Changing the Inner Dialogue

Are the conversations that you're having with yourself healthy or do you have that small inner voice that always wants to hold you back?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around building our Personal Power by talking about changing the internal dialogue.

I don't know about you, but I have lots of conversations with different people every day. And the conversations that I have with myself, I have found to be the most important. Now, I'm not talking about sitting in a corner, talking to myself. I'm talking about that inner dialogue that we all have that either empowers us or holds us back. And I know for many years, this was a major issue for me.

Every time I went to expand my comfort zone, every time I went to do something that was outside those limiting beliefs that we've worked on before, I have this voice that would remind me of where I really belong, remind me of my shortcomings, remind me of what it is that I should be doing and shouldn't be doing. And in my experience of working with people all around the world, just like me, human beings, I find that this is the case for everyone.

Now, the first thing we need to understand is that this voice was created by us. I like to call this voice my mini-me, my little version of me, that voice that is deep inside my subconscious that reminds me of who I really am.

Now, the challenge with that voice is a lot of times, that reminder of who you really are is not the truth. It's a truth that you have created based on the things that we've talked about in the weeks previous, where we've talked about those limiting beliefs, those things that you've done in your past, those experiences that you've had that you have created a meaning from that changes the way you feel about yourself, changes the way you see yourself.

And that inner dialogue is either helping you or harming you.

What I want to do today is to help you to retrain that voice, to make sure that we understand that because we were able to train that voice, we can retrain that voice today. Let's get started.

We've all heard of this thing called the comfort zone. It's that place where we feel safe, where we feel confident, where we feel competent, and anything that's outside that comfort zone, by virtue of what it's called, feels uncomfortable.

One of the things that I realised years ago is that language is vitally important. What we say to ourselves, what we say to others then creates what we get back.

So, it's really important for us to understand some language around comfort zone. Now, you've all seen them. You've seen those memes that say the magic is all outside your comfort zone. Well, it's not. It's uncomfortable out there. So, it's not about it being magic and it's not about being hard or what's inside the comfort zone being easy. It's all about whether or not it's familiar or unfamiliar.

When we look at it in this context, when we look at it in this way, we can see things that we now do that we might say easy — I'd like to say familiar — that fit inside our comfort zone. Now, remember the first time you did some of those things. I remember the first time that I picked up a telephone to ring someone that I didn't know to ask them to take me on and utilise my services.

Many, many years ago, I almost had a pink fit. I had butterflies that were not flying in formation. And my inner dialogue was reminding me that they were not interested in me because I wasn't good enough. But nowadays, I can pick the phone up and I can ring anybody. I can speak to anyone because I'm not ringing them to see if they like me or if I belong or if I'm good enough, I'm ringing them to offer them a service, a solution that they need. So now, it's in my comfort zone. It's familiar.

So when we want to retrain our mini-me, that inner dialogue, we need to remember that we have trained that mini-me, that small voice to keep us inside that comfort zone. Because when we step outside that comfort zone, it feels uncomfortable.

Let's say for example, you're one of these people that doesn't like speaking in public. Apparently, in the list of fears all around the world, speaking in public is only second to death by fire. So, there's something about speaking in front of other people that people feel fearful of. And we know it's because their focus is on themselves and they're concerned that they won't be good enough, that they won't belong, that people won't like them. So, it's not the speaking in public itself.

So if you're ready to retrain that voice right now, I want you to come on a journey with me and I'm going to take you through a simple process to do that. The first thing that we need to do is acknowledge the mini-me. Because we have created it and we've asked it to keep us safe.

So, let's say we were to do the same thing with our mini-me. Instead of disrupting that pattern, we would say, "Okay, I hear you. I know I taught you to stop me from speaking in public, but I want you to unlearn that because we've got a lot to say, and we've got something that these people need to hear. So therefore, watch and learn."

The beautiful thing about a mini-me, that inner dialogue, is that it can be retrained. If we trained it once, it tells us straight away that it's teachable. So therefore, just like us, just like every bit of learning that anyone does to be able to move forward from past beliefs, from past learnings, we need to first unlearn.

So, you get up on stage and you speak and it's fantastic and the people love it and you have served and you've given your best. And over a period of time of repeating the new behaviour, we now develop a dialogue that says, "Get up and speak on stage" because now we have changed the underlying belief. We've changed the underlying language.

The key step in being able to develop our Personal Power is to change the inner dialogue, the way that we speak to ourself. So, what I want you to do over this coming week is I want you to look at some of those limiting beliefs. I want you to flip those beliefs and I want you to affirm those new beliefs to yourself. I want you to practice retraining that inner dialogue so that we can have a healthy voice that empowers us and moves us forward.