Inner voice

Underrated truth: The voices in your head aren’t yours.

They’re recordings. Your parents. Your teachers. Your bullies. Your exes. You’ve been replaying other people’s opinions so long you think they’re your thoughts. They’re not. Turn off the tape. Find your actual voice.

— @scottdclary

Your inner critic is not you.

It’s inherited. It’s learned. It’s… baggage.

How to tell:

• The loudest voices in your head are usually not you. Your real inner voice is a quiet, reserved voice.
• When your real inner voice needs to shout, it tells you using the body, not your head. That’s where gut feel comes from, for instance.
• The critical voices aren’t you either. Critical voices come from the ego, and attacks itself. Your real inner voice does not blame, scold, make you feel small, affect your ego. It just communicates what is.
• If it uses fancy words, build complex narratives, philosophize, it’s not your real inner voice either. It’s your intellect trying to fool itself. And to your intellect, you’re the easiest to fool. Your real inner uses visceral feelings, sometimes emotions, to talk to you.
• Your real inner voice is linked to your body, to your external environment, to in-real-life reality. If you can detect and measure it externally, if you can track the data, it’s more likely to be your real inner voice. Your inner critic can build massive complex inner realities without any validation externally.

So tl;dr - don’t trust the words in your head.