Three Ways to Control Your Inner Dialogue—and Control Your Life
Improving your relationship with the one person who has the greatest power to build you up or tear you down: YOU
“Your worst enemy can’t harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much.”
Inner dialogue shapes who we are. It shapes how we think about ourselves, how we show up to others, how we react, and how we process events. I’ve spent years working to understand this voice and trying to influence it.
The summary of the problem is this: about 98 percent of our thoughts are subconscious and only two percent of our thoughts are conscious. Most self talk is generated by a “voice” that we don’t directly control. Further, about 75 to 80 percent of these thoughts are negative! What? Why? Over the past 199,000 years of our 200,000-year evolution, the instinct to focus on the negative kept us alive. That noise in the bushes might have been something trying to kill us, and we needed a certain brain wiring for our species to survive. That evolutionary algorithm is outdated. Maybe our descendants thousands of years in the future will have better wiring, but for now, we need to work with what we have.
Here are three observations to help with your inner dialogue:
1. We are the only ones keeping score. In fact, we design the rules and create the game
Imagine you’ve set a goal to run a four hour marathon (roughly nine minute/mile pace). You purchase a training program and follow it to a tee. The day of the race you start off ahead of pace. You get to mile 24 and with only two miles left, you’ve still got energy and you’re going to beat your goal! Then a race official steps onto the course and tells you the race is going to be 12 miles longer and that anyone not running 8 minute, 30 second pace is going to be disqualified. You feel demoralized. You’ve gone from beating a really important goal to not even finishing the race.
This actually happens all the time in our minds. You are the race director of your life. You can determine whether a nine minute/mile marathon is a raging success or grounds for disqualification. You can decide whether the race is 26 miles or 38 miles. You can be grateful for your job, your family, and your health, or you can compare your life to someone to whom, on a particular dimension, you compare unfavorably. Is my race to have more money than Bill Gates or is it a race to put forth my best effort, show up with integrity, and help others along the way? Your life is your race alone. You design the rules. And here is the best part: You can declare victory any time you want.
When you really think about directing your own life, you’ll realize that many of your perceived stresses, disappointments, and anxieties are functions of rules you have created. You have the power to change those rules any time you want. I can promise that the only person keeping score is you.
2. We can’t control our thoughts, but we can be aware of them
Even if you spent the next five years cleaning the floor of a monastery in Tibet with a toothbrush in silence, you’re not going to control your thoughts. But you can be aware of them, write them down, and recognize them for what they are. They are subconsciously generated thoughts that you have the ability to accept, act upon, give power to, or ignore.
Often, we think this inner voice is trying to “save” us. Common thoughts our inner voice generates include alerting us to danger, generating fear, and introducing doubt. The voice often brings us to the worst case—what can go wrong, why something won’t work, and/or why a particular circumstance is bad. The voices include self criticism, jealousy, regret, and shame and lead us to conclusions including, “I am not enough,” “I can’t,” “I should,” “I should have,” and “if only.”
Sound familiar?
The first weapon for this battle—and make no mistake, it is a battle—is awareness. Start by recognizing that your thoughts are occurring and write them down. Rather than try to just think positive, you are better off pulling these negative thoughts out of your subconscious, shining a flashlight on them, and examining them with your weapon in this battle: your conscious mind.
With our negative thoughts on paper, we make the invisible subconscious thoughts become visible. The invisible, negative thoughts floating around in our minds have power; the visible, negative thoughts become something we can analyze and consider. Negative thoughts are often to-do lists or things we have yet to work out.
3. The mental often follows the physical
I’ve come to believe that my mental state follows my physical state. When I feel terrible, I have terrible thoughts, and when I feel great, it is easier to have a positive perspective. Some of the things that impact my psychology include lack of sleep, hunger, exhaustion, drinking alcohol, caffeine or lack of caffeine, and/or a poor diet. Sleep in particular has such a big impact on my mood that I’ve come to prioritize this over nearly everything else in my life. Perhaps the simplest, most reliable and powerful tool to create better thoughts and a happier life is a good night’s sleep.
Our inner thoughts have the greatest impact on our self esteem, anxiety, stress, happiness, and lives in general. We have more conversations with ourselves than with everyone else combined, and when we internalize these conversations they shape our identities. Mastering our inner dialogue may be the most important game we play. Once we recognize that self talk is a game and that we get to choose the rules, we can begin to unleash our best selves and live our best lives.
