We received an interesting email this week which is summarized below:
“I notice a lot of your posts have repetitive sayings… Is it safe to assume that you encourage people to talk to themselves?”
In short the answer is yes we strongly recommend that everyone talk out loud to themselves. There are many benefits to rewiring your brain and both word choice and tone can have dramatic long-term impacts on your consciousness.
Waking Up: The next time you wake up and walk to work start singing out loud. It sounds stupid. If you are afraid that people will look at you (they will) then you can also try this as you’re getting ready in the morning. As much as we like to believe we are in control of our environment, your environment which includes sounds will tend to dramatically influence your mood. If you can wake up and sing a happy song, such as James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” we guarantee your day will start off better.
Lifting and Sports: When you spend a serious amount of time improving your body or becoming an elite athlete you quickly learn that talking to yourself changes your level of concentration. When you lift you should mentally focus on parts of your body, a great example is to say the word “load” three times as you come down on a one legged squat focusing on your glut and hamstrings. Subsequently saying “explode” as you come back up from the contraction.
This will also work if you’ve ever stepped up to the free throw line in basketball, prepared for a serve in tennis or practice penalty kicks in soccer. Focus in on the task by drowning out the noise with a useful repetitive saying… Just don’t go overboard collecting violations like Karl Malone.
(Racking up 10 second violations)
Receiving Criticism: For those of you working on Wall Street this piece is probably the most important. You will get reamed out. A lot. Since you’re more likely than not a highly educated and competitive person you’ll likely react as follows: 1) you will state out loud “I know I messed up”, 2) you will go silent and stir in your chair as you angrily replay what went wrong in your head, 3) you will say “I’m sorry and it won’t happen again”.
Option one will likely happen to you at least once and should not be said again. When you say you “know” this implies to the listener that you don’t care. If you knew of the error it would have never occurred in the first place. Strike this response from your vocabulary.
Option two will happen when you either 1) hate the higher up or 2) got thrown under the bus for that pitchbook error – yes both will happen. This is better than part 1 as you can hide your emotions, but it will cause undue stress as you replay in your mind over and over how much you want to crack the person over their head with your keyboard. Instead if you’re getting stir crazy repeat the following phrase: “I know that XYZ happened and there is nothing that I can do to change the personality of XYZ. I did my best and I’ll continue to do my best and watch out for XYZ in the future”. There is a lot going on in this sentence but to summarize you need to 1) know you put your best effort in, 2) recognize you cannot control the actions of a sycophant VP/MD or otherwise and 3) you do not harbor hostility.
Option three will happen when you’re in the wrong, care about your job and take full responsibility for the action. Any time an error is made and you make the statement “it won’t happen again” and mean it you will immediately diffuse the situation. So long as it does not occur again. Simply go back to work and add item X (the error that occurred) to your checklist of things to watch out for and do not stir reprimanding yourself over something that you can easily fix going forward.
In short when it comes to work, taking responsibility and positive affirmations will help you avoid an eventual eruption of emotion as you bottle up negative feelings. We all know this person in the office and he never gets promoted once he is known for being unable to control his own emotions.
Safety: We know you likely read the title and said “start talking to myself you mean like a crazy person!” Actually that is a great idea. If you ever find yourself in a sketchy party of town and don’t want to be harmed, begin acting like a loony cartoon character. Not even criminals want to mess with the crazy people as they 1) could do something harmful to them and 2) likely do not have anything of value in their possession. We’re certainly not suggesting you go looking for trouble, but we’ve all been there before and remember that no one wants to mess with a crazy person.
Learning a Language: This one goes without saying, constantly talk to yourself in the language you are learning. If you’re walking to work and don’t want to sing like a crazy person since you’re already in a good mood from doing so in the morning, you should start naming objects on your way to work in French/Spanish/Russian etc. As much as we like to believe that we can simply memorize words and phrases speaking will accelerate your learning as you practice tone, accents and hear yourself repeat the vocabulary lesson for the day.
Concluding Remarks: The longest conversation you will have in your life will occur alone. With this in mind you should practice having the correct conversations… starting yesterday.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
