The Orchestra in the Head
At any given moment, most of us are strolling around with one of three voices prattling on in our heads. None of them is really us, and none of them is setting us up for inner or outer communication success. While the presence of self-talk, and the impact it has on how you think, feel, and behave is likely not a new concept for you, if these voices still exist for you and, more important, if you are struggling to manage them, well, then, we need to address them. In this chapter, we’ll jam on how to talk back to them — since they play such a profound role in how we show up and speak up.
The first voice that might be hanging out in your noggin is the voice of the Critic. She’s an unapologetic mean girl. She’s also not very creative. She sets you up to perpetually feel like you are an impostor in your own life and gives you unwanted immunity against your own greatness.
She says things like:
You’re not smart enough.
You’re not pretty enough.
You’re not experienced enough.
You don’t smile enough.
You don’t have a big enough network.
You’re not skinny enough.
You’re not curvy enough.
You’re not hairless enough.
Okay, maybe that last one is just my Critic speaking.
When the Critic in your head holds the mic, you never believe you are enough. You doubt your decisions and the choices you have before you. And, above all, you feel as if in every moment the world is seeing you as a contestant on a reality TV show the minute she lands in the bottom two — and everyone watching, including the contestant, knows she’s about to lose and be voted off. When you let (because it is always a choice) a chatty Critic run the show, you live in your head, disassociate from your body and spirit, and often censor your outer voice — believing that nobody wants to hear what you have to say.
I lead a mastermind group for female entrepreneurs and changemakers who want to use speaking to spread their ideas, grow their businesses, and make a positive impact on the world. The participating women all have the opportunity to film speaker reels and receive photographs of themselves onstage speaking.
I see these women’s Critics show up big-time during this process. Whether a woman is in her late twenties, nearing her golden years, or somewhere in between, the feedback she provides my team when reviewing her materials is rarely related to her speaking content — or even to her performance. What we hear in spades are comments like:
My roots are showing.
My face looks like a drawing on an Etch A Sketch. Can the elevens between my eyes be Photoshopped?
Why didn’t you tell me a wrap dress makes me look like a ruptured pork sausage?
Now, these women are doing significant work in the world, in many cases not only changing but literally saving people’s lives. Many are active in women’s empowerment, and yet when they view themselves speaking, what they consistently see are their blemishes rather than their beauty marks.
Unfortunately, the Critic is not the only voice that likes to eat up our mental and emotional bandwidth and compromise our communication success. She has a bestie, whom I affectionately refer to as the Cop. And the Cop, as Cops are wont to do, polices your decision making and turns everything into a dichotomy. In other words, there are a maximum of two options in any situation — and they are at odds with each other.
There are good people and bad people.
There’s the right vocation; all others are my karmic mismatch.
I can be a rock star, or I can be the roadie.
When our Cop directs the show in our heads, she strives to make everything black-and-white. Sinful or sacred. As a result, we forget that most of life exists in the gray, too often underused, space between these extremes. So much discourse in the world right now is mean, one-sided, one-note, and judgmental. When we have a Cop in our heads, we inevitably are too.
When I began my coaching business, I worked with a lot of twenty- and thirtysomethings who were in the throes of career transition. Many of my clients were habitually changing jobs, as my generation is inclined to do. In some cases, they switched jobs after only six months, or less. One woman, whom I’ll call Ruby, was one such client.
I met Ruby at one of my facilitation workshops. At the time, she had a university leadership position, and she felt stymied by all the institutional bureaucracy. She wanted more substantive face time with students, and she sought tools for facilitating deeper transformation — and this is how she found herself in one of my workshops. When we began working together, she quickly decided she could never have what she wanted in the environment she was in, so she took the opportunity (and a financial step backward) to manage transformational programs for a holistic center in a rural community. Within less than a month in this new role, Ruby felt she had made a terrible mistake. She missed her friends, she missed her coworkers, and she missed living in a big city. And although she loved the vision and mission of her new employer, she felt even further away from her goal of facilitating transformation now that she was a manager and had little interaction with people, outside her small team. Ruby decided to take the first opportunity she could get back in her old city as a departmental administrator, and in doing so, also took her second demotion in less than a year.
When you are a coach, your agenda is always supposed to be your client’s agenda, but I’ll be honest, I had my own agenda for Ruby, though I wasn’t experienced or brave enough to articulate it at the time. I wanted her to realize the role her Cop-like self-talk played in her somewhat manic job-hopping. Ruby, like so many other perfection-seeking women, kept telling herself there was a right job for her — and that everything else was dead wrong. As a result, the minute she didn’t feel cozy in a new opportunity, she bailed, for she interpreted her discomfort as a sign that she was fundamentally off purpose. Instead of living and learning through an experience that was happening for her, she interpreted the situation as happening to her. She also barely moved the needle when negotiating either of her offers — which, while shocking, given that she had taught negotiation workshops, makes sense. She was so mired in her Cop thinking, she had a hard time coming up with creative alternatives to money when her employers failed to concede more than a few thousand dollars on their offers.
In addition to the voices of the Critic and Cop, there is a third, equally self-sabotaging voice. Unlike the Critic and Cop, this voice is usually pretty positive — she is a bit of a frenemy. This voice is the Cheerleader. The Cheerleader is, as the name suggests, extremely adept at cheering you on. She tells you:
I’m cool with my client’s passive-aggressive emails.
I can pull a second consecutive all-nighter to get that financial report done.
It’s fine that I have a big presentation in an hour, my partner is out of town, and my kiddo’s school just called to ask me to come pick her up because she’s got a raging fever. I’ll figure it out. Always do.
Now, in all fairness, the Cheerleader voice, in moderation, isn’t such a bad thing. In moments when we have to bulldoze through something uncomfortable and necessary — our first week at a new job, a negotiation, an illness (ours or somebody else’s), or telling a tantrum-prone kiddo to put her stickers away — we definitely want to empower this voice. However, when we go to her by default rather than by design, ultimately we are going to feel frustrated and tired. It’s going to make us feel like we are playing