Summary
Joe and Brett explore the repetitive, critical voice in our heads — what it is, how it operates, and how to develop a new relationship with it. Joe distinguishes between the repetitive negative inner voice and unique/inspirational thoughts, noting that most of our ~50,000 daily thoughts are the same loops repeating. The voice often mimics critical figures from our childhood and creates the very outcomes it tries to prevent.
Rather than fighting or trying to eliminate the voice, Joe recommends playful experimentation: laughing at it, loving it, questioning its logic, or simply noticing it. He explains that the voice always contradicts itself and operates through “shoulds” that generate rebellion rather than change. The key insight is that trying to get rid of the voice IS the voice — instead, changing your relationship to it through awareness, humor, and love naturally quiets it over time.
The conversation also explores how the voice generates anxiety that narrows our options, creates binary thinking, and prevents us from being present. Joe suggests that speaking from what you want (rather than trying to be right) creates far more freedom and authentic connection.
Key Concepts
- The inner critic is not your voice
- Experiment with your inner critic
- Resisting the inner critic strengthens it
- The inner critic speaks from care
- The inner critic mirrors relationship patterns
- The voice in the head talks to itself more than to you
- Rehearsing conversations avoids rejection
- Awareness changes what shoulds cannot
Key Quotes
“It’s like you’re living with a horrible micromanaging boss all the time and we know what that’s like if we’re actually sitting next to one of those people and they’re constantly barraging us and yet we just think it’s normal when it’s coming from ourselves.”
“To use a voice in the head to get out of the voice in the head is like asking a thief to be the security of your house.”
“If you assume for a minute that the voice in the head loves you and it’s just really has a whole bunch of crappy strategies to love you, then there’s a way of listening to everything the voice in the head has to say as a deep care.”
“Oftentimes the voice in the head is talking to itself more than it’s talking to you.”
“Life is really great once you realize you’re already wrong.”
“The voice in the head is always contradicting itself — you were too cocky there, you were too humble there, you spoke too much, you didn’t listen enough.”
Transcript
[Music] foreign it’s like you’re living with a horrible micromanaging boss all the time and we know what that’s like if we’re actually sitting next to one of those people and they’re constantly barraging us and yet we just think it’s normal when it’s coming from ourselves welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson foreign most of us have a voice in our heads constantly narrating our experience have you ever noticed what yours is like how it talks to you how would you feel if someone else spoke to you the way this voice speaks to you would you speak to someone else in this way today we’re going to explore how the voice in our head influences what we say do and feel and explore how to develop a new relationship with it Joe what is the voice in the head the voice in the head well let’s make a distinction there’s a voice in your head which is the thing that you can hear talking to yourself it’s kind of the editor that’s constantly happening that’s judging your situation wondering what people are thinking about you telling you what to do telling you how to do it and and I would make a distinction here that there’s the voice in your head that is repetitive and the voice in your head that is unique or inspirational so neurologically speaking they say that we have about 50 000 thoughts a day that happen that’s the voice in your head and most of those for most people the voices saying the same thing over and over again you should lose weight you should lose weight you should lose weight or why why are you drinking so much coffee stop drinking so much coffee right it’s a repetitive voice in the head and so when I’m speaking about the voice in the head in the context of working with people I’m talking about the repetitive bossy critical voice in the head so let’s take a moment to like help listeners tap into their voice in the head right now because if it’s 50 000 thoughts a day it must be accessible at any time yeah that’s great yeah great so a wonderful way to do this is to just be silent for the next say 20 30 seconds and stop thinking okay so in that time period there a thought arose and maybe the thought was how long will the the silence last or this is stupid what makes us do this or I hope I didn’t forget the eggs in the in the oven whatever and that’s the voice in the head that’s what it is it’s the constant thinking that goes on and for most people it’s very auditory it’s very word focused for some people it’s more somatic it’s more body focus but Grand majority of people they can literally it’s like they can hear the voice yeah I kind of felt both uh as the silence went on I started to feel a little bit of tension in my body and then the thought that popped up was like I wonder how much Dead Space we should have in a podcast before we lose people’s attention great yeah perfect right so both are always happening there’s a somatic well that’s not exactly true there’s always the somatic experiencing that’s occurring you can’t stop that and then oftentimes there’s thoughts that go with it the tricky part is that the more you become aware of the voice in your head the more you become aware of what it’s saying so oftentimes when people first get confronted with the idea they might not think they have many thoughts in their