Carlos Velásquez · Medium · 5 min read · Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

What is your inner voice telling you? That voice that starts talking as soon as you wake up and continues chattering throughout the day.

What assumptions underpin what it is saying?

Your inner voice influences your mood. Your mood impacts how you treat people; how you treat people impacts how they treat you — influencing the quality of your relationships. Your relationships affect the quality of your life. The quality of your life forms the sounding board which projects your inner voice, creating a feedback loop.

Without awareness of it, your inner voice will remain on autopilot, akin to sitting in a self-piloted boat in the open sea with a faulty navigation system — a slight miscalibration will take you hundreds of miles off target.

Unless you learn to edit your inner voice, it can unwittingly change your life’s trajectory.

Below are several scenarios that lend themselves to editing your inner voice.

Feeling Jealous

Do you gravitate toward jealous people? Neither do others.

Jealousy repels us. Our bodies viscerally detect it before our minds do. Jealous people are often excluded from social circles, even if they are otherwise likable.

Worse still, jealousy makes us blind to the fact that what we are jealous of — someone’s educational attainment/wealth/status, etc. — results from a unique set of circumstances whose happenstances are impossible for us to understand fully.

Consider the envy one might feel toward someone’s career success. Jealously prevents us from acknowledging that said success may largely result from sacrifices that person made. Sacrifices that may have prevented the high achiever from enjoying other aspects of life (e.g., hobbies, relationships, better sleep) we could not imagine existing without.

At a more fundamental level, jealousy hinders our ability to build genuine relationships with people uniquely positioned to share life lessons with us; thereby limiting our understanding of the tradeoffs necessary to attain “success.”

Sadly, jealousy thwarts positive energy — in the form of insight, knowledge, and wisdom that could be obtained through genuine relationships — from entering our life’s feedback loop.

Jealousy handicaps our search for a better life.

Being Disrespected

How people treat us is rarely based solely on our actions.

Some people do not have the emotional bandwidth to consider how their actions can make others feel. When feeling overwhelmed, those lacking sufficient emotional bandwidth apply coping mechanisms that can make them disrespectful. By overcompensating for their psychological shortcomings, they often disrespect others. (Contrast them to emotionally grounded folks who choose not to be disrespectful in similar contexts).

Many people are fighting battles we are unaware of. Everyone will inevitably interact with disrespectful people.

Allowing our inner voice to fuel vendettas against disrespectful types limits our ability to understand the human condition (our aspirations, fears, disappointments, etc.), which is the root cause of disrespectful behavior. Defaulting to an inner voice that practices compassion and limits judgment, on the other hand, helps us better understand the human condition — and ultimately helps us better understand ourselves.

Understanding ourselves is vital in cultivating self-respect.

The self-respect we cultivate manifests itself in the way we treat others. Since how we treat others impacts how they treat us, we are more likely to attract positive energy into our life’s feedback loop by practicing compassion and limiting our judgment.

By editing our inner voice, even disrespectful people can serve as a conduit to living a better life.

The Inner Critic

The inner critic criticizes, judges, and demeans us. It tells us we are not smart enough; not good-looking enough; not successful enough. The inner critic is that inner voice in our head that magnifies our flaws and minimizes our strengths.

While it can motivate us, the inner critic nonetheless takes a toll on our self-esteem.

We must quiet it.

The inner critic needs the past and the future to criticize, judge, and demean us. It can only berate us for something that already happened or will happen. Crucially, it is incapable of berating us if we are fully engaged in the present moment.

Some people engage in the present moment through prayer and meditation. Meditative states, however, can also be reached by partaking in physical activity (e.g., dance) and creative pursuits (painting) that fully engage us.

By engaging in the present moment, we quiet our inner critic.

When our inner critic is quieted, we are better positioned to capitalize on our strengths and address areas of our lives we want to improve.

Quieting the inner critic is key to reaching our full potential.

Have A Look Inside

“A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. ‘Spare some change?’ mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. ‘I have nothing to give you,’ said the stranger. Then he asked: ‘What’s that you are sitting on?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied the beggar. ‘Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember.’ ‘Ever looked inside?’ asked the stranger. ‘No,’ said the beggar. ‘What’s the point? There’s nothing in there.’ ‘Have a look inside,’ insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold. I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.” ~ The Power Of Now, Eckhart Tolle

Similar to the beggar in the parable above, many of us spend our lives metaphorically sitting on the side of the road. But instead of sitting on a box, we spend our waking hours sitting with our thoughts — the inner voice in our head — without much introspection.

Our journey to a better life starts by looking inside ourselves. The “looking” part starts by observing our inner voice.

We have the ability to edit our inner voice. And through this editing process, we can learn to better navigate life’s rough seas.

Have a look inside. Listen. What is your inner voice telling you?

How will you edit it?

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