Focused - 139: Soundtracks & Self-Talk

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

David & Mike consider the source of negative self-talk, the power of positive thinking, and taming the rebellious brain.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. How about you? Excellent. For Deep Focus, we're doing that now at the top of the show. We had a nice talk today about Focus and holidays and gaming tables and all things. So that was kind of fun.

It is. You've given me some great holiday inspo. So today we are here to talk about self-talk, which is, I think, the unknown enemy, for lack of a better term. So this is a show I've been wanting to do for a while, so we're going to get into it. We've been wanting to do for a while. So we're going to get into it. We've got something to discuss before we do so. However, I just wanted to take a minute to remind the listeners about these gorgeous calendars we have for sale. Yes, the calendars are out. Link will be in the show notes. The 2022 version of the Focus New Year calendar has several upgrades, including two different orientations. I think that's the big one for most people. You don't have to decide between portrait and landscape.

They are double-sided printed. So one side is portrait, one side is landscape. You can choose the one that you want. They are dry erase. So if your plans change, you can modify them. And we added some stuff for tracking habits, yearly themes all that kind of stuff so if you are interested in them they are 28 and if you want it before january 1st now would be a great time to place your order yeah i'm already kind of in the headspace of 2022 so i hung my next year one up and it is crazy how much of it is filling up already, you know, big events. And it's really great having it on the wall there to see. I find myself referring to it repeatedly throughout the day.

So this is a calendar that both Mike and I use. I think it could be helpful for you if you're trying to remain focused. It's got the cool focused logo on the top and it helps support the show. So if you'd like to have a nice wall calendar, I can't think of a better one. And we appreciate everybody that's already bought them. I know a lot of you have them already. And that's another nice thing about this is as soon as you order, it gets sent to you. You're not going to have to wait until the end of December to get this thing up.

All right. Self-talk. This is a thing that I have a complicated relationship with. And kind of the reason this show came up is because Mike and I offline have been talking a lot about positive thinking and kind of positive self-talk. And I have a very skeptical mind coming toward this stuff. But before we get to the positive side, I want to spend some time talking about the negative side of self-talk,

because I feel like for most people, that is really the center of all of this. I mean, negative self-talk is something I think we all fight against. I remember, I think I was in high school and I read a lecture. There's a guy named Alan Watts who was kind of like a contributor and philosopher up at the San Francisco Zen Center. And he talked about the brain as the rebellious organ. And that's the first time I ever stopped to think about the fact that that voice in my head isn't necessarily telling the truth, that the rebellious organ is kind of screwing with me. When was the first time you became aware?

I mean, we're all aware of self-talk. It happens all the time. You sit there like, oh, I should try this. And there's something inside you that says, you're going to suck at that. Or there's no way you'll finish that. Or really, you know, when was the first time you thought that maybe that voice wasn't necessarily there to help you? Good question. I think my earliest memory of this topic came when I was in high school and I grew up kind of around this stuff. My dad owned a software company and wrote and researched a lot of products in the social emotional learning space, emotional intelligence, things like that, which is where self-talk kind of has its roots, in my opinion.

And I remember him telling me in high school that if you are hitting a golf ball off the tee and you see a great big water hazard on the left, the natural inclination is to tell yourself, don't hit it towards the water hazard. But he told me that the brain can't differentiate positive and negative like that. It latches on to the object itself. And so we're kind of default negative by saying, don't hit it in the water, don't hit it in the water, but your brain attaches to the water. And so what ends up happening is you hit the ball into the water. And then you recognize that that effect was not intended. You didn't like it. So you're going to do everything you can to avoid it again. But that just kind of reinforces this negative cycle. I never really thought a whole lot about how I was applying or fighting against this actively

in my own life. I've grown quite a bit in especially the last several years and become more positive. I think that my brain kind of tends to focus on the problems. And one of the things I realized from prepping for this episode was that I've still got a long ways to go in terms of breaking out of negativity. Oh, yeah. I mean, just yesterday, I was sitting there in the backyard pulling weeds. And my brain went to the breakup with my first high school girlfriend and how terribly I handled it. You know, I mean, man, I'm so glad there was no social media when I was growing up because Lord knows what I would have done back

then with social media. But the, um, yeah, I mean, it's like, why? And I was thinking, well, why did you just do that to me? You know? I'm just having fun out here pulling weeds. Why did you pull me into that? So I think this is an issue, and I can guarantee you this is something my father and I never spoke about. But it is that rebellious Oregon line from Alan Watts to me was a spark, and I've carried it in my head ever since. And I do think this is something that we all deal with. And then like when, after the whole girlfriend thing yesterday, I was looking at my dog running around, I was thinking, well, you know, do you think she has negative self-talk?

You know, I don't think so. You know, I mean, like, she's like, there's a squirrel. I'm going to go chase this squirrel. You know, she doesn't say, well, if you chase the squirrel, you'll never catch it. Or what's the point of chasing the squirrel? You never catch it. You you're terrible at squirrel catching your life is your life is rubbish. You know, my dog doesn't think that, you know, um, but we do. And, um, like so many things in kind of this space of, of, you know, what's going on in our head. I think awareness is something that is really important. And really, I want everybody listening to stop and acknowledge that, oh, yeah, there is this little villain between my ears that occasionally wants to torpedo me from doing some of the best things of my life.

