Leadership Step-By-Step – Personal Essay #3: Inner Monologue
The Leadership Step-By-Step chapter 3 is titled “Inner Monologue” and challenged me to write my entire inner monologue a few times a day. Basically, just write every thought that comes into your head as they come into your head.
At first, it was really hard to do. Thinking about your own thinking immediately tends to make the thoughts stop, but once you’re able to get yourself going on a theme, your mind will take care of the rest. As such, my inner monologues often started with things like “Okay, so what am I thinking about recently? What should I write about? What’s happening in my head today?” But after getting past that stage, it started to become really hard to stop myself. The thoughts just kind of flow endlessly.
Here’s an example of some of my inner monologue:
“Recently I feel like my goals have become blurry and unclear. How can I refocus myself? There’s that bird again. Manoa (my dog) looks so calm. My wife wants to go to Target. I do need an XLR cable for my microphone, maybe they’ll have one. Maybe I should find a used one though. What else did I want to buy? I feel like there was something but I can’t remember what…“
In general, I found my own inner monologue to be very unemotional and factual, often stating the obvious. I felt like it did very well represent my usual mind. I didn’t find myself being judgmental of myself or others very often, more just stating my own thoughts and opinions on whatever I was thinking about at the time. Every now and then, I’d sit down to write and my thoughts would actually focus in on a topic or argument I want to make, and it was during those times that I actually felt something good for my brain (and maybe my soul) was happening.
Here was another bit when I was thinking about how you go about finding what you enjoy in life:
“Every person will have a whole host of things that resonate with them but they just haven’t tried them yet. If soccer, gardening, skydiving, and sculpture are your things, but you’ve only ever tried to make habits of basketball, cooking, video games, and hiking, then it will feel like nothing fits you. If you don’t know what resonates with you, go out and try stuff. Take classes. Go with a friend when they go do something they do regularly. You’re probably going to hate some of it, and that’s fine. That’s all part of the self-discovery process.”
When I ended up writing pages that stayed on topic and didn’t wander too much, I found it to be a great exercises in trying to organize my own thoughts live, as they happen. Trying to focus my mind to carry ideas from start to finish in a way that would make sense to a listener and naturally weave together ideas, examples, and anecdotes that flow into a coherent argument. It felt good when I could achieve that, and felt like it was good practice for having arguments or debates with people in every day life.
This exercise is one that I think everyone should do from time to time. It really made me realize how all-over-the-place my own brain is. We like to think our brains are very logical and structured in thought, but you really see your monkey-brain jumping all over the place when you get it down on paper in real time. It’s a twist on mindfulness practice that really does have practical use. By becoming aware of your monkey brain jumping all over the place, you take the first step in being be able to control it; to realize when it’s jumping all over the place too much and realizing you need to make a conscious effort to rein it in.
I’ve actually heard of people doing this every morning as a sort of “mind dump” to start the day (aptly called “morning pages,” which were recently recommended to me by a friend) and get all the extra unnecessary junk in their head out of their way so they can focus on what’s important, and I’m really considering doing this regularly. It’s kind of a fun exercises to do, and I do have to admit that once you’ve cleared some of the random thoughts out of your mind, it does seem to make my headspace for the rest of the day feel clearer. It’s like applying a bit of grease to my mind’s cogs; it just feels like my mind runs smoother all day.
What would your inner monologue look like? I’m actually curious to know how my inner monologue compares to others. My first thought is that my inner monologue probably just looks like anyone else’s, but it would be really interesting to see how they measure up…But maybe that’s a big ask. If you think about it, a pure, unedited inner monologue “mind dump” is quite a personal thing. It shows a side of you that you yourself is probably not conscious of, much less something that your friends and family around you notice.
Overall, I’m glad to have had the experience in doing this exercise and plan on working into my regular schedule. I recommend it. Give it a try. I guarantee you’ll come out of it knowing more about yourself and become a better you.
For anyone who wants to learn more about Joshua Spodek or Leadership Step By Step, find it on Josh’s homepage.
