In order to maintain talent in multiple areas, train yourself to prevent negative thoughts that can diminish your ability to work towards achieving the multiple goals you set for yourself. Start by paying more attention to your inner dialogue. Then, work on breaking your negative thought habits.There are several ways to rid your mind of negative thinking:

Overcome fear. Audacious, yes. But reflect on what’s holding you back. The most common barriers to acquiring talent are based on your emotions.Recognize this and prevent emotional perspectives, such as fear, from preventing you from pursuing whatever talent you wish to acquire.

Filter out the negative. We tend to filter out the positive and be overly concerned with the negative, especially in terms of our perspective on our own abilities. Don’t fall for this mental trap. Contemplate your room for improvement only so far as it motivates you to continue improving.

Recognize the middle ground. Abandon the concept of perfection. Don’t think that you must be perfect at something to consider yourself talented.

Strengthen your position with positive thinking. Optimism isn’t going to make you good at anything on its own, but it will help. Recognize that it is objectively within your control to decide how to think about something, especially goals you set for yourself and your ability to accomplish them.

Respond to negative thoughts that arise by re-framing them in equally true, but more positive perspectives. For instance:

Instead of thinking, “I’ve never done this before, and it seems hard,” think, “Here’s an opportunity to learn, and there are a few different ways to approach this.”

Instead of thinking, “I’m too lazy” or “There’s no way I can do that,” tell yourself, “I haven’t put enough time into this, but I can at least try it and see how it goes.”

Finally, don’t get discouraged by thoughts about how slowly your talents are improving. Decide to tell yourself that it’s worth one more try.

Practice the thinking part too. Even convincing yourself to favor positive thinking takes practice. It will pay off though. Become less critical of the world around you, and of yourself, simply by repeating positive sentiments to yourself and pushing away negative thoughts.

Maintaining a positive mindset will not only improve your mood, but will help motivate you to stick with the hard work required to acquire new talents.