The thing about the negative self-talk is that you don't even realize that you're doing it a lot of the time. I grew up understanding what it was conceptually, but as I just shared, I found myself slipping into it anyways. Even though intellectually I knew this is a bad thing to do, you should just focus on the positive outcome or the positive situation. And once you create that image in your brain, then your body will try to manufacture that outcome. I knew that. I could pass a test that talked about that, but I was pretty terrible at applying it. And when you were talking about your dog, the other thing that came to mind is Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the manically depressed robot. And I think it's

interesting. What is fascinating about Marvin is that robots, like dogs, are not supposed to have that negative emotion to them. And it feels weird when you see Marvin moping around all depressed. I've been talking to the ship's computer. It hates me. And it just kind of shocked me that there's some things here where we see it and we're like, oh man, that obviously does not belong there. But we have such a hard time noticing it, at least for myself, I have a hard time noticing it in our own lives. Wait a second, Mike, I'm confused. You mean you got something from a fiction book that you can use in your life? It's true. It's true. You heard it here first.

What an interesting idea you have stumbled across. Well, I do think though that for me, the voice was gospel until I stumbled into Alan Watts. And I'll always be thankful for him for waking me up to that early in my life. Early being high school, I don't know if that's early to some people, but it is to me. And as soon as that occurred to me, I'm like, oh, wait a second. That voice is a liar. You know, he's lying to you. I mean, maybe you could play that song on your saxophone or maybe you could get into college or, you know, all the things that you're questioning yourself at. I was at the time I started to, um, to ignore the self-talk early. And I think that is something that we all need to figure out. I don't know. It's a, uh, it's a challenge. And like I can

explain from yesterday about going to, uh, make chastising myself about the first breakup in my life yesterday, something that occurred, I don't know, over 30 years ago. You can never fully defeat it, but at least you can be aware of it. So how do you deal with negative self-talk, Mike? talk right well not very well apparently because like i said i i can identify it but only kind of after the fact i'm not very good at catching it in the moment i'm trying to get better at that but one of the things that has helped me is recognizing that i i tend to default towards those negative situations. You used a couple of examples where I could never do X, and you fill in the blank. And you look at people who are doing X, and you're like, well, that's great for them, but I can't do it because of, and you have a whole list of reasons. And I definitely do that.

And I'm recognizing that I limit myself by taking that approach. What would happen if you really could do X, and the only reason that you haven't is that you haven't tried it yet? I heard somebody describe faith and fear the same way, and this really is something I've been brewing on lately. Faith being the definition of faith being belief that what you cannot see will come to pass, and then fear having the exact same definition, belief that what you cannot see will come to pass. Faith being the positive version, the you-can-do-it version, and fear being the negative version, the one that's going to create a big long list of why other people can do that thing but you can't.

And that's the one that I gravitate to, but if they're exactly the same and it's kind of like a switch that I can flip, then I've got to try to do everything in my power to do that. And there are a couple things that I'm trying to do to change that default, but still got a long ways to go. This kind of relates to something I read in the Courage book from Ryan Holiday that we can't seem to stop talking about, but he was talking about how fear is so often unknown in our heads that we don't really put parameters around it, which makes it a lot scarier. And he wrote the story, I think it was of Sherman. It was one of the World War II, I'm sorry, it was one of the Civil War generals who was heading into unknown country and they heard the wolves howling and they thought they were heading into wolves

and they thought that it was like there were 20 wolves and there was just two of them and they thought they were going to get torn to shreds, but they went ahead anyway. And when they got in there, finally, it was just two wolves. So it wasn't 20. But it was the fear of how we inflate fear. There's some connection there, but I'm kind of off on a tangent. Getting to how do I deal with this is I've come to think of that inner voice as just kind of like a mischievous trickster, like my own personal Loki that lives between my ears and acknowledging it not as me. I really don't, you know what I mean? It's not me. It's my brain cooking things up. And I don't think my brain hates me, but I think it's afraid. A lot of us have underlying fear. So it starts generating synapses to give you excuses not to try things and not to take risks.

And, you know, I guess that, I mean, genetically helps keep us alive longer, but in the modern world really gets in your way. So I treat my inner voice as a paranoid liar. I don't know how else to put it, you know. It's like, you know, if you had a crazy person that I don't know how else to put it. It's like if you had a crazy person that lived next to you and was always saying stuff to you, you wouldn't always believe it, right? But because it's in your own head, you want to believe it. And I don't think you can really silence it entirely, but you just have to be kind of generous towards it and smile. Like yesterday when the girlfriend thing came up, I just kind of laughed. I'm like, well, that's kind of strange that you just did that to me because that girlfriend has nothing to do with me pulling weeds out here on a sunny day with my dog living my best life.

So I don't know why that happened, but I'm going to let that go and get back pulling weeds and I'm not going to dwell on it, you know? And I think to me, that's the way I've come to peace with it. One of the things that helped me was reading The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul, which you recommended to me. So thank you for that. But in that book, she kind of talks about the difference between the message and the response, and it made me recognize that when we receive certain types of messages, we have a default response, but we can actually create the space between the message and the response. We can change the response. So if something happens, the default reaction could be that we're afraid of this thing, and our mind creates a bunch of scenarios where

the worst possible situation is going to manifest in your life if you pursue this course of action. But when you create that space to recognize that the initial thought is probably wrong, like you were just talking about, then you have a chance to flip the narrative. And so that's the way I am trying to deal with this, is to change my response. Not to change how I feel about the thing that's happening, because the thing that's happening could be scary. that could actually be an indication that that's something I should do. I forget which book I picked this up from, but they quoted Derek Sivers, and he said that if something is scary, you should do it.

