How To Talk To Yourself

What’s in Your Head, in Your Head?

Shel Silverstien (and the Cranberries) vastly undercount the voices echoing in the average head; it’s certainly more than one.

There is a voice inside of you
that whispers all day long,
Shel Silverstein, The Voice

The idea of having voices in your head isn’t particularly flattering. It conjures images of a Hollywood-type of schizophrenia. Yet, it’s a fact: each of us has a crowd between our ears. Some of the voices in our heads cheer us on. Others put us down. Some whisper to us as we try to fall asleep. Who gets to sit on your inner committee and how on Earth did they get appointed?

It’s easy to overlook our internal conversation in the bustle of life’s duties. Our culture’s outward focus keeps us from taking time to look inward, and it’s a shame, since your inner conversation is the foundation for all the other conversations you engage in. In a conflict, it can be tempting to think that other people are the problem and that they need to change. The shifting of your inner conversation is another approach.

I wrote a book about conversations and how we can (and already do) design them — even our internal conversations. Some people feel like “conversations” is a squishy word and that “design” excludes people. I say: design belongs to everyone now. And I believe that we are all designers of our conversations.

What you’re reading is an excerpt from that book, Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter. Read on or click that link to get free chapters of the book.

Your Mind is Racing

I heard a story on NPR about a woman who would leave herself voice messages, talking to herself about her challenges, while she was out walking her dog. Later, she would listen to the recordings. She could then take a step back, and listen to herself, as if she was listening to the problems of a friend. We all know how much better we are at solving other people’s problems than our own.

Many of us are also kinder to other people than we are to ourselves, applying a very different and more forgiving error recognition OS with friends or family. Taking her internal conversation outside shifted how she related to it.

Externalizing her inner conversation also slowed down its cadence. Self talk is fast — really fast. Researchers have clocked inner speech at a pace of 4,000 words per minute — which is about 10 times faster than verbal speech. The voicemail method slows self talk down. Like taking in a landscape at a stroll vs a bullet train, she was able to hear nuances in her own perspective that would be easy to miss otherwise.

Comedian George Carlin said “The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” Even with externalization, there is a tendency to agree with ourselves, especially if there’s an issue we’re passionately, stubbornly stuck on. It can be hard to break the thread of a circling thought. Our internal conversation can cut a deep groove and get stuck in a rut.

Who’s invited to the Party?

Powerfully motivating invitations are magic when you’re looking to engage anyone, whether it’s inviting someone to come to a party or be your mentor. We take care in external invitations because we know that force and coercion rarely brings out the best in others, and yet we try to use force on ourselves.

Invitation is even more critical in our inner conversation. What voices would you like to invite to your inner party? And what voices would you like to politely ask to leave?

Inner stakeholder mapping can be an enlightening exercise. It’s worth taking 15 minutes and trying this out:

Who are your inner stakeholders? Capture 3–5 “people” in your inner conversation on sticky notes.
Who talks to who, when? Draw the interactions and conversations between them as arrows.
Which voices would you like to ask to leave?
Which voices would you like to work together better?

If you want to learn how to have better conversations with yourself, in your life and in your work check out my book. Get free chapters and downloads here.