head and the voice in the head isn’t very active and then the more they pay attention to it the more they realize it’s constantly humming along back there and obviously there’s people who do a tremendous amount of meditation or different practices where the voice in the head is far more silent particularly the reoccurring voice in the head is far more silent and quiet and that in itself is an interesting thing because the somatic experiencing hasn’t stopped and so to some degree it’s harder to find um the pain that’s occurring The Voice makes it much easier to feel that pain or to see the the dysfunction of the way the voice happens and it’s harder to understand it or see it or work with it if it’s just a somatic experience and what I notice is the more the more you become aware of it the more sensitive you are to it the more sensitive you are to it the more you realize what it’s saying and how it’s saying it so a great example of that um you know I did a ton of meditation and um in my earlier years and a point came along where the voice in the head you know cut by like 75 percent and I felt like it was gone for a while as far as the reoccurring negative looping thoughts and over time I’ve noticed oh no there’s still things there that took me a while to notice like just the thing that’s always saying oh have you done this have you done this have you done this have you done this right so it’s just a matter like anything and like the more it’s subtlety see it it’s it you know the more sensitive you become to it the more you become aware of how much it’s affecting your day-to-day minute-to-minute life and what makes it important or interesting to become aware of it like I imagine if I had a roommate in my head just constantly talking to me ignorance would be Bliss so what what makes it worthwhile to start paying attention and noting what it’s saying if what it’s saying can be so self-critical and distracting yeah there’s a couple reasons one is it’s because the it’s the first step to a different relationship with it so in my first experience of really becoming aware of it I was reading a psychology book on Gestalt it was Fritz pearls I believe and he was talking about how there was a upper dog and an underdog in your in your internal dialogue and there was the the upper dog was like the bully telling you what to do criticizing you and then the underdog was the one that was rebelling against that guy which is a much more subtle quiet voice that people often takes years for people to get in touch with and experience and just being aware of it just being aware and for for me in particular it was the should thing I think he called it out he’s like when you tell yourself you should do something that’s that’s the upper dog and just by recognizing it and seeing it every time it came it just started to become quieter and quieter so just the recognition of the voice in the head can change the way the voice in the head dialogues with you until you resist it until you’re like oh man I gotta change that voice in my head then the voice in the head is now telling you to change the voice in your head and that resistance makes the voice in your head persist but just the simple awareness of it just like the gentle oh there it is doing that thing again can reduce it and so then the question of course is like why would I want to reduce this voice in my head and there is a ton of reasons for that um a very active negative voice in the head is and the DSM they would call it dystymia right the definition of low-level depression is this constant negative self-talk so that’s one reason another reason is because life is just far more enjoyable and sweet when you’re not repeating like when when your Consciousness isn’t a horrible boss right so so on one level you said like oh what if my roommate was all that I’d rather just not hear them um the truth is that when you have this deep critical voice in your head it’s like you’re living with a horrible micromanaging boss all the time and we know what that’s like if we’re actually sitting next to one of those people and they’re constantly barraging us and yet we just think it’s normal when it’s coming from ourselves right and so just the joy and Bliss of life as that voice changes or as your relationship to it changes it totally can transform how much joy and happiness and ease and and uh Clarity you can have right and so somebody I was talking to recently about the voice in the head they said that like their voice isn’t like a self-critical voice but what they do is they rehearse conversations or like conversations they could have had and it seems like that is kind of a way of being self-critical like it the fact that you would rehearse a conversation you’ve already had about how you could do it better comes from self-criticism and then self-criticism is shaping the thoughts of what you thought you should have said what are some of the other ways that the voice can show up in people if if somebody’s listening to this and they’re not connecting with this idea of there being a voice in their head that’s critical of themselves or the upper dog as you put it constantly telling you things to do uh shutting you uh wondering about what other people think of you incessantly or even just more than once rehearsing trying to make sure that you get perfect at something before you actually go and live it all those are great examples of how the voice in the head can work there’s kind of a multitude of ways that it can work and and it’s quite cool in the way that it finds its new home when you’ve spotted one you know like I said before you can be saying oh the should thing I understand that I don’t want that so I’m just going to be aware of it and then producing the