brain cannot tell the difference emotionally between you saying something negative to yourself in your own mind and someone you know and love coming up to you and saying something horrible to your face.

The impact on our emotions, confidence and self-esteem is the same.

I knew that positive mind set and how you speak to yourself was important – but this scientific fact changed everything for me.

That simple fact is why how we talk to ourselves is the most important dialogue of our lives.

If we are going around all day saying in our minds ‘I can’t do this – I’m not good enough – I’m not attractive enough – I’m not clever enough’. Then at the end of the day you will come home with the same lack of confidence and self-esteem as if someone had been following you around all day saying ‘You’re not capable of doing this– you’re not good enough – you’re stupid’.

We then wonder why we feel so low when it was only us saying it to ourselves. Quite simply your mind doesn’t care or know if it’s you or them. It all matters.

However, just as the brain cannot tell the difference between who is throwing the negative comments at us – it also can’t tell the difference between the positive.

So, this becomes our greatest tool.

If you had someone following you around all day telling you 'how great you are – how clever you are, how capable, how confident, how valuable, how attractive' - you would feel on top of the world.

The amazing reality of neuroscience is that we don’t need to pay for this sidekick of positivity and praise, because we can carry them around with us anywhere we go for free in our own minds.

Mindfulness and affirmations therefore become two of the most positive tools we have at our disposal for getting our inner dialogue into an ongoing positive track and raising our confidence and self- esteem.

We can catch ourselves saying the negative and turn it around with mindfulness and we can affirm the positive image and belief in ourselves with affirmations.

Try to do affirmations every morning for 31 days – write 5 that really resonate with you and what you want to do and the kind of person you want to be, write them down and then re-write them and say them out loud every day for 31 days. Then notice the difference in how you feel about yourself and your capabilities by the end of that period.

Let your mind catch up with your heart - when both are in sync, that is when the magic happens.

An example of a simple affirmation -  'I am enough'.

Yup - we all are.