I'm trying to kind of make that my mantra, because I recognize that I tend to overthink things, and overthinking will naturally lean towards the negative. So when I see something that I am initially afraid of, I ask myself why. And then usually it comes down to, I have all of these answers to the question, well, what if I fail? Or what if I mess up? And that's the fear voice speaking, the pessimist. If I can flip that around and I can lean into the optimist or the faith perspective, the positive versus negative, well, what would actually happen if I succeed? It might actually be really, really good. And it might completely change everything. So I should give it a shot, see what happens. Because the worst case scenario,

if I'm going to really boil that down, none of those things are actually going to happen. But with the positive one, I kind of don't know where that could lead until I take a step out there and see. So I've got work to do again, but this is just something I'm trying to change my self-talk whenever I notice these things,

whenever I notice myself shying away from something because I don't know how this is going to turn out or this seems scary to me. Using that signal as an indication that actually the correct response is, this is what you should go for. Yeah. It's almost like the negative self-talk sends you down a path that you shouldn't go on. It's like in the classic fairy tales, there's, you know, there's a fork in a road and one has a golden road that leads to a castle and the other one goes into a deep, dark forest with thorns and sounds and scariness. And, and the, the self-talk wants you to go down that other path. And like, I don't think the answer is to get angry when it

happens. Like, ah, you know you know, self-talk is making me crazy. Now you just got to kind of smile and be generous and like, you know, okay, crazy Loki, crazy brain Loki, you had your say. Now please sit down and be quiet and let me get back to work. And that is for me the way I deal with it. But that really affects the way I think about all these positive thinking things, which we're going to talk about in a minute, because my distrust in the inner voice has consequences. Privacy is a tool that makes it easy to manage your financial lives online while keeping your most important information secure. By generating virtual numbers, privacy masks your bank information so you never have to worry about giving it out to people that you don't know online. We've all been in that situation where we have to give our credit card number to a site or a person that we just don't really trust. And we always wonder, is my information going to

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Go to privacy.com slash focused and sign up now. Our thanks to Privacy for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, before the break, we were talking about self-talk and how I've come to just try to largely ignore it. Now, there's this whole separate track about self-talk, and it's the power of positive thinking, you know, and the idea that you can lift yourself up by changing the narrative of your self-talk. And I keep going back. Do you remember that Saturday

Night Live skit? I think it was Al Franken who did it, where he would give himself little talks about, you're okay, and things are going to be all right. Do you remember that? Or are you too young for that? I do remember Stuart Smiley. Yeah, Stuart Smiley. I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And gosh, darn it. People like me. Yeah. So I, that to me is the encapsulation of my thoughts toward positive self-talk up until recently, because, uh, I was very early in the game and realizing that my brain is a crazy, uh, Loki brain Loki. Uh, but I was not sold that you could go the opposite direction because to me, because it is crazy Loki, the best thing I can do is ignore it in all varieties. But I'm starting to rethink that. And that's partly because of you.

Well, I don't think, again, that I'm an expert in this area. I think I kind of have a negative initial response to that kind of stuff too. And as we were prepping for this episode, I was kind of forcing myself to figure out why that is. I think it's a couple of things. Number one, I think that if you are constantly thinking negative, you maybe are impacting your situation more than you realize it, but you normalize it because this is what I know. And so any change is scary. I'll just continue with what I know without even thinking how things might be better, could be better,

whatever. But the other aspect of this for me, which is the one that was really interesting to me, is that that voice in your head whenever you would hear it or you hear it on the radio, whatever, the inflections, the cadence, how it sounds, to me, it sounds exactly like Tony Robbins. And Tony Robbins... That's kind of funny. I'm sorry. I got to say, Tony Robbins does some amazing things. He does a whole lot of good. He's helped a whole bunch of people. But he is not my style. And so that's the worst possible situation for me, the real gravelly Tony Robbins voice. You can do it, sort of a thing. I think my inner voice, when i try to go positive is more

stewart smiley which is equally bad yeah and this is the the thing is like that is the the soundtrack and the words of johnny cuff that you've been been listening to but it doesn't have to be the one that you continue to to listen to and i realized as I was thinking about this, that that soundtrack, that voice that I immediately write off because of how it sounds whenever I hear it is a big reason why I have a timid approach to some of these books in the productivity space that probably a lot of our listeners have the same sort of reaction, like, I don't really want to read that one. Some of the ones that come to mind are like the Dale Carnegie one, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Sounds clickbaity, manipulative. That's not for me. I don't want to be a sleazy person like that. Well,

if you actually read it, it's all about serving loving people. It has nothing to do about manipulating them to get your own way. But that's the narrative that I hear in my head because in my head, I'm kind of thinking like, I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be like the probably improper picture of Tony Robbins that I have in my head. That's not what I want Mike Schmitz to be about. Another one that I just started reading is The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. Heard about this book a long time ago, sold 15 million copies, and I've always been like, eh, I don't want to read that because it's going to be that voice

telling me, oh, just say it and you'll change your situation. And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, it's not that easy. It's got to be way more complicated than that. They're forgetting about a whole bunch of things, and I just never even engaged with it because it was packaged in a way that I just had a visceral negative reaction to. Oh, so you're coming in, you weren't necessarily on board with positive thinking either. Not really. I knew the damage that negative self-talk could do, because again, I grew up with this, but I had nothing to replace it with, which is the key here, I think. You can't just say, I don't want to do X. You have to replace that with something completely different. You have to come up with a why. And then once you have that image, then you can start building that or creating that, which actually I think your mind is kind of wired to do very well. And so I'm coming around on this just like you are. But yeah, at the beginning, I recognized that not only do I not like this idea, but I just have, I lumped all of these people in this self-help development space together. And I'm like, yeah, those, those are the crazy people over there. And I just need to stay away from them. Yeah. I mean, it just felt to me like,