voice in the head becomes the aggressor to the voice in the head itself it’s amazing how it can just find its new natural home and Zen you know they talk about trying to use the voice in the head to get rid of the voice in the head I’m paraphrasing here but to use a voice in the head to get out of the voice in the head is like um asking a thief to to be the security of your house it doesn’t work yeah it’s like the voice the voice isn’t you and the voice speaking to the voice is also not you all of it is just in the way of your impulse and what that kind of brings me to one of the characteristics of the voice is that it seems to be slowing us down either by pulling us out of the present into the past or the future trying to solve some unsolvable puzzle or the the self-criticism in it can just inhibit us from taking steps that you know may be imperfect but our steps or saying things that just speaking what’s true for us in the moment without imposing a lot of constraints on it around what people might think or what what might be wrong about it or something yeah I mean just a great a great way to think about this is so your voice in your head has worried about how some future thing’s going to go maybe a job interview or maybe a first date whatever and if you think about all the worrying that you did and all the scenarios that it went through and all the things you thought you were going to say and all the ways you were going to behave like how much of that was actually pertinent how much of that was actually useful energy how much of that actually helped you prepare and how much of it just did nothing it was just a waste of time and how much of it actually hurt right so I see oftentimes when people are rehearsing things over and over and over again it builds up such a anxiety around the actuality of the thing happening that they’re not there and present with what’s occurring in front of them when the time to rehearse is over right yeah in my experience of that is it also sets you up for a major disappointment and self like a shame spiral after the conversation doesn’t go anything according to your rehearsal yeah I mean that’s that’s a characteristic of the voice in the head actually is to create the reality it’s trying to avoid give an example of like a perfectionist right and having the voice in the head trying to tell you convince you that you need to be perfect about something and that incessant nature makes it very hard to even do something really well right that’s why you see so many artists get hooked on Heroin or alcohol or anything that just silence the voice in their head so that they can be in that flow state so that they can create their best work it’s no different than doing a PowerPoint presentation or making a speech or having a great first date and it’s about being present in the moment and and being true to yourself in that moment yeah and like in an even more diffuse way just sitting down and like looking at a blank page or a blank canvas and feeling that like just that slight negative emotion of like uh whatever my first brush stroke is about to be is going to be wrong like whether or not that’s even a voice that’s like I’ve I’ve always felt that present in anything that I’m doing to some extent and most of the time just didn’t notice it and many times just didn’t take action on things that I wanted to do orc would have loved to have done but just didn’t notice that I didn’t do them because I avoided feeling that feeling and then I avoided feeling that I had felt that feeling and that’s why I didn’t do the thing I wanted and then Justified it for some other reason I just didn’t have time and that’s a great example so it could just be a Feeling than if you stop and you say hey what’s the message behind that feeling then you’ll be more aware of the voice and oftentimes for different people they’ll be more aware of the feeling are more aware of the voice and they’re often in concert and the voice can be really subtle and thought and and the or the feeling can be seemingly very subtle just like the voice can seemingly be very subtle so what’s the way when you when you start noticing this voice and you just start start paying more attention and noting it what are some tips for not getting into a resistance battle with it but also not buying into everything it says which I guess is what we do by default when we’re not noticing there’s a voice yeah right that’s the thing the thing about having no awareness of the voice and it’s happening even in you know this moment I have awareness of the voice happening and this moment I don’t um is that when we’re not noticing it’s happening it’s far more likely to control what we’re doing so that’s I think a really good point that you just made as far as how there’s so many ways there’s a plethora of ways of working with the voice in your head so one whole category of ways to work with the voice in your head is just to ask how you relate to it right so voice in the head says oh you should have done better in that project right so some ways to relate to it would be um okay fine and then kind of like a subtle response to it and another way to relate to it is oh I see that you really care that I do a good job and I would love to ask you to use better management techniques with me you know another way to deal with it is to practice silence and another way to deal with it is to love it another way to deal with it is to tickle it another way to deal with it is to really really get in a massive fight with it and then see what happens when you’re exhausted from that fight the main thing here that I really recommend is to is to play and to experiment right you think that oftentimes the kind of the underlying assumption is that there’s