The Voices in Your Head

It’s ok.

It’s safe to admit it! You have voices in your head! .

We all have voices in our heads.

Critical Voice

Are you familiar with this one? The Critical Voice – it runs an ongoing narrative that judges us, everyone around us, and offers a running commentary on our situation and circumstances.

This Critical Voice was created during childhood. It came up with the best and simplest explanations it could to help us understand and survive the normal (and the abnormal) childhoods we were dropped into.

Being a Kid is Hard!

And childhood IS stressful no matter your personal circumstances or the quality of your family relationships. Great parents don’t change the fact that a child-mind is trying to make sense of an adult world.

Childhood was a time of continuous novel and challenging experiences. We were dependent, and for much of the time, helpless as children. Learning to walk, talk and eat, coordinate movements, and understand what we were seeing and hearing was supremely challenging.

 And because we didn’t have the capacity to understand what was going on around us, we made mistakes. We misinterpreted and misjudged. We tripped and fell many times in the process of learning how to use our bodies and our minds.

Human Design Feature - trial and error

Making mistakes isn’t a problem because learning by trial and practice is an important design feature of humans. But making mistakes, although normal, creates self-talk. Self-talk that helped us refine our behaviour and motivated us to keep trying (or not).

Oops!

The self-talk we chose as children was rudimentary, limited by the size of our developing brain, our breadth (or lack) of experience, our environment, and our genetic predispositions.

Unfortunately, these simplistic explanations which were the best we could access at the time, were not meant to survive into adulthood.

The Wise Voice - Yay!

As adults we have the benefit of a bigger, more mature brain that can problem solve, see context, create humor and be creative in ways we could not even imagine as children.

With age and maturity comes the development of our Wise Voice: the one that can see the gift in the challenge, the one that describes how well you did (not how you fell short), the one that is kind and forgiving, (not worried or judging others). Instead of judging things critically in order to survive, our Wise Voice is there to help us discern the best way to move forward in our circumstances, whatever they are.

The Critical Voice is loudest until....

If we don’t make a conscious effort to reduce the volume of our Critical Voice we will hear (and unfortunately, believe) this noisy, bossy, demeaning critical voice as adults. We’ll hear it tell us how stupid, unworthy, unattractive, and useless we are. We’ll hear it tell us how incompetent, awful, and entitled the people around us are. And we’ll hear it tell us that life isn’t fair and that we’ll be happy when…. (our bad boss retires), and if…… (our partner stops drinking).

Thoughts are just thoughts!

Our thoughts, whether they come from our Critical Voice or from our Wise Voice, are just thoughts. And thoughts, which powerfully influence our mood, our behaviour, our experiences and our trajectory in life are still, just thoughts. They usually (but not always) contain a kernel of truth and then layers of habitual childhood interpretations.

It takes training to shut down our Critical Voice and instead start listening (and trusting) our Wise Voice. Whichever voice we train ourselves to hear will impact our performance, our success, our motivation, our health, and our relationships.

Listen up!