If you ask people off the street what to do to have a great body, likely most will either say “exercise more” or “eat better.” Both are actions. Or if you were to ask those people how to find a life partner, most will reply, “try online dating” or “ask your friends who they know.” Again, more actions. We tend to think that if we are not getting the results we want in our lives, body, relationship or otherwise, then we are not taking the right actions.
But usually, the problem is that we are not thinking the right thoughts. Every action you take starts with a thought, after all. For example, this week I was behind on my email. Each time I opened my inbox, my thoughts went something like this:
“Why are there so many emails? Uggggghhh. I hate email. How did I get so behind? Pathetic. How will I ever get through them all? I don’t have enough time today. I’m like that Greek guy who keeps trying to roll a boulder up the hill, only to have it keep rolling back down. I will never be able to stay on top of this much email.”
And on and on.
My negative thoughts made me so miserable that I decided to take a break from email and focus on cleaning my desk instead. When the desk was clean, I decided to write a proposal. And when the proposal was done, I checked out a Glee video on YouTube. All to avoid the dreaded email.
See how my runaway thought train made it pretty darn hard for me to check my email? Not only did I need to find the time and the knowledge to answer the emails, but I also had to battle a slew of negative thoughts that made the process of checking my email quite miserable. To avoid that misery, I opted not to check my email at all.
At some point, I realized what I was doing and had a good laugh at myself. Email is vital to my job, and so I needed to figure out how to stay on top of it. How did I get into the right actions around email? You guessed it, by cultivating a different inner dialogue. I then hopped onto this thought train:
“Wow, I sure have a lot of emails. I bet there’s some good stuff in there. My client, Jill, was going to have a difficult conversation with her boss. I wonder how that went. And I bet Tom got back to me about that partnership deal. The talk at his organization is going to be fun. Ok, there are a lot of emails here, and this is going to take some time, but heck, that’s a big part of my job description. The sooner I start, the sooner I can get on to that proposal.”
You can imagine how much easier it was for me to check my email with that inner dialogue, as opposed to the negative one. I actually even partially enjoyed the process of checking my email, but let’s not get too carried away here. 
The key to crafting a good replacement inner dialogue is that the dialogue has to ring true for you. It has to appeal to what you believe in, what is important to you and what excites you. For example, if I had tried to think, “boy, I LOVE email,” that wouldn’t have been a very good replacement inner dialogue, because it just isn’t true. I don’t love email, maybe someday, but not today. Trying to engage that inner dialogue would have felt fake and cheesy. So instead, for my replacement inner dialogue, I tapped into things that I do love: my clients, my business partners, my job.
In summary, we treat our inner dialogue like it is a weather front that passes over us: something that we have no power over and can only watch and suffer through. But what if you could actually cultivate an inner dialogue that worked for you? You actually can shift your thoughts around something, like checking email, to make it that much easier for you to take the right actions and hence, get the right results.
What results do you want? What negative inner dialogue do you need to redesign? Come share a snippet of yours with us! What replacement inner dialogue will you try?
Love,
Samantha
P.S.- I lead a weekend workshop where we figure out your deepest priorities in life: the Life Coaching Crash Course. Register using promo code: Daily100 to save $100. I promise, these two days will change your life. (Locations include: NY, Boston, DC, California).
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Dr. Samantha Sutton is a Senior Coach and Director of Courses and Seminars at The Handel Group™. Samantha designs and leads the Handel Group’s™ flagship workshop, the Life Coaching Crash Course. Samantha additionally coaches at universities such as Stanford and MIT. Prior to becoming a coach, Samantha received a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from MIT, and then moved to the Handel Group™ to engineer people’s lives.
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