I don't know, like snake oil, you know, because again, I have the mindset of I'm always dealing with crazy Loki brain. So, um, why do I want to give any voice in my brain any more power? I've spent so much time just trying to keep him quiet and sitting down. Why do I want to give him a platform? And so that's something that concerned me. You turned me on to this John Acuff book called Soundtracks, which I've read over the last couple of weeks. And he talks about it in terms of overthinking. He says, we all spend too much time overthinking. Like when you need to make a big decision, you'd rather just keep thinking

about it than actually take action, which I think to me is a variety of self-talk, right? It's like we all use overthinking as an excuse to not take action when we should. As a result, we fail to jump on opportunities that we should jump on and life passes us by. I think that's something that all of us struggle with. And so he calls about overthinking. I really think he's talking about negative self-talk. And throughout the book, I mean, at one point he talks about a pocket jury, which is entirely negative self-talk, you know, a judgment inside your brain that, you know, tells you you shouldn't do something. Uh, but his idea is that, look, these, uh, the soundtracks that you have in your brain, like, um, you know, this wasn't one he used, but like a good example that a lot of us can relate to is

when you're told you're not good at art. I mean, when I was a kid, they, I tried to draw a picture and they said, Oh, you're not good at that. You know that you're just not an artist. I remember a teacher telling me that like second grade, and then I never drew again. I'm like, well, if I'm not good at it, then, then so be it, you know? And, um, and I guess I'm kind of mixing metaphors cause that was told to me by someone else. It didn't come from my brain, but my brain quickly jumped on that and said, okay, you're bad at art. You know? So every time I'd want to do some art, um, Loki brain says, Oh, remember you're bad at this. Don't bother. And, um, then I, you know, when I got an iPad, I said, well, let me see how bad I really am at art. And then I got okay at it. So I think that the idea of that negative soundtrack, you're bad at art, can you change that?

I think there's something to that. I mean, rather than just trying to make it quiet so you don't hear it anymore, I guess the premise of his book is you can replace it with a different with a different belief which he calls us different a different track yeah and i really like that that metaphor he kind of talks about the voices that you've been listening to you've added those to your personal playlist and you've listened to those over and over and over again and if you want to change the way you think, if you want to stop overthinking, then the way to do that is to change the tracks that are on your playlist. And I feel

like that's a very powerful analogy. To go back to your point about combining metaphors there, I don't think actually they're too different. With the art example, I have my own experience with that where I never considered myself artistic when I was growing up. And then in middle school or high school, I started taking some drawing lessons from somebody. And in a year or two, I got a lot, lot better. So I actually had evidence that I could draw, but then I didn't draw for a long time. And then my brain jumped on the old narrative of you're not an artist. And when I got back into sketchnoting, I had to overcome a huge mental hurdle because you're not an artist. Your sketchnotes are going to look like garbage compared to somebody else's. It's kind of like the bullet journal stuff. You look at what

other people are doing and you quickly lose the inspiration to try it for yourself. My first sketchnote was a stick figure and a bunch of words, but I continued to do it, and I continued to get better. And so I think just having that in action, that creates the space for your brain to manufacture those negative soundtracks, whether or not they have come initially from somebody else, or they're completely being made up, or you have a body of work to support or refute the evidence, it's still going to manufacture the people on the pocket jury who are going to tell you that you can't. Yeah. And he actually comes up with like a test to determine if a soundtrack is helpful to you. And I like this. This is one of the best nuggets in the book, I thought, was there's three questions you ask about the narrative of the inner voice.

Number one, is the thing it's saying true? And with negative self-talk, so often the test fails right there. Like, it's just light. You're bad at art is a lie. You know, you don't have a lot of experience with art, but that doesn't mean you're bad at art. The second one, is it actually helpful? You know, does it encourage me or discourage me? You know, that kind of thing. Is this talk that is going to make a difference in a positive way or a negative way? If it's only leading toward the negative, then you need to get rid of it. And then the third question is, is the thought kind? And I thought that was the genius step there, right? Because so much of your talk to yourself is not kind. And if you could develop a filter that says, whenever I'm unkind to myself, I need to throw that away. That is not going to help. And even if it's true, if it's unkind, that's not really what you want. And I thought that was one of the best segments of the book and something that I'm still kind of like wrapping my head around. Yeah, I thought that was pretty brilliant, those three questions.

And I think it's not just self-talk. This is a little bit of a tangent. But when I read those, I instantly started asking those to my kids. And the older ones specifically, they can very quickly identify something that their younger siblings did this thing. Was that true? Should you, and these criteria basically for it, should you say something to them? Well, is it true? Yes. Is it helpful? I guess you could argue that it's helpful that yes, they really shouldn't be doing that. But is it kind? That's always the one where they're like, hmm, I guess I shouldn't. And I am doing this myself, too. The is a thought kind, that's the one that really clarifies things for me. It reminded me of one of the Buddhist precepts, which is abstain from false speech.

And that is kind of along these lines. It says do not tell lies or deceive, but it goes kind of beyond that. do not tell lies or deceive. But it goes kind of beyond that. You're not supposed to slander or cause disharmony or enmity or another part of, I was just looking it up, abstain from rude, impolite, or abusive language. Do not indulge in idle talk or gossip. I mean, there's more to this than just being right or wrong. Yep, exactly. There's other criteria to use. And I think that is it helpful? Is it kind? That's really the stuff that was really helpful for me and impactful in actually applying it. Because when you say, is it true? Well, yeah, we know it's true, but that doesn't

mean that it should be said. So there's got to be some other clarifying questions. And these two follow-up questions are very good at that, in my opinion. And it's really interesting to me how the Buddhist precept is about speech. So it's about talking to other people, about communicating. But this should apply to the way you talk to yourself just as much as the way you talk to others. Absolutely. Yep. We are jerks to ourselves. We talk to ourselves. If not even more so.

