It should not come as a surprise to me, but it turns out that when I talk to myself, I’m talking to… myself.
It should not come as a surprise to me, but somehow it did.
When I talk to myself, I’m talking to… myself.
It has been a long-time habit of mine to talk to myself. Most of this isn’t, I’d thought, talking to myself. Mostly it is rehearsing future potential conversations with other people.
This habit that I have will likely be familiar to my parents, my wife, many housemates over many years, and NUMBEROUS passers-by who have thought/hoped that I was on the phone with very small bluetooth headphones that they couldn’t see.
I have caught my dad doing the same thing, so it’s very possible it is in fact genetic.
And then.
Having spent decades rehearsing conversations with bosses, partners, clients, bullies, political opponents and more… I finally got it.
I found myself, talking to one of my coaches, letting my frustration with someone out.
Exactly the kind of thing that I would normally be saying to myself, but that instead I was paying someone quite a bit of money to let me say to them… and it was worth it.
Because I heard what I was saying, and in a crushing moment I realised the message, the frustration, was for me.
That I could take all those words and turn them on myself. And they were definitely true about me, in a way that they weren’t definitely true about the other person.
And of course I could turn them on myself.
After all, I couldn’t be talking to the man in question.
He wasn’t there.
So the message couldn’t be for him.
It could only be for me.
In some ways I knew this already - my friend Kristen once described to me the work of one of her coaches, including a ‘F-ck you letter’, written to someone else and then turned on yourself.
But I didn’t know it. And now I do.
The political opponents and bullies and bosses were always a bit too simple, to be honest. Not as nuanced or smart as real-life people.
All the conversation was was with the part of me… slightly too simple to be a whole person, because it was only a part of a person.
The part of someone else’s soul that I had inherited into myself through spending time with them, expressing not their doubts and criticisms of me but, in fact, my own.
Someone once said to me that his theory was that every time, in a coaching session, we’re talking about someone else, we’re in Victim Mode. And that switching to Player Mode changes things.
But now I wonder if that’s quite right.
In fact, perhaps we’re simply not talking, really, about the other person in those moments.
Perhaps instead we’re talking about ourselves.
The frustrations at the lack of integrity, the pushiness, the sneakiness.
And yet who didn’t hold up their integrity to someone else when they got the chance?
Who are you really frustrated with about pushiness?
Who is sneakily talking behind someone’s back in this very moment?
We see the world - as the Talmud, quoted more recently by Stephen Covey, says - not at it is, but as we are.
Everything we see and hear comes through the lense of our beliefs, and the filter of what our brain believes is important.
The pretence that our poor approximations of what someone else would say are actually what someone else would say fall down in the cold light of a real person.
But of course so often in 21st Century England we aren’t having conversations in the cold light of a real person.
And so as I reflect on the conversations I have with myself that are with… myself.
I wonder about the conversations we have online, the ones across comments sections or emails or messages that look like they are with another person, but don’t feel like that.
Where the publicness changes things.
Where the text takes away the nuance of a real human.
And where, possibly, both people are really talking to themselves, anyway.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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