this voice a it’s never going to change and B there’s nothing I can do about it and see it’ll always be there and well what if it’s like I’m just gonna do a series of experiments with the voice in my head I’m just going to play with it in different ways I’m going to laugh at it hysterically one day and I’m gonna just notice it another day and I’m gonna love it the third day so there’s all there’s so much flexibility in it but there’s something in our system that is so scared of having that voice in the head go away or to change that it convinces us that we have no flexibility or no options around the voice in the head when I’ve heard other people describe this in other books um or other other work and there’s even a little bit of in this in this conversation is that there’s this assumption that the voice itself is not valuable and that’s just it would be better if we didn’t have it and then here’s a bunch of strategies to get rid of it um but I’m curious what value is there in that voice because often the the self-criticism that I experience of like how I could have done something better is real it’s just that I feel shame that I didn’t do it that way the first time but I actually could have done better you know so it’s like maybe maybe the voice has something valuable to say there’s a way of looking at the voice in the head of hearing it and hearing the intention behind what it’s saying and that’s almost always valuable if you assume for a minute that the voice in the head loves you and it’s just really has a whole bunch of crappy strategies to love you but it really loves you then there’s a way of listening to everything the voice in the head has to say is a deep care it’s just not doing it really well right it’s just not like if I told you wow you’re messing up this podcast you’re hey you’re messing up this podcast hey you’re messing up this podcast and yes look you’re still being silent you’re messing up this podcast why aren’t you saying something Brett you’re messing up this podcast like that’s not going to make a great podcast but the Deep care behind that is oh it really wants you to have be successful and so getting in a war with the voice in the head is like you just you can’t ever win that the question is what’s the relationship you want within mm-hmm like another cool thing to think about is that oftentimes the voice in the head is talking to itself more than it’s talking to you I’m gonna let that one sit for a second right it’s like it’s almost projecting onto you when the voice in the head is saying you’re messing up this podcast you’re messing up this podcast well is it you or is it the voice in the head that’s messing up the podcast yeah there’s there’s something interesting in that where the the voice in our heads often seems to map onto an actual person in our history or some blur of many people in our history that were caretakers or parents or teachers yes like a lot of the things that I say to myself in my head are things somebody else might have said to me in the past and so I’ve just internally learned to say it to myself first before somebody else does it you know yeah that’s part of the care that it has is it’s trying to keep you out of trouble it’s trying to keep you not from not being insulted from not being chastised to not having to feel you know the way it felt when you were three years old and being chastised and so it’s absolutely it often mimics very important figures in our life or it’s reacting to very important events in our life and that’s definitely how it goes which is interesting because oftentimes if you know we had let’s say a really critical mom and the mom just constantly criticized us at some point you’re just like you’re full of it you know you don’t know what you’re talking about but you don’t you don’t question your your head that way right so if your mom constantly is like you should shave more you should shave more you should shave more you’re like yeah you’re full of you don’t need you’re the wrong generation you don’t know but if the voice in your head says you should shave more you should shave more you should shave more and you’re like far more likely to buy into it but it’s not even you didn’t even choose to program it you didn’t even choose what reality it agrees with that was chosen for you and yet you constantly humans constantly believe what’s going on in the voice of the head which is another way to relate to it is to actually see through the false logic of the voice in the head the voice in the head is always contradicting itself is like you were too cocky there you were too humble there you spoke too much you didn’t listen enough you listened too much you didn’t speak enough if you really start looking at how the voice in the head operates it doesn’t give you actually a place to to succeed often it like there’s no way out it’s everything’s there’s a problem with everything and yet we still buy into it so to really look and find out that there’s a little bit of untruth in everything the voice in the head says everything the voice in the head says and to find that it gives you a lot of freedom and perspective from The Voice in the head itself the the reoccurring negative voice in the head well what about the truth in it like what what about the times where if I if I did say the thing that I thought of saying that I might have lost a client or lost a partner or angered somebody or gotten judged like how much of it is untrue and how much of it is true yeah this is an interesting question right so let’s say you’ve done something that insulted a client and let’s say the best thing to do is to say hey I’m really sorry about that I did that it’s not what I wanted to do it’s not how I wanted to be with you and I apologize