Yeah, we talk to ourselves way worse than we would ever talk to anybody else. At least I do. Another thing that John Acuff did in the Soundtracks book that I thought was very clever was he talked about the worst boss he ever had and he said he had this boss that like when he would go on trips instead of letting him go back home afterwards required him to go to the office first when he got back from the airport and the boss wanted him to work on holidays and that when when he'd hit a goal the boss would say well how come you didn't do better than the goal and he's just describing this toxic environment with this boss. And then at the end, he's like, oh, and of course, the boss is me. It's me working for myself. I'm the worst boss to myself. And he totally caught me. I actually listened to this

book. I didn't read it. And the way he told the story, he's a good speaker. So he really made it sound like a third party and this i'm thinking man what a jerk i would have quit that job you know he had me he totally suckered me and then at the end he's like oh yeah it was me i was a terrible boss to myself you know and there's so many things about this book that are talking about ways to deal with the world but framing it in terms of dealing with yourself and i i did like the way he kind of walked that line. He got me too with that story because I know a little bit of his background and I know that he was originally part of the Dave Ramsey team. And I was like, is he talking about Dave Ramsey?

I don't sound like Dave Ramsey I know. And he's like, oh, by the way, it was me. Yeah, yeah. Well, so kind of getting back to the idea of positive self-talk, John Acuff is making the argument that rather than turn the volume down on negative self-talk, which is what I have been doing most of my life, that I should try to replace those tracks with other tracks. This is where it kind of falls down for me, this idea, because to me, Crazy Loki Brain is going to be saying stuff forever. I'm never going to stop him, you know, but as I've kind of got this mindset that he's Crazy Loki Brain and he's not going to, he's not telling the truth. And, you know, I just ignore him largely. And I'm sure there are times that he becomes convincing to me, but I think

I've gotten pretty good at ignoring him. I don't think I'm ever going to get him to stand up and say something good, but maybe there's another personality in there that is actually on my side and more kind and patient and compassionate. And I need to work on giving that voice. But I just don't think you can replace negative self-talk with positive talk. I think you can try and focus on better positive talk, but you're always going to have an element of negative self-talk. It's always there. So you're not walking around going, my life is dope? Well, maybe that is something we thought but he said that in there and i've been teasing you with that offline for a week now but the um

he quotes um who's the guy who said this it was um is it kanye kanye yeah and um and i've never been a particular kanye fan i know there's a lot of people like him but you know i'm a jazz fan so i'm i'm not into his music. And some of the things he's done personally, I don't agree with. But apparently at some point, before he was famous, he was in a room and somebody called him up and said, hey, I need you to come do this thing. And he said, I can't right now.

I'm busy. And he ended the call saying something like, my life is dope. And Johnny Koff thought that was just amazing. and he ended the call saying something like, my life is dope, you know? And how Johnny Koff thought that was just amazing and what a great self-talk soundtrack that is to say, you know, my life's amazing, you know? And what if you focused on that instead of thinking that your life is terrible all the time? What kind of wings would you grow

with self-confidence like that? And that's a good question. Yeah, I think there's some truth to that. And the key detail from that story for me was that he's on the phone with this person who wants him to do something and he says, I can't do that. And then they ask why. And his immediate response is, because my life is dope. And his immediate response is, because my life is dope. And that is the thing that speaks to me from that example is we talk a lot about saying no to things and saying yes to other things.

When you say no to things, you have the capacity to say yes to the right things. things. But you can say no a lot easier when you have a motivation for the things that you really want to be doing. When you're just trying to fill some space to find something, then everything looks like a valid option. But when you know this is the picture of my life, and my life is dope, anything that's not dope, I'm not going to do. Yeah. Another point John Acuff makes in this book that I think really resonated with me is that you can't just make up lies and feed it to yourself as positive self-talk. You know? Yeah.

They have to be true, the things you're saying to yourself and like you know i'm this is kind of what was it the the silent life character was a stewart smiley i keep forgetting his name i think so yeah but the um that's why i always thought that was such bs is because you know he just sitting there lying to himself with all these weird statements and it's like it's delusional. And that was kind of my feeling about positive self-talk in general. But the idea of coming up with things, of telling yourself things that you are good at, or I am working to become a good artist. Or you don't have to say I'm a great artist, but you say I'm passionate about art and I'm learning.

I'm an art student, which is true. And I think that is a form of positive self-talk, but it has to be true. And I think you've got to incorporate, if you're going to try this, you've got to be realistic with what you say. You know, the soundtrack doesn't stick if it's a lie. Yeah, that is a very good point. And one of the things that John Acuff says in that book is that you're not just making something up, you're telling the truth in advance. I feel like that's a kind of a cop-out way of describing it. I understand the point he's trying to make, where if you're telling the truth in advance, you really believe that the statement that you

made is true, but it's not true right now, then you're forcing yourself to kind of answer the question, well, if that's going to be true, what changes need to be made? Who do I have to become in order for that statement to become true? But I feel like that's too much of a disconnect for me personally. I do think, though, that one of the things he talks about in this book is the ratio between positive and negative thoughts, going back to something you said about not being able to completely silence that negative voice. I think that's true. But if you're hearing a bunch of positive messages, eventually you're going to start to believe them. And so you keep saying and hearing these positive things, but what is the point where it really switches over

and you've changed your defaults? And he talks about this ideal positivity ratio of three to one. And I've heard this ratio before, but for whatever reason, when I heard it this time, it kind of got me thinking, you know, if I were to tally all of my thoughts for an entire day and define them as either positive or negative, what would the final ratio be? And I think it is less than three to one. And one of the reasons I think that is because of my reaction to this phrase that he used in the book. And I wanted to share this with you and see what your reaction was to this.

