By Dawn Onley

“I’m always broke.”

“I’m fat.”

“I’m dumb.”

“I’m horrible with money.”

“I’ll never be able to …”

“I can’t …”

Or a particularly bad acronym I’ve been seeing a lot of lately: “fml.”

Quit it! Right this second. The self-defeating language. The negativity. The whining and complaining. The excuses. Quit replaying the disparaging words over and over again like a Greatest Hits CD. Stop declaring yourself a loser before you even have a chance to win. Just. Stop. If you can’t stop on your own, get help. It’s that important.

You are ordering your steps by your words. Is it any surprise then that what you are getting out of life is exactly what you are proclaiming? As a man thinketh, so is he!

“Believing in negative thoughts is the single greatest obstruction to success,” according to Charles F. Glassman in his book “Brain Drain the Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life.”

It all starts with how we think, and what we project.

Many of us have been there. Many still go there from time to time. Frustrated. Hopeless. We have developed a bad habit of using disparaging words to refer to ourselves and our current place in life. And like most bad habits, it’s a tough one to break. We can’t see our way out. It’s our default button.

I use to always announce “I am tired” because it seemed as if I never got enough rest. Or, I would say “I am not good at public speaking.” So guess what? I always felt tired and I wasn’t good at public speaking. What I put out there became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There’s a quote by Joel Osteen that I live by these days: “Whatever follows I am is going to come looking for you.”

Think about it. There is a sort of bravery that is summoned when we choose to believe in our better selves, even against dismal scenarios or uncertainty, and when we start reinforcing that belief by the words that we speak (even if we don’t quite feel them yet); when we take a step towards our destiny, even if we can’t see the full pathway ahead.

I finally stopped saying I was tired all the time. Tired people don’t get things done. In 2011, for nine months, I trained five days a week for a bucket list item I was determined to accomplish. Later that year, I crossed the finish line of the New York Marathon — so proud of not just my physical accomplishment, but winning the mental battle as well. That’s the biggest battle of all.

I am victorious. I am successful. I am smart. I am wondrously made. I am unique. I am prosperous. I have boundless energy. I am capable. I am enough. I am ready.

And, so are you. Once you believe.