and then that thing that you did wrong can build trust can actually make your relationship deeper if you’re in your head saying wow you screwed up with the client and that say happens once yeah then it’s not a reoccurring negative thing and you immediately take action on it then whatever’s happening is it’s an effective efficient cycle right but if you’re saying it multiple times and doing nothing about it or you’re saying it 20 times and then doing something about it that is not an efficient cycle that’s just self-abuse that’s just like there’s no need for that it doesn’t make you happier it doesn’t improve the relationship it doesn’t make them happier with you it doesn’t build trust and none of that it doesn’t it doesn’t add anything there so the important thing is that it’s reoccurring and it’s negative self-talk yeah something I notice is when it’s when it’s reoccurring there’s often some kind of double bind there’s like oh like I I really screwed that up what I need to say is this but I already said the other thing and I can’t go back on my word or another is just this sort of a fight between the different versions of the voice yeah exactly like how efficient is that right like how is that helpful exactly and there’s a wisdom to it and it’s like oh well what is it that you want oh I want a better relationship with them and I don’t want to look like I’m inconsistent and I want to be respected by this person and if you get in touch with that and you just name that it’s actually you know particularly in like a view frame of mind it’s it’s like amazing to say oh hey wow I noticed that I was inconsistent here it’s not how I want to be with you and I also notice that I’m having a hard time saying that I was inconsistent because I’m scared you’re going to look at me this way this way but it’s more important for me to be in in my integrity than to you know try to look good in front of you and so I apologize and how can we proceed to build trust from here when the voice in the head is abusing you like that what’s occurring is you’re creating fear in your system right it’s creating anxiety and then that anxiety it makes you think in in a binary way I either apologize I don’t apologize it doesn’t give you the whole vast array of opportunities in front of you at any moment and it also that anxiety also puts it so that you have like a false end where you’re like the only moment you can see to is that moment of apologizing or not apologizing you’re not seeing like the whole relationship and how it can get better over time and so that abuse that self-abuse turns to anxiety the anxiety prevents us from learning the anxiety limits our options are the options we can conceive of the anxiety stops us from seeing past a very particular moment and that’s another reason why an abusive voice in the head is is not effective the thing you just said like uh that scenario where you were just speaking to the client was beautiful and I could imagine being and this this has happened before where I’m like what would Joe say and I’m like I can’t come up with what Joe would say and I’m like oh or like what what would I say if I was speaking so clearly from my truth that I don’t feel like I have access to because I’m under barrage from all these different voices and then nothing gets said and so there’s a thing you said to me the other day which was like you know life is really great once you realize you’re already wrong right yeah yeah there’s another thing just there’s a so what I did when I said what is it that I really want and then I spoke the want and what you’re doing is saying in some version of what’s the right thing to say whether it’s through the projection of me or through being completely high integrity and so doing the right thing trying to make it right is part of the anxiety yeah that is the voice that’s what the voice is trying to do it’s trying to make you right exactly and that’s fear of being wrong and that’s how the voice gets more and more subtle right because it sounds it sounds like a great thing like what would my highest Integrity self say sounds like a like a great thing but it’s still trying to get it right and that’s why I said to you life is great when you know you’re wrong because then you don’t have to try to be right and then you’re just operating from that place naturally that that place of Integrity naturally and so I find the much neater trick is just to say what do I want and then speak into that want Which is far more vulnerable than trying to be right yeah absolutely I mean like being right is trying to say or do the thing that is perceived by both the voice in your head and others as everybody agrees that it’s right which is an impossible task totally impossible exactly and what you want is something that it can flow and change it’s it can be true in the moment and you may get what you want or not get what you want and then learn more yeah that’s right that’s right also there’s this total freedom in identity right if you if you aren’t worried about being right and you don’t need everyone to think you’re right and you don’t need to be right like there’s a huge freedom in that there’s just like this amazing freedom in it and what’s cool is that if you’re there and every time you worry about being right or every time that you’re wrong and somebody’s chastising you for being wrong and you let that emotion move all the way through you it’s like it disintegrates more and more of what some traditions would call the ego but what I would call just limiting perspective it just starts to disintegrate your limiting perspective and it allows your identity to be far more expansive internal experience of identity to be far more expansive and and need a lot less protection I