Okay. So the phrase is, everything is always working out for me. What do you think about that? He kind of lost me in this section of the book for a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, I have disembodied negative self-talk since I was in high school. By Alan Watts calling it the rebellious organ, I really don't consider it my thoughts. You know what I mean? Sure. As I keep saying through the show, it's like crazy Loki stands up and yells something once in a while,

and I tell him to sit down and shut up, and then I get on with my day. I don't consider that my negative self-talk. I consider it the crazy uncle that lives in my brain. So this just didn't really work for me, this whole section. I don't know if I'm being dismissive, but yeah. I don't know. I mean, I understand your position on this. I do feel that my thoughts are my own, and that's just based off of my Christian religious belief system. And I can change not necessarily what thoughts get manufactured, but which ones I meditate on, which ones I allow to keep playing in my brain. And if I recognize

right away, this is not truthful, not helpful, or not kind, and I dismiss it right away and replace it with something else, that does have an impact on me. But this phrase, everything is always working out for me. When I first heard this, I was kind of like, first heard this, I was kind of like, huh, yeah, right. And then just kind of the position that I found myself in, the next question I forced myself to answer was, why did you react that way? And then I started getting into gratitude. And I mentioned the Norman Vincent Peale book that I read. And I realized that we can focus on the negative things that are going wrong in our lives. And I've been in this place before where there is one thing that is going wrong and I fixate on that and I say, oh, my life is horrible. And then the minute that someone shows me actually this, this,

that, and the other thing are going well, oh yeah, I guess you're right. I guess I don't have it so bad. And I'm kind of wondering, maybe part of this is an indication that I am indeed more negative than I realized. And I've been working the last couple of weeks since I initially started reading this book and started reading some of this other stuff to kind of change. I'm not trying to follow necessarily the system that John Acuff outlines here. It's kind of a hodgepodge of a lot of different things that I've been reading lately. But I am trying to catch myself in the moment whenever I hear those negative soundtracks that say you can't and ask myself, well, what if you can and play a positive version instead? And I feel like that's provided some pretty big wins in recent history.

And maybe this is just me being excited about the shiny new object for me. But I do feel that there's a lot of good that can come from recognizing maybe how negative you tend to be and then doing what you can to become more positive. I do think, you know, I'm not trying to say, well, you need to embrace the negative voice instead of telling it to be quiet. The ideal version is probably somewhere in the middle there for me. I know meditation is one of those things that has been difficult for me to get it to stick. But I don't know. This has really kind of challenged me lately, and I want to throw it out there to the listeners too, because I feel you can kind of locate yourself based on your reaction to things that you hear like that.

All right. I have thoughts on that, but I want to wait because I want to talk about this next thing first. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Timing, the automatic time tracking app for macOS. Go to timingapp.com slash focus and get 10% off your purchase. Let's talk about why you should be tracking your time. For anyone billing their hours, that might seem obvious, but even if you are employed or billing per project, you need to estimate how long a specific task is going to take.

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moving the needle. Time tracking is something everybody should try and timing is my app of choice for doing it. If you want to take control of how you spend your time and improve your productivity, download the free 14-day trial today by going to timingapp.com slash focused and save 10% when you subscribe. That's timingapp.com slash focused to try timing for free and save 10% when you subscribe. And our thanks to the Timing App for their support of the Focus Podcast and RelayFM. We've been dancing around this idea of the pocket jury, which to me in this book is really negative self-talk. And one of the things he focused on was convincing yourself, you know, collecting evidence. And I think it's the reason why he calls it the pocket jury,

because it allows him to kind of make the argument that, like, be a lawyer, you know, get evidence, prove your case to why this negative self-talk is wrong. And this is something that has been also evolving for me, even before I read this book, is that increasingly I find myself writing down my values, beliefs, and thoughts on subjects. And, you know, part of it is kind of the nerd button getting pushed by obsidian and saying, well, what if, you know, I've been trying to do a better job at codifying what I call for lack of a better term, Sparky OS, you know, my operating system, you know, you know, what is the governing values of it? You know, like, you know, compassion is king, stuff like that. You know, what is the stuff that is most important to me? And kind of forcing myself to confront that. And for a lot of my life, I had these ideas floating around my head.

But the process of writing them down and committing to them is something that I think really changes the game. And then when he has this section in here about arguing or collecting evidence for the jury, that really connected with me in this regard. Now, am I taking this book and going off on a tangent or am I onto something here? I think you are onto something, but it's probably possible that you're on a tangent too. And that's kind of the nature of all of these self-help books is there's going to be something in there, if you're really looking for it, that speaks to your situation. And then you take that and you run with that and then you discard everything else. And that one good idea is going to be worthwhile to you. This pocket jury thing

specifically, I remember reading this and thinking about you right away and being like, David's either going to love or hate this section. I'm usually generally against anything related to law. I mean, like, I don't want to watch a movie about a trial. I don't watch TV shows about it. You know, I've lived that stuff and it's just, I can poke too many holes in it. I don't watch TV shows about it. You know, I've lived that stuff and it just, I can poke too many holes in it. Like whenever I watch a TV show, I'm like, oh, that question never would have been admissible. I mean, you know, it's like, I feel like these people don't have enough technical advisors, but just the idea of saying, okay, crazy Loki, you keep saying that I'm bad at art. Let's, um, let's examine that, you know, objectively. You know, I have

