The most important story that you will ever hear is the one that goes on in your head everyday. It’s going on right now—it’s deciding whether what I have just said is true or not. It’s the voice that says, after you miss your first serve in tennis, “You’d better not miss this second serve or that will be a double fault.” It’s distracting sometimes. It’s right sometimes. It’s wrong sometimes. It’s beautiful sometimes. The important thing to realize is that it’s not your voice—unless you choose for it to be.
The other important thing to realize is that it’s almost always talking. It’s not always letting you make decisions about what to think. It often just blurts out the first thing it thinks of and it can be very easy to just sit down in the back seat and let it do the driving. This is very dangerous. Only you should be driving you. You should be steering. You should be deciding what to think. You should be in control. It takes a keen ear to hear the thoughts that are going on in your headspace. It takes practice. There are probably several voices—some from your friends, some from your parents and family, some from your teachers, and some from all the people out in the world. Practice recognizing all of these thoughts that are going on in your head and then start shining the spotlight on them to see which ones you want to keep around and which ones you want to give back to the owner.
In college, I developed a repetitive stress injury. When a massage therapist specialist suggested that I take a year off from my graduate studies in order to heal myself of this injury, I heard an almost audible voice in my head say, “You can’t do that—if you do that, then you’ll fall a year behind.” Woah. Where did that voice come from? Was it mine? It didn’t sound like mine but there it was in my head. What did it even mean to fall a year “behind”? Sure, I would finish my Ph.D. a year later if I took a year off but as long as I was alive somewhere breathing in and out and enjoying myself, I wouldn’t fall a year behind in life. I would be a year ahead in life. And that sounded okay to me. So I ignored the voice in my head, took the advice of my massage therapist, and spent a year working as a bartender on the quiet Hawaiian island of Molokai, where I could finally hear some of my thoughts. I finished my Ph.D. a year later than I would have otherwise but I was much happier overall, and I did recover from that repetitive stress injury.
I believe we have these stories going on in our head to help us try to make sense of the world. When the sky is filled with lightning and thunder and it starts to pour rain, we need an explanation. We need a story. Maybe the rain god is mad at us. Maybe the sun god is mad at us. Maybe another god is crying tears of joy. Maybe it’s an impersonal phenomenon that has to do with air pressure and humidity levels. Whichever explanation you believe, that’s a story that you’re telling yourself or hearing and choosing to believe. Be conscious of the fact that there is a story being told and examine all of the stories that come your way.
When you apply for a job, you tell yourself a story in which you might be the most qualified candidate for the job and the employer might recognize that and hire you. If you don’t receive a job offer, then you have to tell yourself a different story. But what story do you tell yourself? Do you tell yourself that you weren’t good enough? That you aren’t as skilled as you think you are? That you looked good on paper but then blew the interview? Do you have a good reason to tell yourself those stories rather than some other story? Maybe they thought you were highly qualified but that someone else was just slightly even more qualified. Maybe they unexpectedly lost their budget for that role during their quarterly planning. Maybe they had an internal candidate in mind already and were just going through the motions of posting the job because the government required them to. They may have even written the job description so that it was tailored to the internal candidate’s skill set so that no outside candidates would have a chance of outqualifying her. It could be any number of things. Observe which one you believe. All they did was not offer you the job.
Which story you choose to believe or to tell yourself will affect what you think of yourself and what you do next. These are not small things. These are very important things, so be careful and mindful of the stories you tell yourself and what you choose to believe. If you think that you were secretly laughed out of the interview room, then you might never apply to that company or that type of job again. If you think they would have happily hired you if they didn’t happen to meet one other slightly more qualified candidate, then you will shrug it off and press on.
The stories you tell yourself also affect how you view others. Once I saw a mother give some candy to one of her sons but not to the other. I was with my friend’s mom and she said something like, “That mother was so mean!” I had a hard time believing that a mother would be mean so I said, “Maybe that son is diabetic and can’t have sugar.” My friend’s mom was pleasantly surprised with my comment and smiled and said something like, “That’s a very kind interpretation of the situation!” If you don’t know what’s going on and you have a choice between a kind story and a mean story, then why not tell yourself the kind story? The world will become a more beautiful place.