can observe that any of my internal thoughts are actually trying to avoid feeling something the thought might be self-criticism which is trying to gain control over myself to avoid feeling whatever whatever I felt by not getting it right in whatever sense um but also like rehearsing a conversation or just overthinking about something that a like a project that I want to do if I find myself in a circle or a cycle on it it’s often that I’m just trying to collapse the discomfort of the unknown into some framework of known and if I’m trying to do that to some extent that’s impossible it’ll just be a unsolvable puzzle and I’ll just keep doing it when if I just let myself feel the the powerlessness of the unknown then all of a sudden those thoughts go away and then I’m actually freed up to take action what’s cool about what you just said is that’s a fractal or a micro version of a major thing that happens whether it be the fear of death or the fear of taking a risk right to be okay with that feeling of unknown to be okay with like I don’t know what’s going to happen next which is true like we think we know it’s going to happen next we get taught over and over again we don’t you know we create our our world so that it we think it’s predictable and then something very unpredictable happens everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face right I haven’t heard that one I’ve heard um I think it was Muhammad Ali or somebody don’t quote me on that there’s another one I think it was John Lennon which is plans are what you do while life is happening so like that generally is to to be in love with the feeling of of confusion and mystery and unknown and like all emotions it seems like if we do that then we won’t make plans or if we do that we won’t be prepared or if we do that and if that’s happening then the voice in the head has convinced you of that through some wonky logic what actually happens when we get good with that is that plans happen far more naturally organically and they flow far easier yeah well this brings up something else that uh like some another way that this has shown up in my life as stopping me from from like moving forward um if I get to the point where I’m rehearsing a possible conversation and then I feel like I’ve actually fully rehearsed it and then it was perfect then all of a sudden it becomes completely uninteresting to have that conversation anymore because hey I don’t want to like break its Perfect Image in my mind and B it becomes boring because there’s no unknown in it and then C sometimes I’ll actually trick myself into thinking I actually had the conversation it could be disastrous yeah I can’t I can’t comment how many times I’ve been like wait a minute didn’t we talk about this no we never talked about this oh oh no right yeah so that I mean those are all the more subtle ways that the voice in the head operates yeah I mean you just kind of described how maybe the voice in the head doesn’t want to feel the the system doesn’t want to feel rejection and so the voice in the head starts with let’s rehearse so that you don’t experience the rejection and then the voice is like oh this is boring and then the voice is like you probably already had the conversation I mean that’s that’s how the whole thing works and so it’s like there’s always a way for it to insinuate itself and the more you become aware of it like I say it’s subtle to you see it and then the more you see it the more depth there is available and all that is needed is just to relate to it differently and to love it and to be aware of it and not have a fight with it and then you can have moments that happen in your life that they feel like big moments um sometimes sometimes they don’t and all of a sudden you’ll recognize oh the voice in my head is like so much quieter there’s so much less of it yeah what happens when you get to that point what did it feel like when you had that like sudden 75 reduction in the voice in your head it’s different for different people um for some people it’s hardly noticeable it’s like it’s such a slow progression and for some people especially what I notice is people who are like really deeply depressed when that kicks in then it’s just like this life-changing holy crap which has happened some people they resist it and they feel like they’re I think there’s this whole thing called depersonalization disorder and and or the thing called Zen sickness and so people can it can happen they’re like wait a second where am I this isn’t good I can’t I need that back so you can have all sorts of reactions to it um when it happens and you’re aware of it and you’re not fighting with it it’s incredibly joyful it’s it’s just it’s like your car has just become 75 more efficient your energy is far more aligned with um the way that you want to be going and not second guessing yourself and and it’s more enjoyable you’re more in the present all that stuff but again to have a goal to get rid of the voice in your head is to not love the voice in your head and therefore it is a very slow process far better to just love the voice in your head as it is and not try to get rid of it and not reject it yeah it almost sounds like the framing of like getting rid of the voice in the head is like creating separation from it but what we’re actually going for is developing such a relationship with it that it’s communicating with us so cleanly that it is just a part of us instead of you know compressing itself down into words and then you know hitting us in our like logic like Battlefield yeah it’s an interesting question you know eventually that question comes up as you’re talking about like what’s the voice in the head and what’s you and what’s the difference between them and I think