Why You Can't Trust Your Own Thoughts

We all have thoughts and they run through our minds all day long. But where do these thoughts come from? And what are they trying to tell us? And how do we stop thinking the thoughts that are holding us back and start thinking the thoughts and actually believing the thoughts that are going to change our lives? So today I'm going to show you why you can't trust your own thoughts. And I mean in a very literal, provable, scientific way. And then I'm going to explain to you in detail the two main reasons why that is. And so by the end of this, you're going to be able to tell the difference between a thought that's actually yours and a thought that comes from somewhere else. Because if you could control your mind and control your thoughts, then you can change the course of your life. So let's get into it. In the 1930s, there was a Russian psychologist named, and I hope I don't mess this up too bad, Lev Vagotsski, and he was studying how children develop their language and how they develop their thinking. And he noticed something that was really interesting. It's obvious if you've ever been around a child, but it's really interesting what he found out is kids talk to themselves out loud. Like, you've seen this if you've been around a four-year-old. They're building something and they narrate what's going on outside of them. He says like, "Okay, well, this this one goes here. No, not this one. This one doesn't go here. Oops, it fell down." Right? And then around six to seven years old, which is right towards the end of what they call identity development, it goes quiet and they stop talking to themselves out loud. And what he found out was that the talking does not stop. It just goes underground. The kid doesn't talk stop talking to themselves. They just stop saying what they're thinking out loud. And then this becomes what we call our inner voice. And his conclusion was your inner speech is internalized social speech, which in basically plain English means the voice inside of your head is other people's voices that you heard out loud over and over and over again until you started saying them internally to yourself silently. So you didn't invent the voice in your head. You didn't invent your thoughts. You actually inherited them. And psychologists are basically in agreement across the board that the voice in your head is primarily the voices of your primary caregivers. Whether that be your parents or your aunt and uncle or your grandparents, whoever were your primary caregivers. And then obviously that's that's the majority of them. But then also there's some extra things in there. There's voices that you heard along the way. Things that your aunt told you or your cousin told you or what a teacher told you after you get out into the world. So it's not just your parents, but it's mostly your parents. And like I'll give you a really quick example of how somebody can develop an identity not just from their parents but from other places as well. So I have a really good friend and he's had body issues since he was a kid. And he was telling me the story last week when he was 8 years old. His cousin told him to put on a shirt and cover up his boobies is what he said. He's like put on a shirt and cover up your big boobies. And my friend since I've known him like a decade now has always struggled with his weight and his body. He's been up and down. He's always want to get healthy. He doesn't get healthy. And what he realized over the past year is he started healing this part of him, this little inner child that's in him, and developing a relationship and trying to heal this part of him that like when he was 8 years old was really really hurt by his cousin who he looked up to saying he had boobies. And so he started healing this part of him and working himself. Now he's got the best relationship he's ever had with his body and over the past year has been the most consistent in taking care of himself that he has been his entire life. And we will be right back. Hey, real quick. If you're someone who sets a goal, gets really fired up for a couple weeks, and then somehow ends up right back with the same habits that you swore that you were done with, this is for you. Listen to me for just a second. It's not because you're lazy. It's not because you don't have enough discipline. It's because you're trying to create a new life with the same identity that you've always had. See, you have to understand, you will always act in alignment with who you believe that you are. So if deep down you see yourself as somebody who quits, someone who never follows through, someone who always falls back into the same old patterns, then you will keep proving that story true over and over again. And until you change that old identity underneath it, nothing will change. That's why on August 27th, I'm hosting a completely free live workshop where I'm going to show you how to identify the patterns that have been controlling your decisions without you even realizing it. how to break those patterns and then how to shift your identity so that the actions that you want to take finally match the life that you say that you want. So, if you're ready for change and you don't want to stay the old version of you, go to 2026workshop.com right now or scan the QR code that's right here to save your free spot for August 27th. So, go ahead, save your seat and I'll see you there. And now, back to the show. And so I'm just using as an example to show you it doesn't always have to come from your parents. It can come from moments in your life of things that happen as you get older. And so the reason why this is really understand and it's really important