Be more effective by taking control of your inner voices

Back in July I was at The Marketing Academy Fellows Retreat. It was an opportunity to reconnect with marketing peers and get up to speed on a wide variety of topics, from personal #mentalhealth and #wellbeing to the latest thinking on #AI.

I rarely talk on LinkedIn about wellbeing but one person, Emma Harris from Glow (#slowthefuckdown movement), talked through her life story and she loaded us with life improving suggestions (see more in my retreat notes https://sideminds.com/blog). You can listen to her story on The Places We'll Go Show and the podcast https://lnkd.in/eaeXqAQV.

One wellbeing suggestion she had came from the The Walt Disney Company film Inside Out, and she talked through how she controlled her inner voices similar to the little girl Riley in the film.  She had made her inner voices all characters; Negative Ninny, Kick Arse, People Pleaser and Risk Manager; recognized they all had positive intent but had managed to stop any of them from taking over, especially at night.  She had learnt to ‘pass the mic’ from one character to another and took back control.

I think we all have inner voices, so I started to do what she said and began to name them and call out their bad behaviour. Three months on and the wonderful thing is I find this works. I measure this through sleep, because this is where my inner voices emerge, and my sleep is improving.

So, let me take you on a journey through my mind and how I take back control. Start by imagining it’s around 2am and my character’s Spark or Cat decide it’s time to do some thinking.

Spark is my inner entrepreneur who likes to problem solve and comes up with lots of ideas. I like Spark and often go on wonderful adventures with him and this is where I’ve come up probably with some of my best marketing initiatives, as my brain joins dispersed dots. Cat by contrast is my inner worrier, Cat is short for Scaredy Cat, and she starts to catastrophize everything. She is important because she keeps me safe by thinking through worse case scenarios but needs to be managed. Healthy sleep would see me drift in and out of spending time with Spark and Cat, but the trouble is they can often get joined by Rolly.

Rolly blows everything out of proportion and lets things escalate. It is like being on a rollercoaster ride and he will compound ideas or issues together. I can come up with what I think are great ideas, or the world can end. Either way, when Rolly gets involved he likes to hang around for a few hours and makes sleep impossible.

When Rolly finds something especially gloomy or worrying, he can sometimes bring in his friend Sulk, which means come morning, I am not just knackered, but I am morose and silent and locked away in my man shed. Another a great night and how on earth am I going to work well after all that? 

This is a spiral to nowhere, but fortunately there is Doc and Sunshine. Doc calls order on everything.

In my  mind I literally call out Doc to take charge. He is my mindfulness coach and gets me to become present in the here and now, and be more aware of my breathing and body. I did an online sleep course year’s ago using the free app sleep.io, which gave me some amazing techniques. By focusing on Doc and these sleep techniques, or in Emma’s terms, passing the mic to Doc, I start to calm things down. I ground myself in the present, becoming more aware of my body and realise these thoughts and feelings don’t exist. They aren’t real.

The nice thing about Doc is he is almost always accompanied by Sunshine. Sunshine is my happy place. As the name suggests it is always sunny with Sunshine, and it usually means I’m playing around in the sun, or had a couple of pints of beer and am falling asleep mid-afternoon in my happy place, which is usually a beach in Devon. Bliss.

This 2am journey is a spiral which resolves itself in the end and I get back to sleep. The process of defining these characters means I have called out these inner voices and understood their strengths and weaknesses. I like spending time with many of them, but I’ve learnt to box the time off by calling Doc in. Too much time with any of them can be distructive and unreal, but I need to spend time with each of them in a managed way. This is what Riley found in Inside Out, where she couldn’t always hang out with Joy by shoving Sadness out of the way, but needed to embrace all of her emotions.

Some people may read this and think I am totally crackers, others I hope will read this, maybe empathise with the situation and give is a try. It has made a huge difference to me and hope this will help others too.