Talking Heads (series) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This morning while walking my dog I had a random thought: “hey, I should run with Izzy (my dog) regularly.” And almost immediately I heard another voice in my head say “you can’t do that.” I realized that this voice is actually pretty common, and loves to immediately shoot down ideas, plans, hopes that I’m perhaps a little unsure of. (It is my own version of the “shotgun,” a nickname for someone who used to meet up with Jason, etc awhile back. No matter what we said, and no matter how much we bubbled with optimism about something we were discussing he would immediately shoot it down.) This voice is active, and I wonder how many times throughout the day it holds me back.
Through this little moment of reflection, I was reminded of Ramit Sethi‘s excellent post on “The invisible scripts that guide our lives.” As he says in the post, these scripts can be so entrenched in us that we don’t even notice the impact they have. “Would a fish know he’s swimming in water?” How many times does my “shotgun” voice speak up and I don’t even notice that I listen to it?
The good news is that we can respond to and even change those invisible scripts that may be impacting our lives. The better news is that the first and most important step in this process is noticing. The bad news is, noticing can be very hard. Do you see the scripts that impact your life?
Life Putting 