Chad Silverstein delivers a brief personal monologue about noticing and changing one’s internal self-talk. He emphasizes building awareness of the voice in your head, not letting transient emotions dictate behavior, and preparing ("preloading") calm responses to life's inevitable setbacks—using an ocean-underwater metaphor to illustrate staying cool beneath surface storms.
Chapters
I don't know what the statistics are on how many conversations we have with ourself all day long, but I know it's a lot. And we do it. We talk to ourselves. We have this voice in our head. It's conversations with yourself. And it's incredible that you don't actually stop and think about, like, what you're telling yourself, how powerful that is. And it's amazing if you catch it and you're able to kind of build that awareness of it, how much more successful you could be with changing the way you think, which will change the way you feel, which will change the way you behave and going your whole life unconsciously unaware of what you're telling yourself. That is, for me at least, a scary thought that you just lose control of what you're telling yourself all day long and you're just repeating it. And so I think, you know, again, this reminder, having the daily reminder, having, you know, people that you can lean on and work with, whether it's a builder, you know, some mentor, someone a truth teller in your life that can help bring things, things to the surface. You know, I always like to say that, you know, people say, trust your gut. You know, it's something that we've learned to do. But a lot of times your gut is based on an emotion and your emotions lie to you. You may have to embrace your emotions, but they come and go. And again, they're not lying to you as much as they will. They will disappear. You'll feel this low, and then, you know, you can come out of it. And then you realize, wow, I can't believe I was so upset about that. Or so low. So you have to embrace your emotions, but you don't have to let them dictate how you live your life. I always like to say, and I think I maybe have said it before, that you think about the ocean and think about on the top of the ocean. You can have storms and tsunamis, choppy water. You could have ripples. And if you're underneath the water, right, you're cool and calm above the water. You could have crazy stuff going on. Think about life throwing all kinds of curve balls at you. But then, you know, six o' clock in the morning, the water is like a sheet of, of glass. Things are calm. You're going to have those moments of your life that are calm and crazy. But you want to be underneath the water. You want to be cool and calm all the time, no matter what kind of storm is crashing above you. And I like to look at life that way. I like to think that, you know, things are going to happen, their storms are coming. My reaction to that, my response to that. Preload it now. How I want to react when I get screwed over, when I lose an investment, when things don't go my way and I want to be cool and calm when. When someone upsets me and frustrates me and doesn't do things when I want them to do it, how I want them to do it, so that I don't react and give over my control to someone else to make me feel a certain way just because my emotions at the time got me all riled up. So think about that for you. Write about that, get clarity on that, and control that.