You can do this even when there’s only a small chance of the kind story being true. Let’s say that you know for a fact that when someone cuts in front of you in traffic, 90% of the time that person is aware of what they are doing and they choose to be rude and only 10% of the time that person is oblivious to what they are doing. You can think that this person is choosing to be rude, which might make you angry and aggressive, or you can give this person the benefit of the doubt and think that they might be in the minority and are oblivious rather than rude. The statistic supports both stories. And each story will change what you think about that person and how you react to the situation. So why not choose the kinder story? This isn’t delusion. You don’t think that 100% of the drivers are oblivious—you still believe that only 10% of them are oblivious and 90% of them are rude, but you can appease your mind which always needs a story with the kinder story and not jump to conclusions about the intention of the driver in front of you, which is uncertain.
I sometimes go one step further. I delude myself. I sometimes pretend that the cars are not being controlled by drivers with intentions or feelings but rather that their behavior is just like the wind and the ocean. Sometimes they are forces that aid me and sometimes they hinder me but it’s never personal. This frees me up to focus on other things, like driving safely and figuring out how to best navigate this sea of cars. It no longer matters if the car in front of me stopped because it wanted me to crash into it and try to collect money from my insurance company or if it stopped because it ran out of gas. All that matters is that there is a car stopped in front of me and I am trying to get around it. All of the cars are in fact being driven by humans with intentions but I don’t need to focus on that fact. A story that’s less true helps me operate in a way that I find more peaceful and useful in my life. Stories are often useful because they are true but sometimes the truest stories aren’t the most useful ones. I’m not suggesting that you believe lies or lie to yourself. That probably won’t be useful in the long run. But it’s useful for me to pretend, while I’m driving, that the movements of cars are like the movements of the wind and the ocean. It’s not personal. They’re not out to get me. They’re just moving. It’s a useful story to operate under while I’m driving, even though I know I don’t really believe it.
Your stories become your world, so you have to be very careful who you’re listening to. The thing to realize is that the voice that’s playing in your head isn’t necessarily the voice of reality, it’s more like a narrator. It’s like a sports commentator. You missed your first serve while playing tennis. The commentator says, “He must be feeling the pressure now. If he misses this next serve, then he’ll lose the match.” But commentators are merely narrators. They can get it wrong. They can be jerks, heckling you unproductively. You don’t have to listen to them. You missed your first serve. A different commentator might have said, “He’s done this before and some say he might even be doing it intentionally to throw his opponents off. Right now his opponent is expecting a weaker second serve but sometimes he will use that to his advantage and go for an ace on his second serve, catching his opponent off guard. Let’s see if he’s going to use that strategy this time.” Commentators can be anyone and say anything. That’s the danger. You have to separate yourself from the commentator so that you can choose which comments you want to take on board and which ones you want to leave waiting at the station. The narrator is rarely just telling it like it is. The narrator is almost always adding commentary and value judgments and predictions of the future. See them for what they are and know when you know more than they do. Choose which voices you listen to. Don’t let them throw you off your game.
People have said that you can know everything about a person by how he spends his money. People have also said that you can know a person by meeting all of his friends. I’m saying that you can know a person by knowing which thoughts he kept in his head and which thoughts he rejected and threw out. Pay attention to the commentators that are narrating your life from inside your head because probably not all of them will be the best representation of you. Find the ones that are or add your own so that your life will go in the direction that you want it to. You can create your world just as much as you can receive it. And the voices in your head are the building blocks for your life vision. Think beautiful.
Practice hearing the voices in your head.
Do this for one day: Every time something happens, listen to the voices in your head. Listen to the commentary. Notice the judgments and the advice and the predictions that you hear. If it’s cold outside when you wake up, then you might hear, “It’s cold outside today. I had better wear a warm jacket.” When you’re standing in line at a cafe to get coffee, you might hear, “What is taking them so long? I have to be at work in ten minutes.” When you get to work, you might hear, “There’s Jake rolling in at 10am again. Does he really stay until 7pm like he says he does?” Once you start identifying all of the commentary that’s going on in your head, then you are in a position to keep the commentary that you like and ignore or throw out the commentary that you don’t like. It’s dangerous to let any commentary fly under your radar and take it as the unquestioned truth.
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