19. Three Thoughts: Self-Talk, Meet Empathy

Do you recognize when you talk to yourself? If I asked you in a crowded room to raise your hand if you believe you are empathic... would you hesitate? This episode is about the relationship between how you talk to yourself and your capacity for empathy [hint: they are mates for life], and how to get better at both. Nobody is born empathic and we certainly aren't taught to speak to ourselves with loving kindness. But these are learnable communication skills just like any other. When you develop a practice to nurture this partnership, the result is astounding inner peace, joy, patience and a feeling of spaciousness that's hard to describe without experiencing it. Want in on some of that? Take a listen.

PS: This episode is dedicated to my coach Stephanie Marino, who manages the task of molding and shaping my self-talk and empathy with infinite ease and grace

SHOW NOTES

• Dr. Shad Helmstetter, leading Self-Talk expert
• Learned Helplessness
• Stephanie Marino Coaching

Chapters

• 0:41 Self Talk and Empathy: Paired for Life
• 2:18 Thought 1: Self Empathy Begets Other Empathy
• 3:23 Thought 2: We are Hardwired for Negativity
• 6:20 Eradicating the Question 'Why' Equal Mad Freedom!
• 10:45 Thought 3: Get Yourself Replacement Language
• 21:28 Do This Social Experiment!

Transcript

All right, so this is me days, two days after the election trying to resume a little bit of normalcy and not talk about the election. But I hope you’re all breathing easier - in whatever way you interpret that. I know my cortisol levels are cautiously coming down. Long overdue. 

So today, I'm gonna answer a question that I just got which was a request to explain how empathy relates to self talk - where do they intersect. And as you know, on the show, self talk and its impact is one of the key things we discuss with guests. And the basic premise is:

Self talk and empathy are inextricably linked. They’re married/united/welded/melded. We can’t tease them apart. We can learn to be more empathic to ourselves, which then grows our capacity to be more empathic to others. And that's the notion of scaling global empathy. The mission of In Kind.

First, let’s define empathy. Let’s be simple and not academic or semantic police about what empathy is or isn’t - to me it is simply this: to feel with another, and in the case of In Kind, it’s listening with no other agenda than to understand.

When someone comes on the show and they're ready, they're finally ready to let go of something and offload it from their energy that is one way of showing themselves love. It’s really a form of self care.

And once they do that, it opens them up, it opens their frequency up... Because they've got the reverb of love for themselves. And if you're someone like me, who believes in frequency, you know that that is very palpable. You can feel love from another person, energetically alone, they don't have to say anything, or do anything you can feel it when you're in their presence. So when someone gives themself empathy, it trickles out to their other relationships. You can think of it as going inward, to go outward. 

And this is why as a listener, it will never matter what circumstance or background or culture you grew up in, you can hear yourself in someone else’s story, and when you listen to their self talk, you immediately realize oh - that it's not just me who feels that way. And secondly, there are things I can do to be more empathic to myself - one of which is release, as happens on the show, another is to learn a new language to speak more kindly to yourself. Both are very very powerful tools to have in your daily pocket. 

So that's the first thought I want you to let sink in and I hope you take as truth - self-empathy begets other empathy. 

Thought number two - we are hardwired for negativity. 

So maybe you’ve already sensed there’s a problem brewing here? You are correct! Because self talk and empathy are mated for life we need to develop the skills to recognize how we currently talk to ourselves, and how we can change that because let me tell you - it’s almost never pretty. 

You’ve heard me mention negativity bias and the fact that we need 5-10 positive messages to override 1 negative? I figured that out in the first few months of working with my coach, that my own self talk was not only negative - it was completely dictating my ability to put my work out there. So I knew that once I’d made the discovery that I needed to clean up my self talk, that it would help listeners to hear how other humans talk to themselves, and shift their mindset from hurtful to helpful. 

When I say my self talk was not nice, I mean every single week my coach was identifying how destructive - and wildly incorrect - the conversation I was having with myself was. Like insanely warped and outlandish, and I thought, if that's what I'm experiencing, how many more humans are also experiencing that?

I want to pause for a second here and get really clear that if you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about with self talk - like what are the actual words?? Know that everybody has their own brand of it. And most of it occurs silently as the chatter in your head. Sure, occasionally you scream at yourself out loud I’m so stupid...but 90% of self talk is insidious, subtle and under the radar. 

That is because hurtful self talk is the work of the ego. If we do not learn to become aware and learn how to speak differently to ourselves, the ego takes over and we are operating from our heads and not our hearts. Okay, I'm gonna say that again, self talk can be easily puppeteered by the ego and if we’re not vigilant, egoic self talk will force you into operating from your head and not your heart.