to me is because number one, like I coach people. I've been coaching people for over 20 years. Number two is because I actually have a son and every single thing that I say to him in the tone that I say it is not just me saying it to him today. It's installing a voice that he's going to hear in his head when he's 40 years old. and I'm not in the room anymore. So when he drops something and I say, "Hey, it's okay, buddy. No big deal." Like that's that's one voice, right? If he were to drop something though and I was like, "Oh, you're so clumsy." That's not the voice that I want in his head. It's the same thing. He dropped something. What is the voice I'm trying to install in his head? Literally, right before I started this podcast episode, true story, I was downstairs. He was playing with a puzzle and he goes, "Dad, I can't do it." And I was like, "You can do it." And he said,"I can't do it." And I was like, "Can I help you and show you how to do it?" And he's like, "Yes." And then I was like, "First off, I want you to say,"I can do it." And he said, "I can do it." And I said, "Okay, go ahead and hold on to it. Do you want to place it here and put it in?" And then he got it the little tiny puzzle done. And I said, "You did it." And he goes, "I did it." And I was like, "Give me five." He gave me five. And I go, "Do you want to try it again?" He goes, "Yeah, I want to try it again." And I go, "Okay, go ahead." And this time I didn't help him. And he did it himself. And I said, "You did it?" He said, "I did it." And I said, "Say, I can do it." And he said, "I can do it." And it's like these little tiny things. I don't want him to have a voice in his head when he's 27 years old and he's trying to build a business and he's like, "I can't do it." I wonder how this voice is feeling in the back of his head. Like, I can do it. Right? So, I understand I'm not just raising a child. I'm raising an adult. I'm raising the adult that I want him to be. And so, we think all of our thoughts are ours, but the majority of the time they're actually just recordings of other people's words. We think they're ours, but most of the time they're actually not. And so like let me give you two examples and see if either one lands. Okay. Let's say you grew up in a house where money was tight and you heard the same handful of sentences a thousand times. We can't afford that. Money doesn't grow on trees. It must be nice. Rich people are so greedy. Whatever it was, nobody sat you down and said, "This is the psychology and the philosophy of money." But you were just around conversations. And maybe nobody even said it directly to you, but you just absorbed the conversation every time money came up. Now, you fast forward 30 years and you might be like 38 years old and an opportunity shows up. Maybe it's starting a business. Maybe it's a great investment that's in front of you. Maybe you just want to raise your prices for the photos that you do. And this thought pops up in your head. Ah, that's that's too risky. I might as well I should protect it. Right? And here's the part that I need you to get. That thought does not feel like your mom's thought or your dad's thought from childhood. It feels like your thought based off of years of life and wisdom. It feels like the smart, mature, responsible part that's protecting you. But it's not a wise thought based in data most of the time. It's you replaying the conversations your parents had about money, but now you're doing it in present day in your own voice, and you think it's you. So now you're 38 years old and you're making a decision about your future, an important decision about your future using software that was installed in you when you were 8 years old and you had no idea it was being installed. Right? So that's an example. Another example that I'll give you and and this one, you know, might actually hit harder for a lot of you. Imagine that you're 6 years old and you're sitting on the bathroom floor and you're playing with toys while your mom's getting ready and she's standing in front of the mirror and she grabs her stomach and she just says, "God, I look disgusting." Right? How many of us have heard people say this about themselves before? Now, she wasn't talking to you. She was never talking to you. She probably thought that it was just a private moment. She was just talking to herself, but you were sitting right there. And your brain was doing what a six-year-old brain does, which is to learn the rules of being a human by watching a human. And you learned that day, like the rule that you learned that day was this is what you do when you look in the mirror. You inspect. You find the flaw. You speak to yourself with disgust. And so now you're in your 40s and you catch yourself in a mirror and a thought shows up and the thought is cruel and you think that thought is you and you think like, "Oh, the thought was I I don't like my body." Okay, maybe. But maybe you're also running your mother's mirror routine. This time it's in your own voice, though. And that's the part that makes it invisible, right? like the thought got dubbed over. So it's like it's [laughter] like if I can give an example, it's like watching a movie that was filmed in another language, but somebody dubbed your voice in it. Like your voice was dubbed in it. So you assume that you wrote the script. You didn't write the script. You just took your mom's script and you just did it in your voice. So like I hear stuff like this all the time when I coach people. Oh, like I don't really really like hate my body, Rob, but I don't know why I'm so mean to myself when I look in the mirror or when I see photos of myself. They're like, I don't hate myself, but I