Helpful vs harmful inner voice
/By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.
Summary: Your inner voice is always with you, it can help or hinder you. You work on being good at your job, IMO you should work on having a healthy inner voice!
Warm up thoughts:
The only person you are with your entire life is yourself.
If “culture happens by default or by design.” then, your inner voice happens by default or by design.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” – Pascal
According to Pascal, we fear the silence of existence, we dread boredom and instead choose aimless distraction, and we can’t help but run from the problems of our emotions into the false comforts of the mind.
“Busyness is their silence.”
Some people never sit with their inner voice, they do things constantly to drown it out.
“If you are lonely when you are by yourself then you are in poor company.”
IMO your inner voice is always consciously or subconsciously affecting everything.
Your inner voice happens by default or by design.
IMO one should spend significant time listening to one's inner voice.
IMO one should spend significant time sculpting one's inner voice.
Jingle: if one does not have a healthy inner voice, one will have to pay invoices for the wrecking an unhealthy inner voice does!
Healthy inner voice = essential life element
To have a good life IMO, one should…
Work for something you believe in, i.e. have a good job
Eat well.
Sleep well.
Have quality relationships...
… and IMO you should have a quality relationship with oneself… AKA a healthy inner voice!
As a 25 year old I spent:
significant time working to build a good career.
significant time on building quality relationships.
significant time to be healthy; trying to eat, exercise and sleep well…
… but I spent zero time on my inner voice. Frankly, I wasn’t even really aware I had one! What a dumb dumb!
In fact, you could say I spent ‘negative time’.
From time to time my Inner Voice said ‘we are lonely, we have FOMO, we are going to mess up building Edrolo and more…’ and I promptly drowned it out as much as I could.
IMO healthy inner voice = essential life element
To me it’s as important to spend time on your inner voice (i.e. your relationship with yourself) as it is with your relationships with others.
What I now try to do - work with and on my inner voice
1. Listen to my inner voice and understand what it says (see below for examples on how to do this)
2. Come up with a plan for what I want to change in my inner voice
3. Spend the time to change my inner voice
Comment:
This is effectively ‘therapy’. In some respects ‘Therapy = Improving Inner Voice’
I’ve no idea why society didn’t tell me to work on having a healthy, helpful inner voice.
Be a good friend, be good at your job… be happy society said!
I wish I figured this out earlier. For me, improving my inner voice has improved everything! If I look back now, I believe I was ‘treating proximate causes, not the root cause’ for many issues. The root cause was my inner voice!
Have a healthy, helpful Inner Voice!
Does the idea of 3 days of being totally alone with your thoughts (ie not speaking to anyone, no internet access, no reading, no working and no TV, etc) scare you? If so IMO you are likely not totally cool with your Inner Voice.
In hunter gather days, eating used to be ‘famine or feast’. As such they say you should fast (2 days not eating) for your body once a month.
Human’s used to live in tribes of 150, didn’t have the internet or smart phones, and effectively do the same thing each day (hunting and gathering). Ie your mind had heaps of time by itself.
Once every 3 months I try to spend 3+ days totally with my own thoughts (aka 100% of time with inner voice). At first it was scary, but now I look forward to it so much! I always learn so much about myself, it’s AWESOME!
For a mini version try 12 hours of not speaking to anyone, not reading anything and no internet!
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Details
Inner Voice = 1. Engaging externally + 2. By yourself + 3. Knower of things
The inner voice is obviously many many many things! I’m going to attempt to articulate it with this equation… which is most certainly not all encompassing, but hopefully helpful!
Inner Voice “1. Engaging externally” (how you engage with the external world) = 1.1 Better / inline / worse than things actually are + 1.2 Biases
“Having the closest understanding of reality possible is a core foundation to be able to build a good life.”
Perception + Evaluation + Decision => Outcome
Inner Voice IMO can seriously affect ‘Perception' + ‘Evaluation’.
“We are all biased… and those who don’t think they are biased are the most biased of all!”
1. Better / inline / worse than things actually are
Being able to have a quality ‘intuitive feel’ for if an idea is good / bad is key! Ie having as close a perception of reality as possible.
2. Biases
-L1: I don’t have any biases (yes you do, everyone does)
L0: I am ok with the fact that I have biases but I don’t know what they are
L1: I have found my major biases
L2: ‘L1’ + I try to ‘lean against’ my biases to be as ‘impartial’ as possible (ie actively counter for my biases)
L3: ‘L2’ + I have discussed externally with people close to me about my biases
L4: ‘L3’ + I work with others to help find my biases
L5: ‘L4’ + I have set up external regulators (ie other people) to help me counter biases
Comment:
I know that I’m biased towards ‘first principles thinking’ so when ever I see someone ‘reason by analogy’ I can start to discount their view… but often ‘analogies are a core way to explain something, not necessarily the core way to justify something’.
I’m aware of this bias and try to counter myself discounting when hearing analogies AND have other people (external regulators) help with this bias.
Inner Voice “2. By yourself” (how you are by yourself)
Confidence in self
Sometimes we are our own worst enemy. We ritualistically underestimate how well things are actually going.
Other times we think we are the ‘sh1t’, i.e. overestimating ourselves!
“You are never as good as you think you are on your best day, you are never as bad as you think you are on your worst day.”
I’m lonely
FOMO
Doesn't protect your ego.
Allows you to be vulnerable. We all make mistakes, IMO the problem is hiding from them (denial) and / or not being able to admit them to others.
