Watch Your Mouth—Especially the One in Your Head

We spend a lot of time talking about how we speak to other people. We teach children to use kind words. We tell couples that tone matters. We coach leaders to be thoughtful about how they communicate.

Meanwhile, there is a person many of us speak to all day long with absolutely no supervision whatsoever.

Ourselves.

And some of what goes on in there would get us escorted out of a staff meeting.

Of course this happened.
Nothing ever works out for me.
She doesn’t respect me.
I’m terrible at this.
They’re probably talking about me.
I always screw this up.

We repeat these things so casually that they begin to feel less like thoughts and more like facts.

They are not necessarily facts.

They are often stories.

And the stories we rehearse matter.

Energy follows thought

“Energy follows thought” can sound a little woo-woo if we aren’t careful, so let me take the incense out of it for a minute.

Your thoughts do not magically summon events into existence. Thinking about a parking space does not compel the universe to reserve one for you next to Whole Foods.

But thought does direct attention.

Attention affects what we notice. What we notice influences how we interpret what is happening. Interpretation affects emotion. Emotion affects behavior. Behavior influences relationships, decisions, and what happens next.

That is a very real chain reaction.

Your brain is also constantly learning from repetition. Neural networks that are activated repeatedly can become more efficient and easier to access. This is part of what we mean when we talk about neuroplasticity and the shorthand phrase, “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

It doesn’t mean thinking I’m an idiot three times permanently rearranges your frontal lobe.

Relax.

It does mean that the thoughts, interpretations, and reactions you practice most often can become increasingly automatic.

Your brain likes efficiency. If you keep driving down the same mental road, eventually it stops checking the map.

Your brain is looking for evidence

Human beings are prediction machines.

Your brain is constantly using previous experience to make educated guesses about what is happening now and what is likely to happen next. That ability is incredibly useful. It allows you to recognize faces, navigate your house in the dark, drive a car, understand language, and know that when your teenager says, “Can I ask you something?” there is a reasonable chance money is about to become involved.

The trouble comes when an old prediction becomes a permanent lens.

If somewhere along the way you learned, People leave, you may become especially sensitive to distance.

If your internal story is, Nobody appreciates me, your attention naturally gravitates toward every moment you feel overlooked.

If you have decided your partner “never listens,” you will detect interruptions with military-grade precision while barely registering the five times that day they listened perfectly well.

The brain loves confirmation.

Once it thinks it understands the pattern, it starts sorting incoming information accordingly.

And this is where we accidentally become participants in our own evidence.

If I believe you are going to reject me, I may become guarded. You experience me as distant, so you pull back. I notice you pulling back and think:

See? I knew it.

Congratulations to my brain. It has successfully produced the outcome it predicted.

A woman whose life didn’t change—but everything changed

Here is a composite vignette based on a pattern I see often.

A woman came in exhausted by nearly everything.

Her job irritated her. Her husband disappointed her. Her grown children didn’t call enough. Her sister was selfish. Her boss was impossible. Her house needed work. Traffic was ridiculous. People were generally incompetent.

To be fair, none of these people were perfect.

Neither was traffic.

But as we talked, something became obvious: nearly every experience was being filtered through the same underlying story.

I am the one who has to handle everything because nobody else will.

And once you believe that, the supporting evidence is everywhere.

Someone forgets something? Of course they did.

Her husband completes a task differently than she would have? See, I should have done it myself.

A colleague asks a question? Why do I have to explain everything?

Her daughter doesn’t return a call immediately? Nobody thinks about me unless they need something.

Her nervous system was living inside a courtroom where the prosecution presented evidence all day long and the defense had apparently quit.

So we didn’t begin by changing her husband, children, boss, sister, house, or the Austin traffic system.

We changed what she was practicing.

When she caught herself saying, Nobody ever helps me, she began asking, Is that actually true?

When she thought, If I don’t do it, it won’t get done, she experimented with allowing someone else to do it imperfectly.

When her husband forgot something, instead of adding it to the fourteen-year legal brief entitled Why I Cannot Depend on This Man, she addressed the actual forgotten thing.