don't know why I'm so mean to myself. Uh, you're probably doing what you learned. So, because you didn't really inherit just like what to think, you inherited how to think. And you also inherited the tone of the way that you speak to yourself. You know, whether the voice in your head is a coach and it's like, hey, you know, okay, no problem. let's fix it. Or the other voice in your head could be like, "Of course you did. You always do this. You're so dumb." Right? Both of those is like, "You made a mistake." One of them is like, "No problem. Let's fix it." The other one's like, "Of course you did. You always do this." Those two people, depending on what conversation is happening in their head, are eventually going to live two completely different lives. And the crazy part about that is that neither one of them chose it. So that's where your thoughts can come from. Let's talk about where else your thoughts are going to come from. And this one will probably surprise you. You've probably heard some of the stuff of inheriting thoughts and all of that, but there's another thing that's besides the inheriting thoughts. A large percentage of your thoughts on a day-to-day basis are not replay of the past. They're actually a readout of your body. So, in 2011, there was a study published on in Israeli parole judges. And researchers looked over at over a thousand different parole decisions. So, not a small amount, a thousand parole decisions. And these trained, experienced judges making decisions about another human's freedom. What they found was that at the beginning of a session, like they sit down, they have their coffee, it's 9:00 a.m., whatever it is, the judges granted parole about 65% of the time. But as the session went on and they got hungrier and more depleted, the number dropped all the way down to almost zero right before a food break. So the wor basically the worst time to try to get parole from a judge after judging a thousand different judgments is right before lunch. It dropped to almost zero. Then they would eat and they would come back to lunch from lunch. And you know what would happen? It would jump right back to around 65% again. Same judge, same crimes, same law, different blood sugar. Now here's what I want you to like really sit with when you hear this. Do you think that that judge at hour four felt like a hungry person making a biased decision? No. They felt like a careful judge being appropriately cautious. Oh, they thought they made a fair decision, but it was actually their blood sugar that was speaking. So, that's one thing to think about. Their body is changing the way that they think, the way that they feel, and the way they act. Another thing, sleep. Researchers at Harvard and Berkeley took people, kept them awake for one entire night, and then put them up to brain scanners and showed them upsetting images. The sleepdeprived brains, showed about 60% more reactivity in the amygdala, which is your brain's threat and fear center. And on top of that, the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that provides perspective and calms things down and makes executive decisions. that connection between the two of them got weaker. So, one bad night of sleep and you have a louder alarm, like emergency alarm, your amydala screaming at you, and a weaker regulator. So, which means that, you know, you could get like a a text message from your spouse on a Tuesday, just a normal Tuesday, and it's like, oh, no big deal. Everything's okay. But you could get the exact same one after a bad night of sleep and it can feel like a crisis the next day. The truth is, you know, on Wednesday when you think that it's a crisis, you don't think I'm tired. You think something is wrong in my marriage. But that's how convincing this is. It it feels like it's actually logic, but the logic is not there. So, here's what you need to understand. Your thoughts feel like they're about your life, but a lot of times they're just about what's going on in your body, in your bloodstream as well. Like, I'll give you a great example. A couple weeks ago, it was like 6:30 p.m. I had a long day and I just felt like, if I'm being transparent, like Like, I just felt over it. I felt like I was just over everything. I was like over business. I was over like setting goals, making plans. Like, I was just over life. And I just like I felt like a droopy little boy, right? Like [snorts] I just felt like a sad little And I paused for a second and I was like, "What's going on?" Like this isn't my normal thinking. I can tell that this is not how I normally think. I feel like I'm very droopy, right? Like Eeyore or something like that. And after a few minutes of thinking, I realized, "Oh my god, it's like 6:30. I haven't eaten since 8:00 a.m. So, I just had low blood sugar. So I was like, "Okay, let me eat something really healthy, really hearty, and let's see how I feel." An hour later, felt normal. So sometimes what feels like anxiety, what feels like sadness, what feels like depression can actually just be us needing to take better care of our body. Okay, so what do we do with all this? Let's actually put some process to this thing. Okay, let me give you a four-step process of how to work through this. Number one, check with your body before you believe your mind. Always start there, right? There's an acronym and it's halt. H A L T. Am I hungry? Am I angry? Am I lonely? Am I tired? There's estimates that are around between 60 to 70% of stress and anxiety comes from one of the four of those. And if you have multiple of them, you're going to be way worse. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired, halt. So ask yourself some questions. When did I eat last? How did I sleep? When did I last move my body? Do I feel isolated right now? And don't make any decisions in your relationship or your career or your life when you're in a low state. Eat, sleep, move, come back and see if it makes you feel better. That's the first thing. Second thing, as you do that, you've worked through that, like if the thought survive step one, then we need to see if we can figure out where it came from and see if it's ours, right? So, don't argue with it. Just get curious about it. Don't shame yourself. Get curious. Whose voice is this? And just notice a lot of you are going to get the answer immediately and there's going to be this feeling of this voice in your head being similar to somebody that you know. A name might show up or a memory could pop up. That's not a coincidence. You just found the source. And so if no name comes up, just ask it in a different way. Okay, with this thought, when I think this thought, how old do I feel when I think this? Because thoughts have an age. So, say you get into like an argument with a co-orker, right? Like something I hear from people all the time is like they get in an argument with someone and they're like, "Oh, she speaks to me like I'm a child." Okay, ask yourself, "When in my childhood does this remind me of?" Because that thought is most likely not from today. It's probably that whoever spoke to you like that, that co-orker triggered something inside of you that reminded you of somebody who spoke to you like that in your childhood. So, you're not reacting to a coworker. you're reacting to a wound that was never healed in childhood. Okay, that's the second thing. Identify that. The third thing is keep the content. Throw out the tone. This is a step that a lot of people skip and it really helps. Sometimes the content of the thought is actually fine, but the tone of the thought is the problem, right? So, you could say something like, "I could have handled that better." Okay, maybe that's true. But listen to how it got said. What's the tone behind it? If I say something like, "You could have handled that better." I say it sweetly. Or is it like, "You could have handled that better, dumbass." Right? Like scoldingly. So, it's the same thing besides a dumbass. It's the same thing, but you have to find out what the tone behind it is. You know, would you say that tone, that exact same thing, the exact same tone to someone that you love? If the answer is no, then that tone is not information. It's inherited, right? So, take the useful part and just delete all the rest of it. I could have done better. I'll do better next time. Cool. Zero cruelty. Same amount of information. Okay. Check the tone. And then the fourth thing is overwrite it out loud over and over and over and over and over again. This is where most people stop. They get a thought and they're like, "Wow, that was my dad." And they feel enlightened for about 4 minutes and then nothing changes. You have to understand that voice didn't get there because it was true. It got there because you heard it and then you repeated it 5,000 times over the past 30 years. Repetition is what makes it feel like reality. So the only way out is the same way in. Pick the sentence that you actually want in your head. Say it deliberately at the exact moment that the old one shows up. And you don't say it just like once in the mirror. You say it every single time that the old one fires. You're not affirming it into yourself. You're overwriting an old software. And it's going to feel fake for a while. That's fine. That's how you know you found the right thing to say is it does feel fake. It feels like a lie. It feels like it's untrue. It feels like nothing because it's the first time that you've heard it and the old one feels more real. So the only way to install the new voice is the same way the old voice got hardwired, which is through repetition. And so here's what I want you to write down today. One question, and it's this. What thought have I believed my entire life that I've never traced back to where I came from? And try to see if you can start finding it. Something like, oh, I'm not a math person. Really? Is that so? math is pretty much mostly just memorization. Or is it because your teacher when you were younger told you that? Or you had one bad semester in math when you were 9 years old and you've been organizing your entire relationship with math and your intelligence ever since you heard that thing. Or you're like, I'm just bad with money. Really? Is that a fact or is that just something that you heard someday or you heard somebody say in your family at a kitchen table when you were seven? Or you say something like, oh, I'm too much. Really? Or is it just that when you were younger, someone told you to calm down or that you were too loud or you were too emotional, you were too too sensitive? And so I want you to understand, find out the voice where it came from because what happens is you build an entire personality around what people have told you and what you've noticed around yourself and you find out what the actual thought is that you've been believing and see like, hey, maybe I should try to figure out where it came from. And then don't try to fix it immediately. Just sit with it. Think about it. Because you've been listening to a voice your entire life, assuming it was you, but you've never actually traced back to where it's coming from. So, now that you're an adult, maybe you should decide what thoughts you want to think instead of thoughts that were just programmed into you when you didn't know what's going on. Hey, thanks so much for watching today's video. 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