I am a firm believer that your external voices during your formative years, become your permanent internal voice, so dependent on whether you were surrounded by encouragement and peace or anxiety and insults as a child, you are forever stuck with a cheerleader edging you on through life or a tormentor forever wielding a whip, waiting and hoping for you to fail.

While I cannot point to any abusive parents who might be responsible for this constant presence of this mental lynch mob, I can identify many friends, classmates, teachers, and even strangers whose voices had no place in a child’s ear. By no means am I claiming that people who grew up in encouraging environments never have moments in which they feel discouraged but I stand by the claim that those who grew up in more negative environments are more likely to succumb to these moments, essentially experiencing debilitating fear of humiliation when faced with tasks, challenges, and goals. Many of us who experience this version of “performance anxiety,” may not recognize milder forms in ourselves, but these voices can be exacerbated by deeply emotionally traumatic or troubling incidents at which point they become all we can hear.

It is easy to believe that your internal voice is something you are subject to, like country music in a car in which you are the passenger, or like heavy metal in torture chambers (same thing right?). I challenge this narrative. Our internal voice is simply that, “ours,” and we have some control over it. In as much as the point of this piece is to get us to silence and ignore that voice, take a moment one day to sit with it and listen to what it has to say. It is not a creative voice generating new content to ruin your daily life. It is more like a mixing board at a radio station, you press a button and the (sometimes barely) applicable pre-recorded soundbite plays out in the loudest, most jarring voice imaginable. Your internal voice has a script, from which it cannot deviate, a finite box of sayings from which it is allowed to choose. In case you still haven’t been able to conjure up a few examples yet, these might sound familiar

“…no, you can’t”

“what do you have to offer?”

“you could never…”

“you’re being annoying again”

“you will embarrass yourself, don’t even try…”

This in mind, it’s high time to stop blaming whoever put these voices in our minds and take responsibility for allowing them to persist. This is not an easy task nor one we can accomplish overnight. In my next post, we will explore ways to change the chatter of your critical internal voice to something more positive and fulfilling.