that’s a great question to be sitting with but not to be answering to be in that question like what’s what’s the difference between me and the voice in my head actually that in itself can change your relationship with the voice in your head you know with that to sit with what are some other what’s another like practice or maybe a homework assignment to develop this relationship further with their voice there’s infinite amount and they work different for different people at different stages so when I see somebody I can point more directly to what might be useful for them but generally um there’s two that come to mind one is you know just tell yourself that you love yourself maybe in a mirror and a camera and then listen to the response to you loving yourself all the ways that it makes you uncomfortable all the things that you say that you’re not lovable for that’s all the voice in your head so if you want to excavate it it’s a great way to excavate it um another one which is a more subtle trick is just to ask the question what’s looking out behind my eyes right now and you’ll notice that that often quiets the mind it also kind of puts you in where your identity has moved from awareness I mean from the voice in your head to awareness right so is are you the voice in your head that’s constantly talking or are you the awareness of the voice in the head talking and so it it asks that question and you can do it at any time it’s a great practice in the fact you can be in a meeting you can be in a fight you can be going to the bathroom and you can say what’s looking out behind my eyes and there’s a ton a ton of versions of that question the most common one uh is who am I or what am I not that’s not a question to be answered that’s a question to to be in right it’s to be in Wonder in that question um but there’s a ton of ton of little hacks hack questions like that that are available but I’d say start with one of those yeah what about journaling um like writing down the voice in your head no I don’t have any problem with it yeah it’s a great thing if you want to write what the voice in your head is saying to you great yeah and like bring it into awareness even better once you’ve done it find like be an argumentative lawyer to it not an adversary but an argumentative lawyer and find out what’s a little untrue in each of the statements you know so someone says I should lose weight well you should lose weight according to who what do you mean by shouldn’t you be this the way you are because the definition of should is what is right so and what so I have to lose weight because if not I’ll die early and what makes it that dying early is bad and who’s to say that the best thing isn’t for me to die early I know that’s a crazy but look for any way in which the logic might be right also I should lose weight I’ve been saying it for a decade it doesn’t work so what makes me keep on saying I shouldn’t lose weight maybe I should say I want to lose weight and what’s the response to I should lose weight most people’s responses Rebellion that they don’t do it so there’s all sorts of ways to just start looking into and analyzing and bringing um a fresh perspective into the voice in your head yeah it seems like the example you just gave also helps get people like somebody asking those questions would get themselves more in touch with what they’re actually afraid of correct underneath the the Judgment The Voice had right you can bring View you know the from the first podcast and from the course you can bring that same methodology and and point it towards the voice in your head right being vulnerable with it like ow it really hurts when you tell me I should lose weight being impartial with it like I’m I’m not going to try to get rid of you like what what’s going on what do you really have to say being empathetic with it like how scared is the voice in the head to be like shouting at you like this like what’s it so afraid of and to feel that to bring Wonder to it right you can bring all of that view to your voice in your head and you can dialogue with it in a journal it’s a great great practice there’s really infinite ways to deal with it to play with it to have fun with it and I just encourage people to like to experiment play yeah yeah it seems like a great internal playground for a view and then you might find that the same kind of view conversations you start to have with a voice in your head are gonna probably be somewhat similar to the conversations you might have with your first view conversations with your with your family or your parents or you know your family of origin where many of the voices come come from yeah it’ll also affect all your relationships so if you see through your own shoulds and somebody says you know I really think I should you see through their should whereas if you believe your should then you believe there should if you believe you know your sense of rigid morality then that is inhumane then you’ll believe their sense of rigid morality that um is not humane so when you see through your own voice in your head you are a Bastion of freedom for people because when they’re talking to you you don’t buy into their limiting perspectives so to wrap this up can you can you ask a couple questions for our listeners to to ponder to integrate this conversation yeah how do you want to relate to the voice in your head what’s the most fun experiment you can think to do around the voice in your head and what would it take for you to enjoy the voice in your head just as it is without wanting it to change perfect thank you Joe I really love this conversation I really liked it I felt really alive yeah yeah thanks Brett thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com [Music] foreign