There was this guy I used to know when I was younger. Kind of a strange fellow.
He was always talking to himself, even when other people were around. He was an otherwise normal guy, but he seemed to verbalize the kind of stuff most of us think to ourselves.
I was at this seminar a few years back, and the topic was self talk. We did this exercise where we sat there silently, and then tapped our legs whenever we heard a voice in our heads.
I was pretty amazed at the frequency that everybody else was tapping away. I thought I was the only one.
Of course, there’s different levels of self talk. There’s a flat out voice that you can actually hear. This is the kind of voice you can change with NLP, so like if you hear some teacher telling you you’ll never be successful, you can change the voice into Mickey Mouse or Yoda or something, as well as the content.
Other times, the voices are there, but they just come across as a “feeling.”
The source of these voices, or feelings is also pretty interesting. Some of them come from upbringing, some of them are programmed, and some are a mix.
One of the breakthroughs in linguistics is the idea of “transformational grammar,” discovered by Chomsky, and was part of the basis of NLP.
His theory is that we come pre-wired with structure, from a linguistic standpoint, and then we spend our lives filling in that structure with content.
So if you have a specific voice telling you you’ll fail at being a baseball player, that’s a specific content ( baseball player success) being layered on top of pre-wired structure (fear of failure).
In a sense, our parents, teachers, religious leaders, etc, kind of get bad rap. We tend to blame them for all our problems, but in many cases, they just provided the specific content.
We came into this world pre-wired with the structure on top of which to put the content.
Does that mean there’s no escape? Not at all.
Just like you can plan your diet, or plan your budget, (both of which go against your instincts to eat everything in sight, and spend every cent you’ve got) you can also plan your life around all those other triggers.
Sure, it’s not easy. But being a rich guy or gal with a six pack is better than being a broke fat dude.
Luckily, there’s plenty more triggers to overcome, meaning there’s much more to this than most people realize.
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