Questions to Cultivate Your Wiser Self

Imagine a basketball player missing an important shot in a final and their team losing that game. Although perfecting your throws, especially under stressful conditions, is important for increased accuracy, I care about something else:

What happens inside that player after the game is lost?

I'm interested in one thing in particular: how do they talk to themselves? How do they interpret what happens? And are those interpretations energy-draining or energy-conducive?

Picture a continuum along which you'll place three types of inner selves:

• The harshest (only seeing what you do wrong and hardly recognising what you do right)

• The fluffiest (always saying you're the best and never being honest with you regarding what may not be working)

• And, somewhere in the middle, a version that can be both honest and direct, while also recognising the goodness in you. We'll call it the Wiser Self.

Each of them will interpret the above event differently:

• Harsh inner voice: "You loser, I can't believe you missed it!" (notice the energy)

• An out-of-touch-with-reality inner voice: "Ah, don't think about it at all, it's nothing." (dismissing or suppressing the reality). Once again, notice the energy.

• A wise inner voice: "All players at times miss important shots. Let's debrief what happened and see how you can do better next time." Notice this energy.

Which voice interprets events in your life matters. Although the harsh energy can help the player improve, as it will probably get them to not experience that pain from losing again, it comes at a high cost:

• Additional energy it takes to process self-punishing thoughts.

• Irritability from identifying too closely to results ("results have you" rather than "you have results"), potentially causing damage to professional and personal relationships.

• Adverse impact on your sleep, which in turn impacts performance.

This is why, whenever I hear my clients being overly harsh on themselves, my first move is to help them be aware of this harshness and, if they're ready, to upgrade that inner dialogue from a harsh inner voice to a Wiser Self.

Why is this so important? Because as a person works towards their aspirations, a harsh voice not only makes this journey longer, and more costly, but also less pleasurable. So think of cultivating a Wiser Self as a strategic shortcut to make sure you have a better internal climate to cultivate your development, as opposed to frequent hail storms and tornadoes to take care of.

These are qualities of a Wise Self that I found to be helpful:

• We acknowledge the reality (e.g. a missed shot, a lost game).

• We acknowledge ourselves for doing our best, given the resources we had at the time ("No, you didn't do your best" will take you towards the Harsh Coach territory. A Wiser Self would say "You did what you did, but let's not dwell on it. What do you want to do next time?"

• We believe in our abilities to do better, even if we're not there yet.

• We realise that whatever we choose to do well, it is a craft we need to practice.

• We remind ourselves that even the best players (think Formula 1 drivers) can sometimes spin out, but they use those instances to learn how to be better at their craft the next time.

• We don't jump to conclusions too fast. Instead, we look at the situation from various perspectives and timeframes.

Try this:

Think of an event that didn't go as well as you planned. If the negative self-talk is present, let that voice in you speak first and capture, on paper, how it interprets the event.

After the harsh interpretations are written down (and sometimes putting them on paper and examining them from a distance will allow you to see the flaws in this way of reasoning), pass the microphone over to the Wiser Self and see what they will say about the same event.

These questions can help cultivate your Wiser Self:

• Imagine a Wise Inner Voice next to you. What would they say to you about this?

• What is an opportunity for you in this?

• How can you grow from this?

• How can you make this period the most enriching in your life?

• What are you learning here?

• What DID you do well?

• What do you want to do differently next time?

If you're struggling to hear from the Wiser Self, imagine someone you know who is just, honest, transparent and caring. Invite them to the table and imagine what they would say. Sometimes we need role models to help us integrate a way of thinking that may be foreign to us.

See what you can come up with and remember - it takes practice. Harsh Inner voices are usually less mature and therefore less patient, jumping to rash conclusions about ourselves and about trying out new things. Pay attention to which energy inside of you interprets what happens as you try this, a potentially new, way of relating to yourself.

Note: Thanks to my friend Nathan in NYC for once gifting me a book, "The Untethered Soul" by Michael Singer, which helped me become aware of this important aspect of relating to ourselves (and thanks, Michael, for writing it!).