The ego wants us to remain stuck. So it’s constantly muscling in, and a lot of times it’s tricky because it’s subtle and insidious, and it never shuts up. So I want to give you a couple of examples of self talk that I really self struggled with and that helped ego keep me from creating In Kind for 6 years. 

The self talk is a single word. One that I used like a daily bludgeon. And that is WHY. 

When I was in the beginning stages of figuring out what In Kind was going to be, how I was going to do it - was I going to produce it, was I going to learn how to do all the audio and edit and do soup to nuts even though I was scared to death of the technology behind it. And I was sure I would never be able to get that right or have something of the level of quality that I demand, made completely by my own hand. But I also knew as a storyteller and a researcher, and someone who considers empathic listening and interviewing as behavioral art in a way, it's my behavioral art. In order to do somebody justice, I must produce it in the way that I produce it. I can’t have someone else weave together these people’s stories that they’ve entrusted me with. 

So I constantly was asking myself, why.Why does it take me so long to finish an episode? Why do I get so frustrated when I’ve set my recording levels 15 times and they seem different the next time I go to record? Why do these things always happen to me? And by these things, I mean, what seems to be just completely crazy, technological glitches. For months I was spending 14-15 hours editing episodes, opening what I thought was a finished product the next day, only to find all my edits were out of sync! And the worst was I couldn’t identify why. Countless big and small examples like this happen every time I sit down for In Kind time! The self talk is extremely belligerent. And it’s 10 points for ego who’s trying to make me sit in rumination. Trying to make me wallow longer in my doubt. So hours, turned into days - weeks -months, and years where I sat in rumination, asking why.

Then enter my coach. Within a week, I was brought to my attention that I needed to question the usefulness of why. What do I get when I ask why? Well, what I get is my answer to myself! Why does this always happen to you? ...Because you suck at technology. You're not a technology person. Why do you get so frustrated with things? ...Oh, because you’re  impatient. Oh, now I'm an impatient person. So now I'm an a-technical impatient person! Why can't you just put the work out there even if it's not 100% how you want it? Why can’t you delegate to someone? ...Because you're a perfectionist. 

So you can see where this is going. It takes one small thing and then my ego 

runs it through the rumination machine and it comes out a million times worse problem - a bunch of terrible personality traits! That means, with this winning combination I'm unable to deal with failure and I’m stuck  in inertia.

The list is long. I’m a procrastinator. I’m a quitter. I’m a talker not a doer. I’m not a finisher...I could read you pages in my journal of all the grossly inaccurate labels I’d given myself, and all fed by the question WHY!

So you may be asking what’s the solution to the incessant why self talk? This brings me to thought 3 - to change self talk from debilitating to empathic, you need to create a new language of positive self talk. And this isn’t your standard Duolingo language acquisition, this is much harder. Because first, you need to train yourself to be aware of your hurtful self talk. Then, train yourself to PAUSE long enough to stop the bludgeoning, then call up the helpful talk and tell ego to take a back seat. 

This isn’t easy, but it can be done in remarkably little time, considering we spent our lives learning to be nasty to ourselves! So with the why example, I have learned to ask how. How questions are an amazing antidote to rumination, because how immediately goes to action and it also affirms my confidence that I can do something about the situation. So why leads to what's called learned helplessness - a concept in psychology that explains how, when a person continually faces a negative situation (here it’s our own self talk), we stop trying to change our circumstances even when we have the ability to. We believe it’s futile - like when I said negative self talk can spill over into personality traits! And most people believe that’s in immutable territory - I don’t, but many do! And so rumination was a really deeply entrenched pattern. And I had to realize that it came from anxiety, it came from an anxiety around waiting to produce something perfect, or don't produce it at all.  We don't go around on a daily basis giving ourselves empathic self talk, we just don't do it. We don't say it's okay. You put yourself out there - you learned something, great! Or it's okay. You really fucked that up, but wasn't it fun trying or wasn't it amazing to realize it didn't kill me and it didn't kill my reputation or it didn't do the thing in my imagination I thought it was going to do. That is one of the remedies to self talk, but unfortunately, we don't go around doing that. We are very bad at muzzling it. 

But here's really the key relationship again between empathy and self talk. It will not be enough to just learn to stop whatever your brand of hurtful self talk is - my brand was why and rumination. We need the trifecta. Awareness, pause and new language. 

Sadly, for most of us, talking to ourselves kindly is a foreign language, it's totally foreign because of our negativity bias, which causes us to operate and act from the hurtful place all day long. We need to have replacement language at the ready. So my why/how is one example that helped me tremendously.

