I recommend reflecting on your experience with this chapter’s exercise before continuing. You can reflect about anything you found relevant, but here are some questions you may want to consider:

1. Did you notice any trends in your inner monologue?
   Did you notice common thoughts?
   How do you think your thoughts compared to others’?
   Where and how might you apply your experience in the rest of your life?

Data from Exercises 

Awareness of our inner monologue liberates us from it unconsciously controlling us and enables us to use it to improve our lives.
From Your Senses to Your Thoughts This exercise shifts our attention from our senses to our inner monologue (people also call it self-talk, mental chatter, inner voice, voice of judgment, and so on). People tend not to notice theirs despite its presence nearly every waking moment, like fish not knowing they’re in water.
This exercise makes us aware of it. Future exercises will develop skills to use it, which we’ll see as critical in leading others and ourselves, but we’ll start with awareness.
Our inner monologue chatters incessantly, but we rarely pay attention to it. Many of us have never noticed it consciously. When we do, we can learn a lot. This exercise reveals more about it more effectively than any other technique I know. I learned it from one of my leadership professors, Srikumar Rao, and his book, Are You Ready To Succeed?.
You may notice some things about it already. It uses regular language, unlike some mental activity. One part of your mind thinks it while a different part observes it. It takes cues from your environment but can jump on its own from topic to topic. It often evaluates and judges.
Comparing your inner monologue with how you might answer “What are you thinking?” helps clarify it. A typical answer like “I’m thinking about what to eat” is what you’re thinking about rather than what you’re thinking.
Your inner monologue is what you’re thinking at the word level. It goes more like this:
I’m hungry. . . . wonder what I’ll eat. Is it 12:30 yet? Oh no, it’s only noon, it’s too early to eat now . . . but I’m hungry. . . . Man, I’ve been eating too much lately . . . If I make it another half hour I’ll be good.
I’m so bad at controlling my diet. . . . I’d better work out after work today . . . That’ll be good, I’ll work out . . . Then I can eat early. What time is it now . . . ?
Like breathing, you can consciously control it, but if you don’t, it will run on its own. Unlike breathing, your unchecked inner monologue may go all over the place with no prompting.

What to Do

1. Carry a notebook or paper and something to write with every day during the exercise. (You can use your phone, tablet, or computer if you’re more used to it.)

2. A few times each day, write the words of your inner monologue as best you can, a few lines each time. What you write will look like the examples in this chapter.
Each time you write will probably take about a minute. Do the exercise until you write a few dozen passages (more is fine), taking maybe an hour cumulatively. I recommend doing it at least for several days so that you record your thoughts in different situations—at work, at home, alone, with people, feeling different emotions, and so on—to see how your inner monologue changes with context.
Record your thoughs without judgment. You will likely find not judging hard, but the goal is to raise awareness, which judgment clouds. If you find your thoughts putting someone down, making yourself feel good or bad, distracting you, or anything else you like or don’t like, just write the words in your monologue. Later exercises will work on meaning.