A critical internal voice can be your worst enemy. Let that sink in for a second. In my previous post, I shed some light on how our internal voice is influenced by external voices during formative years. These voices affect almost every aspect of our daily existence including relationships, work or school performance, self-esteem, and overall confidence.

Here are the four ways in which I have successfully turned the volume down on these voices, allowing me to do the things it tells me I can’t and move through life with some semblance of ambition.

New and Improved External Voices

As strange and uncomfortable as this may sound, talk to yourself. Some call these affirmations, but I call it my battle voice. Before going into a situation in which I know my emotional firing squad will be present and ready for duty, I send my own words in to round them up for me. I repeat to myself phrases such as “Sis, you ‘bout to kill it! You’re gonna be amazing! They’re not ready for this level of greatness!  Let these people know who you are sis!” (My battle voice has no ties to propriety, respectability or grammar, excuse her), and in doing so I give myself a fighting chance to make it through the presentation or lecture or meeting that has had my stomach in tighter knots than what anchor cruise ships for the better part of a week or month.

Because your inner voice can only spew out what has been deposited, you need to actively deposit positive words, or you will never hear positive words. One might ask “well why do I need to keep on saying these positive things when the negatives just keep replaying?” Simple! These negative voices were placed there during your formative years. They are like weeds that have taken root and are flourishing within the depths of the very soil of your self-image, while your positive words are like the crops that you must continuously tend to in hopes of seeing a harvest that has not been choked or stunted by the weeds.

Respond

Yes! It is crazy to respond to a voice in your hear, but it is even crazier to let a voice in your head derail your future. Tell it no! A lot of us are no-nonsense until the nonsense is internal. We have all walked away from arguments and been inundated with a rush of better responses for our opponents’ points. Well here is an argument from which we cannot walk away. We have all the time to put our opponent in its place.

When your internal voice says “…no, you can’t,” respond with “watch me!” or “I certainly can, and I will!” When it hits you with a “what do you have to offer?” hit back with an “everything!” This feels silly, it feels uncomfortable, it feels embarrassing, but all those feelings stem from the same internal voice. Remember one of its unsubstantiated one-liners is “you will embarrass yourself.” As an internal voice (just a voice, not a power, not a force, just a voice) it relies on tainting our view of the external world. It needs us to believe that circumstances are insurmountable and that friends recall everything we have ever done wrong, and that others already assume that whatever we do will fail. Refuse to accept these unrealities and let that voice (yourself) know in no uncertain terms that it is powerless against your own will to survive and achieve.

Drown out the voices

Podcasts and audiobooks. Three years ago, I quite literally and very dramatically yanked my headphones out of my ears and threw them onto a bus floor with all the exasperation you can assign to such an action. I tried gospel, I tried Soca, I tried bouyon and I realized that music was no longer effective against the voices in my head. I found that the voices could sing along. Gospel brought every emotion to the forefront and I would find myself crying at the alter time and again, Soca was too happy and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could be this happy while  I suffered in the torture chamber of my own design, and the chaotic tempo of bouyon raised my heart rate to match it, and with no outlet for this sudden burst of cardiac activity, I felt near death’s door by way of a heart attack each time. Make no mistake, I love music, especially the music of the land of my birth, but when I needed to debate my internal voices, neither drums nor a bassline made the points I needed to take home the trophy.

Instead, I made a list (a physical list-when your struggle is mental, you cannot store your ammunition mentally) of all the areas of my life this negative voice wanted to attack; these were finances, body image, relationships, school, etc. and I began to listen to podcasts, audiobooks, and vloggers providing guidance and encouragement in these areas. My negative internal voice and its box of clichés was no match.

Remove any new negative external voices

Cut-Off season is the rudimentary colloquial translation of the removal of negative external voices in your life. The friends who joke about how much weight you’ve gained, or those half your size complaining about how much weight they’ve gained themselves, the aunts who constantly ask when you’re getting married, the cousin who always wants to know if you can afford it…CUT THEM OFF. “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging” -Will Rogers.  While often applied to finance and debt, I believe this quote is applicable here as well. If you recognize that negative external voices have left you in a place of self-doubt, why would you keep negative external voices around you? To help yourself out of this hole you need to completely mute these voices. For this reason, I do not maintain friendships with people who complain about me, who criticize me, who condescend me, who disguise insults as jokes to me.

As I deposit positivity into my own life, I feed only the friendships in which I am afforded grace, patience, and understanding. Please do not reduce this to mean that you must surround yourself with yes-men to be happy. Your friends should challenge not chastise, contribute not criticize, guide not goad and once the fine lines are not only crossed accidentally but altogether disregarded, you will need to draw a bold and undeniable line between you and this force for your own destruction that you have for too long called a friendship.

If nothing else, take this away, you are strong, beautiful, capable, worthy, and valuable and any voice, including your own that says any different is a liar.