Radical.

Over time she started noticing things she had been filtering out: her husband routinely made coffee in the morning. Her daughter sent funny texts during the week. A coworker had repeatedly offered to take something off her plate. Her sister was annoying in several reliable ways, but she was also the first person who showed up during a family crisis.

Nothing dramatic happened.

No one moved to Tuscany.

Her husband did not awaken one morning transformed into the flawless emotional support mammal she had apparently been expecting.

Her job remained her job.

Her family remained her family.

But within a few weeks, she described her life completely differently.

She was lighter. Less angry. More affectionate. More willing to ask directly for what she needed. People around her responded differently because she was responding differently.

Her external circumstances had barely changed.

Her experience of them had changed enormously.

That is the power of noticing the story.

You don’t have to believe everything you think

One of the most useful skills we can develop is the ability to notice a thought without automatically promoting it to truth.

You can think, She’s mad at me, and then remember you have absolutely no evidence of that.

You can think, I’m going to fail, without spending the next two hours creating a PowerPoint presentation explaining why.

You can notice, Nothing ever works out, and recognize that when your brain starts using words like nothing, always, everyone, never, it may not currently be our most reliable narrator.

We are not trying to replace reality with relentlessly positive thinking.

That annoys me almost as much.

If something is wrong, we address what is wrong.

If a relationship is unhealthy, we don’t chant affirmations over it.

If your workplace is dysfunctional, thinking I am surrounded by abundance while Karen sets fire to the organizational chart is probably not enough.

The goal is accurate thinking.

What do I actually know?

What have I added?

What am I repeatedly telling myself?

And—this is the important part—is that thought helping me respond effectively to what is actually happening?

Sometimes change really is this undramatic

We have a tendency to believe meaningful psychological change should involve a profound breakthrough, several tears, a soundtrack, and perhaps a previously repressed memory arriving right before the commercial break.

Sometimes it does.

But a surprising amount of change looks much less glamorous.

You notice yourself beginning the same story.

You stop.

You correct it.

And then you go make lunch.

That’s it.

You catch They don’t respect me and replace it with I don’t know what that meant yet.

You catch I have to do everything and ask, What could I actually delegate?

You catch My marriage is terrible and clarify, We had a terrible morning.

You catch I’m failing and change it to, I don’t know how to do this yet.

I am apparently supposed to call this a gentle redirection.

Gag.

Call it discipline.

Call it cognitive editing.

Call it telling your brain, “Nope. We are not running that episode again.”

The name matters considerably less than the repetition.

Stop rehearsing what you don’t want to strengthen

The idea isn’t to control every thought.

That would be exhausting, impossible, and frankly a little creepy.

The skill is noticing which thoughts you keep rehearsing.

There is a difference between having a thought and feeding it.

A thought can pass through your mind without receiving a chair, refreshments, and a recurring speaking engagement.

When you repeatedly tell yourself the same story, you are practicing a way of seeing the world.

Practice something often enough and it becomes familiar.

Familiar becomes automatic.

Automatic begins to feel like personality.

And eventually we say things like:

“That’s just how I am.”

Maybe.

Or maybe that is simply how you have practiced being.

That distinction opens up a lot of possibility.

Watch your mouth. And your mind.

Pay attention to the phrases you use repeatedly.

Listen for the sweeping conclusions.

Notice the story that appears before you have all the information.

And when you catch one that is distorted, outdated, or simply unhelpful, you do not need to have a meeting with it.

Correct it.

Redirect.

Choose the more accurate sentence.

Then keep going.

Because energy follows thought in a very practical way: thought directs attention, attention influences emotion, emotion influences behavior, and behavior helps shape what happens next.

That means the story in your head is not insignificant background noise.

It is part of the system.

And systems can change.

Insight. Strategy. Action. Transformation.

Sometimes transformation begins with something as small as catching yourself mid-sentence and deciding:

Actually, that isn’t the story I’m going to keep telling.

xo

Johanna