taken art classes. I have drawn this art project. I have, you know, or whatever. Or even like, you know, you say I'm great and no good at art, but, you know, I play the saxophone and I can improvise over giant steps. You know, it's like there's a lot of forms of art. It's not just drawing a picture of Mickey Mouse. And so you start collecting evidence to fight against the internal voice, whatever it's telling you, whatever it says you can't do, start collecting evidence to disprove it. And I think that is a trick we should all keep in our tool belt. You know, that's something we should all have available to us. When we find ourselves limited or afraid to try something because the inner voice is telling us that we're no good at it or we shouldn't do it, don't just accept that. And if you have trouble with that, if you have

trouble just saying, sit down and be quiet, I'm going to do this. If you think that that inner voice is having sway with you, why not go to battle with it and do try to find evidence to contradict whatever it's telling you? You can't go to college. Well, let me look at my grades in high school and stuff like that. And I think there's something to it for you. I mean, I had the same thing with law school. My dad made his living loading lumber on a truck. That was his job. And then he ran saws, and eventually he did some sales. But, I mean, he never went to college. My mom never went to college.

Nobody in any generation before my generation, one of my sisters went to as well, went to college. That was like a thing that people in the Sparks family didn't do up until me and my siblings. So it's like you can argue your way around this voice, and I do think there's something to that. One of the ways that this manifests for me is when you say like the art example or music would be another one, anything creative really, the voice will show up and say, you're no good at this. And then if you ask why, it's because the pocket jury has selected a specific data point to compare your work against. And I think there's something very important that you mentioned just now, which was that there are certain ways that your creativity is expressed

that do validate the fact that maybe you are actually a pretty decent musician or a pretty decent artist. And it occurs to me that whenever the pocket jury says, you're no good at this because of X, then you can reframe it as like, well, I am good at it compared to Y. And I think one version of this for me would be, comparison is deadly. Whenever you compare yourself to something somebody else is doing, it's easy to justify the fact that you shouldn't even be trying because you're never going to be able to do it as well as they are. But really, the ideal version for you isn't exactly the same as the thing that you're looking at. You're going to have your own spin on it, first of all, so it's not going to be exactly the same. It's kind of an apples to oranges comparison.

But also, you can compare it not to something somebody else has done, but where you started. Just look at where you began on this journey. Every time I feel discouraged about my sketchnotes, I look at that first one that I did with just the stick figure and some words. I'm like, wow, I've come a long way. I'm going to keep doing this because it's fun and I'm growing. And I feel like for me, that tactic is especially helpful. It's not as much as what you were describing where you can't ever do a thing because nobody else in your family has done this sort of thing. It's always like, well, yeah, you're kind of doing this thing, but you're really bad at it because these other

people are doing it way better than you. And the solution for me is always to, I'm not going to look at what other people are doing. I'm going to look at where I began, and then that creates the motivation to keep going. Yeah, something else you said that I think is a very useful principle when dealing with negative self-talk is sometimes it's true. It is true, but it's not kind. But you're saying you're terrible at this, or you play the saxophone, but you're never going to play as good as Bob Reynolds does. You know, Bob was on our show a year ago. He's an amazing saxophonist. And you go to the negative self-talk and you say, yeah, that that's true low-key brain but i will never

be as good as him but i actually enjoy it and i'm getting better at it you know so sit down and be quiet and i think there's something to that as well you know you can disarm that yep and you know being aware and another thing you said in the earlier segment that that i meant to follow up on that is you know meditation and then i guess should name, change the name of the podcast to like, David tries to convince you to meditate because meditation is like one of the like great weapons against negative self-talk because mindfulness is really about quieting your mind's voice, which we all agree is quite often, you know, a crazy liar. So the practice of meditation actually gives you a lot of tools to deal with that. Makes sense. I wonder, Mike, if your new experiments

with meditation are one of the reasons why you're making progress on this stuff. Could be. I do think there's definitely overlap here. I don't think it's all because of the meditation. I think part of this is just things that I needed to hear at the right time. Yeah. Just the season of my life that I find myself in, this is hitting the mark for me. I'm excited to, every time I crack open one of these books and read about the things that these people have to say. And like I said, a few years ago, I voided these books like the plague. I'm like, that's just a bunch of woo-woo-hooey. I have no interest in

that sort of stuff. So as I kind of get towards the end here, my thoughts on positive self-talk are still a bit confused, to be honest. I have been very successful in a lot of ways of silencing the negative self-talk. As I've explained throughout the show, I've kind of come up with my own kind of framework to tell it to be quiet. And there's a part of me that feels like action. My action is more important than what happens between my ears. A life of meditation and everything has kind of convinced me that the brain is just one more bit of matter. It's not the whole show. So I don't treat it that way. But at the same time, I have been very careful over the second half of my life about the friends I pick and the people I associate with. Like, I only want people around me that look for the best in others. And I tried to model myself on those people. Like know and that is as i think about it it's a form of positive self-talk

right i mean it's true i'm i'm like trying to rewire myself that when i meet someone i want to think of only the best of this person you know to me every person i meet is an amazing person until proven otherwise in contrast to every person is a crook until proven otherwise. You know, I've been doing this gratitude journaling for years now, where I write about something I'm grateful for every day, which is honestly, it's a form of positive self-talk. It's a way of forcing myself to think about things that I'm lucky to have in my life. And so I feel like there's a big overlap going on. And even though I try to be too clever and say that I don't really want the voice in my head

to have a lot of sway, I am doing positive self-talk without acknowledging it. Is this the part where we get to talk about Obsidian? You want to talk about Obsidian? I'm always game for that. I want to go back, though, to one other thing that you mentioned before we get there about the voices that you allow to speak into your life, because that is not self-talk, but it's very much in line with the Soundtracks theme. And it reminds me of these

three questions, which I've shared before, but very appropriate for this topic. Something I picked up from Jim Rohn in The Art of Exceptional Living. Who am I allowing to speak into my life? What effect is that having on me? And is that okay? Giving yourself permission to remove the negative voices because the very important point that you just made is that nothing is neutral. You can't just endure a bunch of this negative stuff and assume that it's not having an impact on you. It is, even if you don't recognize it.