Why are recordings disappearing into nowhere? And this is a real example. The last time that happened I asked how can I figure this out and learn how to stop it from happening again? Through tons of frantic plugging and unplugging, I discovered the cable, the tiny little cable from my headphones had failed. Well, I'm not trained as an audio engineer. So I did not know that those kind of things could fail. Like I literally didn't even think about it. And a friend of a friend who is an audio person who's been in media 20 years, said oh yeah! Those chords fail all the time. Totally common. I ordered like six cords. And that is my lesson. So it's not why am I such an idiot? It's how can I prevent this from happening again and move on. And it was a really valuable lesson. In fact, I ordered backups for all of my cables and now that’s a non-issue. Why to how, and then mistakes start to show themselves for what they are - great learning opportunities. And I know it sounds cliche, but it's rock solid truth. 

I’ll give you one other example. This is one that's hilarious that me and my daughter always say, so I have a 15 year old daughter. And for years, she basically developed a complex that she couldn’t remember things. So we would, we would say like as a kid, oh, remember to bring your sweater downstairs. And literally, literally, one to two seconds later, she'd walk out of the room, and we'd watch her walk out without the sweater. Multiply that by thousands, and then when you get to school, it can become a real issue. So she was convinced that she had short term memory issues, as in disruptions neurologically - to the point where we were thinking, Oh, should we get her tested? You know, does she have ADD or executive functioning problems? What's going on here? So I read Dr. Shad Helmstetter’s book, What to Say When You Talk to Yourself. And then I had him on the show, and another friend of mine had asked to throw a question to Dr. shad. And so I did. And the question was, what's one of the most common negative self talk examples people say to themselves? What is like a universal one? And guess what the first one he said was? I have a terrible memory. He says the brain does not know or care what you put into it. It's a computer, we own it. So if the ego is going to say to you, I have a terrible memory or tell you to tell yourself, you have a terrible memory, guess what your brain is going to do? It's going to not remember names. So the next time you're in a crowd, and someone says, Hi, I'm Jill. And then five minutes later you’re standing with another friend when Jill comes back up to you and you now have to introduce her to the other person but can’t remember her name - well, it's not your brain’s fault. You just told your brain that it has a terrible memory, and thus, it will do you proud.

With my daughter, the replacement language we use is to say out loud, “I think sharp!” Stole it right from Dr. Shad’s book and it works! Not overnight, mind you, but it does work. So, as all good things worth doing are, it’s a practice. A skill to hone. To get good at that three part process awareness, pause before the hurtful self talk comes, and then call in that replacement language is a practice. 

What is the replacement language you might ask? The best answer I can give there is what is the language you use to talk with someone who you love when they really mess something up? 

That’s where to look first. It doesn't matter if you're a how versus why or why versus how person or, you know, if you're the person who says, I'm such an idiot, what the fuck is wrong with you, or whatever the things you say are, everyone is different. If we can develop whatever loving, helpful constructive language that we use with a loved one, a best friend, a pet, someone we love dearly, for ourselves - that’s what will move the mindset. And lest you think this feels like coddling ourselves, let’s stop right there. We’re not ignoring any mistakes here, not sweeping things under the rug. We're learning from them and trying not to repeat them. 

When we make regular practice of speaking emphatically to ourselves, you’ll be shocked at the ripple effects. People react to you totally differently. And there’s the most amazing added gift of an energy exchange! When I stopped ruminating with the whys, I started getting to the hows 100 times faster! Sweet sweet spaciousness. It’s there whenever I choose it and it feels so much better to encourage myself than to beat myself up. 

Ok quick summary: 

• Self talk and empathy are inextricably bound
• We can overcome negativity bias 
• Replacement language is your empathic self talk

Let’s get to some habit changes! Empathy is nothing, in my opinion, without action. So here’s my challenge. I’m gonna give you a range and a social experiment to do - on yourself. 

You can do this for 10 minutes up to a whole day. I want you to write down every instance of your self-talk. In your journal, on the back of a napkin, whatever but make sure you have enough room because trust me, you’ll have enough in 10 minutes for the napkin. Take note when you’re cooking dinner, parenting, working, waiting in line, driving, this happens everywhere. Remember that self talk is mostly in our head! Put it aside - I’d recommend for a whole day. And sit down with it the next day. Get a cup of coffee or tea, and read it out loud. Say every comment to yourself, out loud. Then, find someone you love - no need to tell them what the experiment is, and pick a few zingers from that liself talk, and say it out loud to them. You can be on the phone, on Zoom, at the dinner table…just don’t text. And see how you feel when you do this. I’m willing to wager that it will be so highly uncomfortable that a lot of you all are not even going to be able to get those words out of your mouth. 

What I hope that you take away here is that we can be so hurtful to ourselves on the daily, that we have stopped looking, stopped noticing. And we can’t keep on that way. We have to do better, and be better for ourselves. How did this help you start training your awareness? In a few weeks my new In Kind website will be up and you can tell me there. 

Until then, cheers to global empathy and thanks so much for listening.