Allowing introspection
Stops you from trying new things.
Tells you what you like and / don’t before you even try.
Gratitude ⇔ Worry productively
IMO we shouldn’t accept everything (eg be grateful everywhere), there are something that are sh1t and not addressing them is silly!
However there are some things that are great… be grateful about greatness!
Getting this balance right is hard, but you can tune it through ‘gratitude practice’.
Brian Doyle: “People Don’t Know We Appreciate Them Unless We Show It.”
Inner Voice “3. Knower of things” (this is a bit analogous to your subconscious)
In some respects I think of my Inner Voice as my ‘subconscious speaking’. My subconscious knows many things..
If I make time to listen to my inner voice / subconscious it normally has many pertinent things to tell me.
The things that it tells me I typically need a plan for. Eg if an incident at work keeps coming up then I know I need to do something about it.
Option 1: could be just to ‘accept’ it. I’m worrying when I shouldn’t, so consciously accept. However one shouldn’t accept everything, this is akin to meaning nothing in the world should change! Thinking you and the world are unimprovable!
Option 2: I have an insufficient plan for what to do. So make a plan!
If I'm in a good place and I don't have a plan I’m unhappy.
If I'm in a bad place and I have a plan I’m happy.
Plan = happy. No plan = unhappy.
Does the idea of 4 days totally alone with only your inner voice scary? If so IMO you should sit with your inner voice and see what it says to you.
How do you spend time only with your inner voice? For example go to a silent meditation retreat.
No speaking to anyone.
No reading anything.
No watching anything.
No phone (no messaging, phone calls, internet, etc)
The only thing you are allowed to do is journal in a notebook as this is a conversation with yourself… a conversation with your inner voice.
In short you stop feeding your mind anything and then don’t try and control where it wants to go!
Most people are feeding their mind something at all times of being awake: work, speaking to a friend, reading a book, watching Netflix, etc.
What happens?
Stage 1: there is all the ‘buzz’ of what has been happening in your life (ie what you have been feeding your mind) that kicks around. It will take a while for the echos of what you have been feeding your mind to play out.
Here your ‘your subconscious / inner voice’ is acting but along with all the things you have been feeding your mind, it’s often in the background where you aren’t aware.
Stage 2: your subconscious / inner voice is now running the show. It very important to note that you don’t want to direct your mind where to go, ie consciously think about certain things. You want to ‘let go of the rheins’ and see where your mind wanders.
Comment:
In Stage 2 I can listen to all these things my ‘Inner Voice / Subconscious’ thinks I should consider… it’s totally EPIC!
I’ve come to believe that my Inner Voice has heaps of things for me to know about that I should be working on.
It ranges from:
Biases
To places where I should be less confident / more confident
To fears
Hopes and dreams
That I’m tired
Instances where I think I’ve acted in a counter productive way
Instances where I think others have acted in a counter productive way
Trump!
Other ways to spend time with your Inner Voice:
Meditation (can get to the point my inner voice can speak to me after 15 mins normally. Ie the first 15 mins are getting to ‘calm’. Then after this there is space for my Inner Voice to speak)
Massage (it’s like meditation, ie quiet time to allow my inner voice to stop being drowned out)
Counselling with qualified therapists (you can try and look for your inner voice as well as making space for it to come out and talk to you),
Counselling chats with your friends (one of my fav things, the best friends I’ve found are way better than therapists as they know you better)
Journalling (in some respects this is a conversation with yourself, talking with myself is SO MUCH FUN. I seriously have no idea where it’s going to go!)
2 hours in a sensory deprivation tank (again this is meditation or massage by a different name)
Just do nothing! Ie don't feed your mind anything for 24 or 48 hours. Most weeks I try not to speak to anyone (in person or by phone) for 24 hours. I call this ‘Duncan Day’. It’s a day where I have a ‘date with myself’ for the entire day.
This is crucial, this is a new activity type… and exactly what I used to try and avoid!
I used to try and avoid time by myself, now I try really hard to carve out a day just with myself a week!
You check in with others and ask ‘how are you going?’ Well I now do with with myself ‘how am I going?’ Let’s have a 3 hour conversation with myself (often through journally, or just going on a long walk by myself, etc)... I learn so much about myself! This is ‘listening to my inner voice / subsconscious’.
Go for a walk / run for an hour and don't listen to anything.
When you learn things about yourself (eg biases, eg that you are caring in a place counter productively, eg that you believe someone isn’t aware of how they are acting in a certain circumstance, etc etc) I try to write it down and consider if I should actively try to change this. If I do then I build a plan and action the plan!
A plan for myself is often ‘making excellence an unconscious habit’.
A plan for others… depends! But hope is not a strategy! IMO trying to help yourself and others is one of the most rewarding things in life!
If you only take one thing away: go on dates with your inner voice.
One way I look at my life is a series of ‘dates’.
I now have ‘dates with myself’. For instance I have a date with writing / blogging each week. I look forward to it so much.
I have a date with my inner voice each week. Eg I’m allowed to exercise and listen to a podcast… but I should also have a date with my inner voice which might mean exercising with no podcast!
Time alone with my innervoice used to be negative sum / draining… but your inner voice is always there consciously or subconsciously. It took much work, but now I look forward to dates with my inner voice!
You could say that 20 year old Duncan was in an unhealthy relationship with himself… I like to think 35 year old Duncan is in a health relationship with myself!