Mind your inner dialogue

How to channel your attention, energy, and being

Where you focus your attention, you focus your energy. And where you focus your energy, you focus your being. Choose wisely. 

As founders, we have to learn to mind where we focus our attention, energy and being. Identifying and changing the things we are conscious of is less difficult. The real work lies in identifying and changing the things we are unconscious of yet still have the power to greatly impact our entire worldview. 

The unconscious is vast, deep and complex and I am no expert in decoding it. But, I have trained myself to listen and change a single spectrum within my entire unconscious universe that has helped me enormously: my inner dialogue.

By inner dialogue I mean everything I say to myself, all the time. Ultimately my internal dialogue has the power to determine where I focus my  attention, energy, and being even if I’m not consciously aware of it. 

And you know what I've realized?

That we don't talk to ourselves very nicely. We’re great at speaking to our family, friends, and colleagues but when it comes to ourselves, we’re extremely strict, unforgiving, and judgmental. At least I am. 

Once I started paying closer attention to my inner,. dialogue I realized my conversations with myself lacked love, understanding, empathy and patience. The tone was sometimes catastrophic, pessimistic, negative and hopeless. There was always plenty of pressure, perfectionism, and comparisons.

And that’s when I decided to change things around. I have not been able to purify my internal dialogue 100%, but I make progress every day. Now at least I’m able to almost always register my internal dialogue, which gives me an opportunity to immediately rectify it. 

Something that’s helped me a lot is imaging that I’m speaking to a kid version of myself. I picture my 5-year old face and automatically, my tone begins to feel more protective, loving, and understanding. It’s a muscle I train every single day and the results are dramatically improving my outlook on life, my startup, my relationships, and anywhere else I choose to focus my attention, energy, and being.

Being a founder is hard enough so there’s no need in complicating it with a suboptimal inner dialogue. 

If you want to change your world, start by changing how you talk to yourself.