Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #3: Inner Monologue
The 3rd exercise of Leadership Step By Step is to record your inner monologue a few times a day for a week. Most days I recorded it at least twice, but I also managed to get to it 3 times a day from time to time.
Since it’s not my first time doing this, I knew it was coming, and I’ve already had some practice. I remember the first time I did this exercise, it was surprisingly hard to focus on the monologue itself. I would get too involved in the “thinking about thinking” instead of just writing what my mind was blabbering on about. For example, I’d end up writing “I’m thinking about how hard it is to write as fast as I think” instead of “Wow, it’s really hard to write all my thoughts. By the time I’m done writing a sentence, my mind is already thinking about the next one. Wait what was the next thing I thought?!”
This time it was much smoother. I knew to just relax, stop “trying” and just let the mind wander. As before, my mind would do a lot of commenting on whatever was happening in the moment. “Hey, there’s a red car passing by. They don’t live here. I wonder where they’re going.” or “There’s my dog. She’s looking for food again. She’s putting her head on my lap. Should I give her something?” Another trend I noticed was that my mind would almost become self conscious about itself “recording” itself. A lot of times I just would feel like “I don’t know what to think about. My mind is blank. Well…Not blank. Since it’s thinking this right now…But not thinking of anything important or significant. Is this really worth writing?” And I did notice that sometimes my mind would go blank for longer periods of time. Times when there was no inner monologue, not even a “Blank! Blank! My mind is blank!”
I often tried to give myself a topic to think about so I wouldn’t just be writing the exact same narrations of what is happening around me: “Let’s think about that thing that happened today…It really made me feel disrespected. I don’t know why they had to say that like that, and why I couldn’t just speak up and tell them so…” I almost felt like I didn’t want to waste “thinking time” and be sure it was “productive”, which was an interesting realization in itself, and possibly speaks to an unnecessary desire or habit I have to try to “optimize” everything, sometimes to a fault.
Overall, I feel like the thoughts I had during this exercise were probably pretty typical. I think that most people would be inclined to just think about what’s happening around them, or about how they can’t think of what to think at the moment, but I will be really interested to read others’ essays.
The exercise didn’t feel profound or lead to any incredible realizations, but I think the exercise is a great practice to have regularly. The ability to just open the fire hydrant of your mind and let it just release all of its thoughts onto a piece of paper and clear all the messy, disorganized, and rambling thoughts out is almost a form of therapy. For this exercise, I never wrote more than 10 sentences or so each time, but in the past, to relax, I’ve taken an entire 8.5×11” sheet of paper and just filled the whole thing with exactly these kinds of thoughts. My mental state afterwards is always more focused after I’ve let all the random thoughts out.
I also hope that doing this exercise leads me to higher levels of self-awareness – by being aware of what I’m thinking, it gives me a meta look into my own brain. It allows me to step back from myself and almost look at my own thoughts from a distance and evaluate whether I agree with what I’m saying or thinking. In a way, it creates a second layer of “me,” which I think can be a very useful tool for staying calm and level-headed. I anticipate that in future exercises when you must learn to lead yourself, it will become a critical skill to have.
