Your voice has two roles, one is to communicate with others and the other is to communicate with yourself, these are referred to as your Outer and your Inner voice.
As we acquire language in childhood, we not only learn the words for things, their name, we also learn how to structure our sentences with the words to communicate with others. The next step is to learn the social rules to communication, what to say, when to say it, the impression this will give to the person we are talking too about who we are. There is far more involved in our learning journey for our Outer Voice than my description, however I’m going to move onto our Inner Voice as that’s the meaningful piece about this blog.
Whilst we are on this learning journey our Inner Voice is working away to support us.
The Inner Voice has three jobs;
1) To enable you to follow an instruction
2) To enable you to decide what you think or feel about something for example enabling you to decide if you agree or disagree with something someone is telling you.
3) To tell yourself, what you think about yourself.
The key thing to note here is, we have never had a learning journey with our Inner Voice that was structured like our Outer Voice learning journey, this wasn’t covered. To understand our Inner Voice, we have had to note what other people do, find information out about it as we go and that means we’ve missed out on something amazing, how to make our Inner Voice our friend, our biggest champion!
That is where coaching comes in, there are different angles taken with coaching, depending on the coaches experiences, training and personal style. For me, I’ve very much routed myself around the Inner Voice because of how influential it is to our confidence and self-esteem.
In my corporate life, I’d been on many soft skills courses that touched on the Inner Voice, although I never heard the phase Inner Voice. I learnt about the Inner Voice and how influential it is to our confidence and self-esteem when I started my Psychology degree in my late 20’s.
I recently created the Unhelpful Thinking Challenge and use this with clients to prompt them to think about their mindset and what their Inner Voice is saying, to enable them to use it to lift their mood in positivity.