The Little Voice in The Back Of Your Head

In every conversation, there are two voices.

The first voice is what you hear from the other party.

The second voice – one that is often louder, more persistent, and more believable – is the voice inside your head.

Psychologists call this voice your Inner Voice. Others call it . In every-day language, you might refer to it as the little voice in the back of your head.

At its core, it’s the way you talk to yourself, even if you don’t realise you’re doing it. (And you do it a lot more than you realise!)

Regardless of truth or accuracy, this voice tells you what is real to you. It’s a way your subconscious protects or guides you as you wander through life.

Your little voice influences your communications

Apart from its psychological aspects, it’s also a key aspect of effective communications. When listening to the other party, you use it to determine if the other person or their message is believable or credible. You use it to pick out the potential errors, assumptions or lies in what they are saying. Sometimes your voice speaks so loudly you can’t hear what the other person is saying. (Hello Bias!).

Six aspects make up your little voice

This voice is more complicated than you might think. It’s comprised of six elements:

Your values and beliefs – the core moral and ethics principles that define you
Your knowledge – what you’ve learnt in life, formally and informally
Your expectations – your belief about the future
Your experiences – your belief about the past
Your feelings, emotions, or perspectives – your emotional or intuitive ‘take’ on a situation
Your opinions or attitudes – what the first five aspects create

Some of these aspects are easily changed. Others will take a considerable amount of work by the other party, and it’s possible you won’t change your mind.

Your self-talk has different ranges of how fast you might change

Some aspects are easy to change. Perhaps the inner voice is …

Uneducated? (Your little voice thinks: I don’t have any clue about what you’re talking about)
Unknowing? (Oh boy – <grimace> – did I need to know this?)
Time poor? (Can’t you see I don’t have time now? Can’t we talk later?)

Some will be a bit more difficult to change. Perhaps the inner voice is …

Distracted? (What? Who are you? I can’t even think straight! Please go away!)
Confused? (Hold on, I have no clue what you’re talking about – it sounds like something else to me?)
Emotional? (I’m not in the mood to hear what you’re yammering on about!)
Sceptical? (Yeah, I’ve heard all this before, and I’m not going to fall for it again!)
Controlling? (You don’t know what you’re talking about, but I do! Why are you even here, wasting my time?)

Finally, some will be very difficult to change. Perhaps the inner voice is …

Disinterested? (Oh jeez, who cares? Not me!)
Entrenched? (You are not going to change my mind!)
Arrogant? (I know what I know, and you can’t change my opinion)
Apathetic? (Absolutely nothing you say will ever make me care)

Also consider this: What would you do in a conversation if the other party doesn’t bother to acknowledge your belief?

Your answer might be: You won’t believe or listen to them.

Know that rule applies equally when the other party is listening to you,

How do you address multiple audiences?

In almost every communications situation, if you don’t know what to do, ask a genuine question and listen to the feedback. Rapport and trust will improve every communications interaction. Build both from genuineness and authenticity.

You need to understand your own self-talk

How much you listen to your inner voice will distort many aspects of good communications. It may be influencing how you:

Gather information
Determine if any piece of information or its source is relevant
Extract relevant insights to try and apply your information, knowledge or intelligence to solve a problem
Generate ideas, from …
- The types of ideas you tend to create
- The judgement you use to decide if an idea (yours or someone else’s) has value
- The ability to collaborate with others to improve a potential solution
- The skills to sell an idea to anyone else, from a business decision maker to your spouse, kids or friends

In other words, to be an effective communicator, you must understand what the other party is telling themselves about you, your topic or your messages.

You also can’t convince anyone to think or try something different if you don’t know what they think now. One of the best antidotes to self-talk is to : in other words, learning how to focus on someone else.

Some Thoughts and Suggestions

These suggestions can apply to:

You using your self-talk on yourself
You using your self-talk on the other party
The other party using their self-talk on you

For consistency, I’ll apply them to you.

Don’t ignore your self-talk, but don’t always listen to it either.

No one really knows if your self-talk is accurate. It’s only accurate in your head. Try telling someone else what you think out loud, and you may realise some of your self-talk should stay in your head. Or, don’t complain and wonder why someone else won’t accept your messages if you choose to insult them first.

Self-talk is two voices inside your head.

Think of any cartoon where a character has a devil and an angel sitting on their shoulder. Those are the two voices: there’s one good voice and one bad voice. Don’t always listen to the bad voice. Sometimes, you need to tell the bad voice to shut up. Or, ask the good voice what it thinks. It tends to get drowned-out by the bad voice.

If you can’t find out what they think in advance of the conversation

… ask the other party what they think.

The two best questions are:

What do you think?
Why do you think that?

(Those two questions are the first two steps of .)

Then, you have two steps:

. (What are they trying to tell you?)
Don’t JAB (no judgement, no assumptions, no bias.)

Don’t push your message or solution too strongly at the beginning.

Some people’s self-talk needs time to think and consider.

Collaborate.

Don’t push messages or solutions without encouraging discussion and feedback. There’s a possibility that open, flexible discussion might actually improve your idea or solution.

There is a similar post – – which has some complementary thoughts.

How have you managed your own Self-Talk? What have you done to understand the other party’s Self-Talk? Please add your thoughts and comments below.