And so I've kind of been taking steps to be as positive as I can and surround myself with people who are speaking positive things. It really is helping, even though it's just minor adjustments that I've made at this point. Yeah, I really want everyone in my life, I want to be able to celebrate their victories. I don't want to be jealous of them doing something I didn't do i want to celebrate every person and i want to cry their tears you know when things bad happen to them i want to be there for them i want to have empathy and feel it for them and help them and i want people around me to feel the same way about me and that is i guess another way that I affect the voice in my head. Because when you surround yourself with people like that,

those thoughts come to you anyway. I'm rambling a little bit here, but I do think this, unsurprisingly, a lot of this stuff is connected. Yeah, now the self-talk part of this and the focusing on the gain, not the gap, seeing the way that you've grown, all that stuff is connected to the journaling stuff that we've talked at length about. that on a regular basis. I know Obsidian is a tool that you're using for that, even if you didn't explicitly call that out just now. But I wanted to make sure I mentioned this because I feel like this has been the surprise benefit of Obsidian for me in that I love using it for disentangling my thoughts. And when I disentangle my thoughts, I see things more clearly

and I am usually a lot less negative at that point. So one of the things that really stuck out to me, I picked this up from Nick Milo when I went through his Linking Your Thinking workshop, is this whole idea of a map of content or an MOC. And I know people don't like that term, but for me, it's just a place to dump things and figure stuff out. The point where I make one of those MOCs or the point where I create a note, basically, where I want to figure out what I think about something is when I experience what Nick calls a mental squeeze point. I just feel this stress and this pressure from not being able to

figure it out. And the point that I dump everything in there, I, number one, feel good verbalizing these things, even though I'm not speaking them out loud. I'm putting them in the note and I'm seeing the text in front of me. And then once I get it out, I immediately feel better. But then also once I see it all together, I usually at that point can see things from a different perspective. It's like the minute that I write it down, I am no longer attached to that angle on the situation. And immediately it boggles my mind how quickly I can start to see it from a different perspective. Yeah. I mean, that's true. And I mentioned earlier, writing it down, codifying it makes all the difference. And you can do that with fancy pens and paper you can do it in a tool like obsidian i've like come to think of obsidian

as like a pensive you know in harry potter there's this thing that dumbledore has where he can pull his thoughts out and he drops them in this bowl and then he can go and examine them from different angles and i remember reading the first time I read the book, I'm like, what an amazing thing. I want my own pensive. I could use that so much, you know, to see where I'm vulnerable or where I'm wrong or where I'm going down the wrong direction, but by examining them and turns out I had one, all I had to do is get a pencil and start writing things down. And I'm doing that in obsidian, but you could do it anywhere. Yes, you can. There's a saying, thoughts disentangle themselves through lips and pencil tips. For me, it's also through clicky

keyboards. But the minute that you write it down, getting back to the negative self-talk stuff, if you take one of those negative thoughts and you write it down, the minute that I write it down, thoughts and you write it down, the minute that I write it down, the minute I can see how stupid it is when it's in my brain. It's like, you know what? He's got a point. I get the same experience through meditation. I've been meditating now for 30 years or 29 years right now. So when a negative thought recurs during a meditation session, rather than dismiss it at this point, I will dissect it and say, well, what is the reason for that? And so often negative thoughts to me are grounded in fear.

I've talked to fellow meditator friends who will say that to them, a lot of them are based in anger, but for me they're often based in fear. I've talked to fellow meditator friends who will say that to them, a lot of them are based in anger, but for me, they're often based in fear. And then when I start pulling it apart and realize, oh, this is the reason why this thought keeps occurring to me. Oh, because I'm just afraid of this or that. And then in my head visually, and I know this is hippie nonsense for a lot of you, but in my head, it i know this is hippie nonsense for a lot of you but in my head it's it's almost like um have you ever seen like when they attack a cell under a microscope and it just kind of like

vaporizes it's like that's what happens to the thought once you understand the basis of it and realize that you know this isn't a real thing it's it's growing out of some fundamental emotion that you have it just vaporizes itself. You don't, you don't have to fight it. You just have to understand it and then it goes away. But that's the goal. I think wrapping up this,

this episode is to vaporize those negative thoughts, the negative self-talk. Yeah. Regardless of the tool that you use to do it, recognize that that is having an impact on you and it is keeping your world and your life smaller than it needs to be. And I think on the flip side, there is something to positive self-talk. And I'm not sure exactly what that means for me yet because I have been dismissive of it so long. I'm just starting to wrap my mind around the idea that

there may be value to it. Maybe someday we'll come back and I'll have better answers, but it's at least worth thinking about. Come back next time when David is repeating his positive affirmations in the bathroom mirror every day. I can't remember what Stuart used to say, but like, you're okay and gosh darn it. Good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.

There you go. All right. We're the Focused podcast. And I hope you're staying focused and not getting hung up on your negative self-talk. You can find us over at relay.fm slash focused. If you want to sign up for Deep Focus, that's the extended version of the show with no ads. You can do that at the same place, relay.fm slash focus. We'd love to have you come on board. Check out those calendars if you haven't already. I'm really happy with the way it came out this year. I said in the prior show, but I got mine mounted and man,

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