Who is the Voice in Your Head?

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.

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. Most of us have a voice in our heads constantly narrating our experience.

"Ugh!

Why'd you say that?" "She hates it when I do this." 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 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 voice is saying the same thing over and over again. "you should lose weight, you should lose weight, you should lose weight." Or, "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 help listeners tap into their voice in the head right now. 'Cause 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, um, 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 silence last?" or "This is stupid. What makes us do this?" or "I hope I didn't forget the eggs 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-focused. But grand majority of people, they can literally— it's like they can hear the voice.

Yeah, I kind of felt both. 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." Right, 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 recurring voice in the head is far more silent and quiet. And that in itself is an interesting thing, 'cause the somatic experiencing hasn't stopped, and so to some degree it's harder to find the pain that's occurring. The voice makes it much easier to feel that pain or to see 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 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, you know, I did a ton of meditation in my earlier years, and a point came along where the voice in the head cut by like 75%. And I felt like it was gone for a while as far as the recurring 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, like the more it's subtle to see it, it's, 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.

Yeah. What makes it important or interesting to become aware of it? I imagine if I had a roommate in my head just constantly talking to me, ignorance would be bliss. So 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 'cause 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 Perls, I believe, and he was talking about how there was an upper dog and an underdog 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, going, "No, no, no," 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 me in particular, it was the "should" thing. I think he called it out. He was 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. A very active negative voice in the head is, in the DSM, they would call it dysthymia. 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 your consciousness isn't a horrible boss, right? So on one level you said like, oh, what if my roommate was all that? I'd rather just not hear them. 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 clarity you can have. Right.

And so somebody I was talking to recently about the voice in the head, they said that their voice isn't like a self-critical voice, but what they do is they rehearse conversations or conversations they could have had. And it seems like that is kind of a way of being self-critical. 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 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, shoulding you, 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 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—" I don't want that, so I'm just gonna be aware of it. And then pretty soon 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. In 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 the voice in the head to get out of the voice in the head is like 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 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 might be wrong about it or something.

Yeah. I mean, just a great way to think about this is, so your voice in your head has worried about how some future thing's gonna 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 gonna say and all the ways you were gonna 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 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. My experience of that is it also sets you up for major disappointment and self— like a shame spiral after the conversation doesn't go anything according to your rehearsal.

Yeah, I mean, 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 to 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. It's about being present in the moment and and being true to yourself in that moment. Yeah.

And then 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, ugh, whatever my first brushstroke is about to be is gonna be wrong. Like whether or not that's even a voice, that's like, 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 or would've 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. Oh, I just didn't have time.

And that's a great example. So it could just be a feeling. Then 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 or more aware of the voice, and they're often in concert. And the voice can be really subtle in thought, or the feeling can be seemingly very subtle, just like the voice can seemingly be very subtle.

So what's the way, 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. 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, "Mm, okay. Mm, fine." And then, "Mm," kind of like a subtle "fuck you" in 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." 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 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 gonna change, and B, there's nothing I can do about it, and C, 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 gonna 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 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 or other work, and there's even a little bit of it in this conversation, is that there's this assumption that the voice itself is not valuable and that it'd be better if we didn't have it. And there's, here's a bunch of strategies to get rid of it. But I'm curious, what value is there in that voice? Because often 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, it's like 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 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 as a deep care. It's just not doing it really well. It's just not— if I told you, "Wow, you're messing up this podcast," 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 gonna 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 with it? 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 something interesting in that where 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 from not being insulted, from not being chastised, to not having to feel, you know, the way it felt when you were 3 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 don't know what you're talking about. But you don't question 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 it. 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. It's 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 succeed often. Like, there's no way out. 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 recurring negative voice in the head.

But what about the truth in it? Like, what about the times where 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 it up with the client, and that, say, happens once, yeah, then it's not a recurring 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. None of that. It doesn't, it doesn't add anything there. So the important thing is that it's recurring and it's negative self-talk.

Something I notice is when it's recurring, there's often some kind of double bind. There's like, "Oh, 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 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now there's just sort of a fight between the different versions of the voice.

Yeah, exactly. How efficient is that? Right? 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 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 noticed that I'm having a hard time saying that I was inconsistent because I'm scared you're gonna look at me this way or this way, but it's more important for me to be 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 a binary way. I either apologize or 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. 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 not effective.

The thing you just said, like that scenario where you were just speaking to the client, was beautiful. And I could imagine being, and 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— The 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 can flow and change, and 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. Expansive 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 I felt by not getting it right in whatever sense. But also like rehearsing a conversation or just overthinking about something that I, 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 an unsolvable puzzle and I'll just keep doing it. When if I just let myself feel 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 gonna happen next, which is true. Like, we think we know what's gonna happen next. We get taught over and over again, we don't. We create our world so that we think it's predictable, and then something very unpredictable happens.

Everyone has a plan till you get punched in the face.

Right? Haven't heard that one. I've heard— 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 that generally is to be in love with the feeling 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. Wow. This brings up something else that like some another way that this has shown up in my life as stopping me from, from like moving forward. 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, which can be disastrous. Yeah. Yeah. Like I can't, I can't count 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. I mean, you just kind of described how maybe the voice in the head doesn't want to feel that— 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've probably already had the conversation." I mean, that's how the whole thing works. And so it's like, there's always a way for it to insinuate itself. The more you become aware of it, like I say, it's subtle till 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 are— they feel like big moments, um, sometimes, sometimes they don't. And all of a sudden you 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 sudden 75% reduction in the voice in your head?

It's different for different people. 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 really deeply depressed when that kicks in, then it's just like this life-changing, holy crap, what just happened. Some people, they resist it and they feel like they're Like, there's this whole thing called depersonalization disorder, or the Zen called Zen sickness. So people can— it can happen, they're like, "Wait a second, where am I? This isn't good. I need that back." So you can have all sorts of reactions to it. When it happens and you're aware of it and you're not fighting with it, it's incredibly joyful. It's just— your car has just become 75% more efficient. Mm-hmm. Your energy is far more aligned with the way that you want to be going and not second-guessing yourself, 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 battlefield?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. Eventually that question comes up as you're talking about 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 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 practice or maybe a homework assignment to develop this relationship further with our 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, there's two that come to mind. One is, you know, just tell yourself that you love yourself, maybe in a mirror, in 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 wanna excavate it, it's a great way to excavate it. 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 is, "Who am I?" or "What am I?" That's not a question to be answered, that's a question to be in. It's to be in wonder. In that question. But there's a ton of little hacks, hack questions like that that are available. But I'd say start with one of those, yeah. What about journaling?

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 wanna write what the voice in your head is saying to you, great. Yeah, 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 should? Shouldn't you be the weight 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? 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 should lose weight? Maybe I should say I want to lose weight. And what's the response to I should lose weight? Most people's response is rebellion that they don't do it. So there's all sorts of ways to just start looking into and analyzing and bringing 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 judgment the voice had.

Right, you can bring view, you know, from the first podcast and from the course, you can bring that same methodology 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 not gonna try to get rid of you. Like, 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. 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, 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 experiment, play. Yeah.

Yeah, 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 family or your parents or your family of origin where many of the voices 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 their 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 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 ask a couple of questions for our listeners to ponder, to integrate this conversation? Yeah.

How do you wanna 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.

It 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 artofaccomplishment.com.