Your inner voice. Friend or foe when it comes to helping you in business? I believe that your inner voice is your unconscious mind and its primary function is to look after you and keep you safe.

It’s great when your inner voice is saying positive and empowering things to you. Take a moment to think of the things it says to you when you are doing something that you are really good at. It will reinforce your strengths and capabilities and make you feel amazing.

However what about when you do new stuff or stuff outside of your comfort zone? Or maybe when you’ve made a mistake or screwed up? This is when you’re most likely to hear the other side of your unconscious mind...your inner critic!

Who is your inner critic?

Who is the person you hear in your head when things don’t go as planned? Everything you hear has been created or chosen by you. It’s all the stuff you’ve heard from others in your life mashed together with your inner fears. It’s useful to remember that at some level this stuff has served you positively so let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water just yet.

Your inner voice is your best friend too...warning you of any looming danger. The real issue here is controlling your inner critic so that you get the positive benefit without the debilitating effects of negativity.

At about the age of seven our unconscious mind splits from our conscious mind and it’s at this point that you become fragmented in your thinking. It’s possible to have values and beliefs that are in conflict with one another.

You might want to think about the voice you hear. Is it yours?

I remember delivering a workshop when this very topic came up and a business owner in the audience told us that she knew she was very capable of achieving what she wanted but every time she told herself she could, she heard a voice that said “Oh no you can’t”.

I asked her whose voice it was and I could see that she was surprised by the response she got. “Oh my...it’s my ex-husbands voice...and we’ve been divorced for 10 years”.

Gentlemen, it's time to put the cat out

So whose voice do you hear in your head?

Whether your inner voice is saying positive or negative things it’s really important to recognise that there’s a positive intention in the message. What could it be for you? Maybe you haven’t had great success with a new sales strategy or technique and it causes you lots of angst every time you try it.

Or there’s a particular client or prospect that takes lots of your energy to communicate with. One positive intention is to stop you feeling the pain of the disappointment or the trauma of communicating with this person...so let’s not bother doing it again...just in case there’s some pain here.

That would be great if it weren’t such a useful tool to increase your sales or potential for future business. You may avoid the short term pain while but the long term impact is that you won’t get any better at your craft and your sales are less likely to increase. Sound familiar?

It’s really useful to think about the positive intention when your inner critic stops you moving forward. Once you know what the positive intention is you can incorporate it in another way, which will allow you to focus on the task in hand and keep the inner critic happy at the same time!

Action

Start recording the negative things your inner critic says and ask yourself the following questions:

• Whose voice is this?
• What is the positive intention of this message?
• How can you preserve the positive intention in your new strategy?

These questions will give you a greater awareness of what’s going on within you and give you greater control. They allow you to make friends with your unconscious mind and change your reaction to that inner voice. Rather than letting it crush you...you can be curious to the reasons behind it. Understanding what’s going on behind the voice will ultimately give you more control to change the voice!

Back to the lady with the ex-husband inner critic...she told me the voice was coming in through her left ear as if her husband was sitting on her shoulder. I asked her to move him to the corner of the room and she said his voice had become quieter. I asked her to put him in the corridor outside and his voice vanished. Now she has a strategy to remove him if she ever hears his voice again!

Ultimately it’s your choice how you react...you have the control...so what are you going to choose?