Dave Kashen and others discuss how your inner voice defaults to negativity and why retraining it with affirmations matters for founders and leaders. They explore the psychology and neurobiology behind self-talk and how reframing it gives you an edge.
Oh, you look so perfect today. Oh, you just nailed that thing that you just did. Wow. Is that just me? Proud of you. No, no.
Jesse, does your voice say that in your head? I feel like your voice says that. No.
Well, I think Dave Kashen said this to me one time, which is like the ego, the ego is trained. So there are, I think there are people whose inner voices are much more critical because maybe their parents were critical of their life experience. There's some who are more maybe medium. There's probably some that are positive, but You can shift that inner voice with practice. That's not necessarily—
and then the inner voice will be like, yeah, you're amazing. Go ahead.
A little. Yeah. I think, I mean, I've shifted mine a lot over time. Okay. That's what, that's why people say to do affirmations and like Dave sent me his morning affirmation once and I do my own. I'm like, hey, and you can train it. It's still, it's still the voice. It's still not you. It's still this, you know, the, but at least now it's a supportive voice. It can be a supportive one. You're gonna have one. Go ahead. But most people today, today's point, most people's does not tend to be.
Yeah. That by default, most people's inner voice is critical. It's negative. It's like a massively distorted toward negativity. And so first of all, that's, that's just like, why change your relationship with it? It's because it's not connected to reality. It's like you live in a reality that's, uh, let's call it like level 5, and the voice would have you think that reality is like minus 5. So just if you listen to your voice all the time, you're in this like really distorted dystopian version of reality that's not actually the reality you're in. So, first benefit is to live in the actual reality you're in. And I often say, like, I think we're neurobiologically wired for a world that existed like 1,000 years ago where lions, tigers, and bears were constantly trying to kill us. And so, the voice is a mechanism of survival in a world that was like, again, 10 times more dangerous than the one we're in.
