A Wake Up Call
I have a friend who schedules pain into his day.
Would you like to know his torture of choice?
Every day he starts with a cold shower.
If you didn’t think it could get any worse, think again. His technique first starts with warm water, but for the final minute of his shower he stands under the closest water he can endure.
After hearing this news (and picking myself up off the ground), I asked what options he would be open to for considering professional help.
His reasoning (if you believe there even can be one) is all about the functionality of the pores on your skin. When you bathe under hot water, your pores open up. Cold water, on the other hand, closes them up. His defense is that this is a healthy process for your skin to avoid taking in dirt, grease, and oil all day.
Don’t hear me incorrectly. I’d rather adopt a different way to wake up my body in the morning. I’m going to keep exploring things like working out, using peppermint oil on my forehead, and I don’t know, anything else that’s normal. In other words, I’m not curious enough at all to try this out.
What I am curious about, though, is if there is something similar to this routine that could be healthy for not our skin but our brains.
What’s Going On Inside Your Head?
Here is what I mean behind this statement.
Every day you are constantly showered with what people think. What people think about the world. What people think about others. And sometimes you even bathe in what people think about you.
Every day you carry around what people say around you and to you.
Most of it slips away in the backpack of life like your old graded homework after it was handed back. But not all of it. Some of it stays close to our chest. And if words stay close enough to your chest, they will eventually seep into your heart as well.
I’ve also observed, as one who sits and listens to people talk for hours every week, that what we tell ourselves is usually a byproduct of what has been said around us or to us in the past.
Here is what I’ve also heard though from people who are fully engaged in doing their “thing” they want to do most in life. People who are clear on what they are doing in life are very attentive to the narrative that is going on in their head.
What do I mean by narrative? I’m talking about your inner voice that speaks to you. The statements you don’t say out loud but say to yourself over and over again. I’m talking about the Inside Out part of your brain.
Seth Godin, who is a great example of one of these people, has emphasized this in his latest book, The Practice. It’s basically a book about how to actually chase the dream of creating something beneficial to the world.1 (This is like the War of Art 2.0.)
His argument, which many agree with, is our inner narratives, what we tell ourselves, either hurt us or help us. Our narrative is what helps us interpret the world. If it’s healthy, we tend to keep moving in a healthy direction. Too many times though, we stand under a shower of unhealthy narratives and let every pore of our being soak up something that we should have never allowed to stay in the first place.
The question for all of us though, is how do we know what we are telling ourselves inside our heads? And how do we know if it’s healthy or not healthy?
After reading through the work of several writers on our inner head narratives, I want to give you three questions that can help you get better gaps on what you are telling yourself.
Question #1: Is it true?
The first question is simple. Is it true?
Is what you’re constantly telling yourself backed up by consistent experience and facts? “If you’re constantly worried about something happening,” says Godin, “but it never happens, it’s probably a miscalculation on your end.”2
I think we could say that again for those in the back of the room pacing back and forth second guessing themselves (i.e. Zane).
We often tell ourselves things about ourselves and situations that aren’t true because they are just manifestations of what could be true. If it’s never been a reality yet, there is no reason to treat it as a reality.
It’s human to want to fill in the gaps. We assign intentions, perceptions, and decisions all the time without any evidence. One of my favorite quotes from Brené Brown is about our false narratives. She says,, “Stories based on limited real data, blended into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality, are called conspiracy theories.”3
As you well know, we have too many conspiracy theories out in the world. We don’t need more inside our personal world.
But what do we do when we don’t know if a narrative is true or not? This brings us to the second question.
Question #2: Is it working?
Another way to evaluate what we tell ourselves in our head is to simply ask the question, “Is what I’m telling myself working?”
Does this voice in your head move you to action, health, and greater growth? Or does it leave you frozen, stuck, and in the same place?
Is it helping you move forward by constantly telling yourself, “There is no reason he would like me” or “No one would ever hire me to do that type of work in the world.”
This is where we must speak directly to the narratives that aren’t working. The myth is to think we can wish them away. Have you ever had someone tell you to just stop thinking about something?
How well did that work out for you after you punched them in the nose?
Right.
We cannot get rid of narratives in our minds (at least not initially), but we can respond to them to not let them be the loudest voice in our head. I’ve heard several directors and counselors advise people to speak to that voice as they would speak to a friend they dearly love who is off base.
The other way to address this non helpful voice is literally to let someone voice their thoughts about your inner narrative. I’ve done this several times with my bosses. Several times I’ve walked into their office and said, “What I’m perceiving in my head is ‘X.’ Is this reality?”
Question #3: Is this love or fear?
This final question is one right out of Emily P. Freeman’s playbook. If you’ve never read her writing before, she is like a cup of hot tea for your soul.
Emily has a question that helps you get to the source behind the words that roll around in your head. When thoughts come to mind, she asks if these words come from a place of fear or love.4 Do the words I hear move me towards greater hope, love, and sacrifice or do they lead me towards defensiveness and control?
In essence, it’s a practice of asking, What well am I drawing these words from in my life? Fears tend to cause us to run away from something. Love tends to move us toward something. Knowing our motivation behind the words we speak to ourselves gives us a heads up if they should even be taking up any headspace at all.
Lovability, Divinity, & Creativity
As this blog comes to a close, I want to make one final note why it’s important to develop the practice of naming the narratives in our heads. One observation by Brené Brown still sticks in my head after coming to a conclusion about her life’s research on our inner narratives, “The three most dangerous stories we make up are the narratives that diminish our lovability, divinity, and creativity.”5
As someone who sits down and listens to people’s inner dialogue week in and week out, I can attest to how true this statement can be for unchecked narratives. This work is crucial in our lives before we speak or do things in our own life and the lives of others.
It’s important you remember and have narratives, that because of Jesus, you are capable of great love, you are valuable in your current state of being, and you have great things to offer the world. The worst narratives about ourselves make us lose these things about ourselves. The best narratives help bring out the best things about us.
And just so we are all on the same page, this isn’t for the social realm of our world. Jesus did a lot of narrative work with people. He called out what others were thinking incorrectly about God and was a master at giving people new stories and frameworks about the reality of God. Changing your narrative was basically his summation of the word “repent.” It was another way of saying, “I know you used to think that way, but now you should think this way because of the realities of God.”6 In many ways, Jesus is the ultimate narrative and reality of what to think about our lives.
So do yourself a favor and begin the work of identifying the narratives that are rolling around in that noggin of yours. And if you’re struggling with how to even start, let me conclude with a step by step recipe to get going on this task.
First, ask yourself, What do I tend to think a lot about?
Second, ask yourself, What are the thoughts that revolve around this concept?
Third, ask yourself one of our three narrative questions we just discussed. Is it true? Does it work? And is this fear or love?
And finally, write down the narrative and go talk it out in front of someone and ask, Does this seem like reality to you?
There are few things worse than working with an inaccurate reality. We don’t tell ourselves enough that we are lovable, meaningful, and creative.
My hope for you is maybe you can open yourself up to a new narrative. A new reality. And one that doesn’t require freezing water at 7am every morning.
References
1Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020), 166.
2Godin, The Practice, 166.
3Brene Brown, Dare To Lead (New York: Random House, 2018), 260.
4Emily P. Freeman, The Next Right Thing (Grand Rapids: Revell, 2019), 79.
5Brown, Dare To Lead, 268.
6Mark 1:15 is a great example of how the word, repent, means to change direction inside one’s head.