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64. Get your soul to talk
We’ve always been a little nervous, culturally, about
talking to ourselves. We usually associate it with in-
sanity. But it was Plato who said that his definition of
thinking was “the soul talking to itself.”
If you really want to get your life worked out, there
is no one better to talk to than yourself. No other per-
son has as much information about your problems and
no other person knows your skills and capabilities bet-
ter. And there’s no one else who can do more for you
than yourself.
A lot of people in the motivational and psychologi-
cal professions recommend affirmations. You choose a
sentence to say, such as, “Every day in every way I’m
getting better and better,” and repeat it whether or not
you think it’s true. While affirmations are a good first
step to re-programming, I prefer conversations. Con-
versations work faster.
The two most inspirational guidelines to productive
self-conversational exercises are in Martin Seligman’s
Learned Optimism and Nathaniel Branden’s The Six
Pillars of Self-Esteem. Seligman offers ways to dispute
your own pessimism and create the habit of optimistic
thinking. Branden offers provocative sentence stems for
you to complete.
Rather than brainlessly parroting “I’m getting bet-
ter and better” to myself, it makes a longer-lasting im-
pression when I logically argue the case and win. With
enough back-and-forth conversation, I can prove to my-
self that I am getting better. Proof beats the parrot ev-
ery time. It’s one thing to try to hypnotize myself through
repetition of words to accept something as true, and
it’s quite another to convincemyself that it is true.