On my continued journey to find happiness, peace, fulfillment, and congruence, I’ve learned a few things.
I want to share one of the most important things I’ve learned about, the hard way.
“Our inner dialogue”
The inner dialogue is the conversation that never stops or takes a break. It is the constant conversation we are in with ourselves. It is the commentary about our lives while our lives are happening, that goes on in our heads.
We, humans, are meaning-making machines. We are constantly assigning meaning to events, outcomes, conversations, and observations too. And we do this by talking ourselves in or out of things and by conversing with ourselves non stop.
Most of us pay no attention to our thoughts or the words that are being produced in our heads at a mind-numbingly fast pace. We usually ignore the words and thoughts and ideas. We try to work in spite of all the noise. We try to turn it off in order to sleep at night.
We don’t recognize the strength of these non-stop conversations we are having in the confines of our minds. They truly build us into the humans we are.
The most important revelation for me was that I am in control of the words that spin in my head.
So if I have slept in, like a lot of us end up doing these days. The words that would come to me as I’m waking up would sound a bit like.
“Oh no your whole morning got wasted” “Didn’t manage to wake up early as usual!”
“So much to do such little time”
“You are so undisciplined”
I woke up late today with all these dreadful thoughts swirling in my head as usual. And I decided to replace them with.
“You are so well-rested you will be able to do double the amount of work in half the time”
“You will manage your day much more efficiently” “Make a list of the most important things to do and knock them out quickly”
“You are human and need the rest, so stop beating yourself up”
That dramatically changed the way in which I approached my two hours of work.
And so the story goes in everything in life. You will hear that voice and you will think it’s on autopilot.
It is not!
You are in control of what you tell yourself, how you speak to yourself, how you approach anything in life will be determined by how you are perceiving it.
Choose kind words, choose positive words, choose an empowered perspective, choose a can-do vocabulary.
I think you will have a lot of fun with this thought experiment.
Sending you love and light
Hawra
