A Story About…The Voice In Your Head

A Story About…The Voice In Your Head

What does the voice in your head tell you?

Is it helpful or unhelpful stuff?
The Internal Voice can be very convincing!

No, don’t be stupid
You are rubbish at
You can’t do
You’re not good enough to
You’re not worth that
Nobody will listen to you saying that
You’ll never be able to…
You’re too (insert derogatory words) to

OR

Don’t rock the boat
People won’t like it/you if
It will be too disruptive to

OR

I won’t try that because I might fail
I won’t do that as it will go wrong
There’s no point because

I’m sure you could add some more!

We can beat ourselves up without even trying. That Internal Voice can be pretty vocal in its opinions.
Those opinions can easily influence the actions we take (or don’t take).

That internal voice is loud and shouty for a reason.

Our brain is hardwired to keep us safe i.e. alive!
After all, what we have always done and the way we have always done it hasn’t killed us yet so it must be the right thing to do.

That Internal Voice gets loud and shouty as soon as that safety feels threatened.

Safe does not mean we are achieving our dreams and purpose.

So what can we do to quieten that shouty Internal Voice, we can crack on with the stuff we want/need to do?

Here’s a few suggestions that I’ve found useful.

• Be Kind – Treat The Voice like you would a close friend. Give it a name if you want to.
• Opinion – Let The Voice shout. Let it have it’s opinion. By listening rather than ignoring, The Voice will feel heard. And by listening it can give you a clue to the way through to achieve what you want.
• Plan – When we organise, process and break it up into small chunks it is easier for the Internal Voice to handle.
• Reason – Having a powerful reason for the challenging action can help persuade The Voice that it’s an essential action to take to feel safe and worth the risk.
• Counter argue – Providing The Voice with a worse case scenario if the action doesn’t happen can help sway it in your favour.
• Reassure – Providing evidence that the new situation is going to be beneficial and positive will calm that pesky voice.
• Rephrase – Rephrase the objections from The Voice using language that has positive focus. Replacing words like Can’t/Don’t/Shouldn’t with Can/Will/Shall.
• Breathe then Jump – Feel the fear and do it anyway. And then celebrate doing it. The brain will hunt for more of what we tell it. So by Doing and Celebrating it’s showing The Voice that we are ok, still alive and can do that again!

And finally,

Practice – The more we practise the process of moving through the doubting shouty Internal Voice obstacle, the easier it gets. And the more fun stuff we get to do. So keep practising!

What does your Voice shout? And how do you move through it?

……………………

Group, Online or 121 Memberships – what works for you best? You choose. PM me for a chat to find your best solution.