Mike (00:12.974)
So I was driving yesterday and I came to this realization that there are, we don't, we people don't need to have this inner dialogue in our head, particularly where we are having a conversation with somebody else in our head. It's been a while since I did that, but it happened yesterday. And I remember I was driving.
And everything was fine until I started to think about, you know, what I'm going to say and what this person is going to say. And, uh, is, uh, you know, this is on one of the, one of the business meetings that I actually had to be honest, I had it this morning, but I was thinking about it yesterday. And I came to the realization that it's absolutely completely useless.
to have conversations in our head about where we are playing both sides.
mike (01:28.334)
You know, and, and I want to talk about that today because it's not only is it useless. I mean, it's actually, it actually creates so much problem because I was driving, I was feeling fine. And before I know it, I'm sitting there and I'm like, I feel a little frustrated. I feel upset. And I'm thinking I'm driving. I'm going, what just happened? I was just fine literally a few minutes ago. And then suddenly I'm driving, everything is fine. Nothing's changed except for the fact that now I feel a little frustrated and upset as if.
Stephen (01:29.889)
Hmm.
mike (01:57.326)
This person is trying to attack me or doing this, but nothing actually happened. This was just some dialogue in my mind. And I remember I focused on breathing. I came back to the present moment. I let it go, let it go. And then finally, when I'm feeling back to normal, I'm feeling good. I was like, what just, what did I just do there? You know? And I remember I used to do this all the time. All the time.
It's, it's, it's nuts. You ever, this is something that, that happens for you, Steven?
Stephen (02:24.835)
Hmm.
Stephen (02:33.891)
I mean, it happens quite a bit. I mean, especially those that, you know, you surround yourself with, especially with my partner, that happens a lot. Especially with, with brothers or relatives and things like that. You know, I can totally see it in terms of, you know, when colleagues for people. And, you know, it's, it's just one of those things where it's like, it's, it almost...
I don't know if it's a societal thing, but for sure, pretty much everybody, it happens to everybody. And kind of like what you were saying, I didn't even know it was going on when I was younger.
mike (03:16.942)
Just to clarify, just to clarify, what you're saying is like you would, let's say like with your partner, like you would act like her and you will say like, she will say this, da da da da da, and then you will say this, da da da da.
Stephen (03:32.099)
Yeah, so, yeah, so in like, I just, let's say I'm working and then something pops up, I think about her about a certain situation. Now it's like me speaking to her, she's saying something back and then me reacting and responding back to that. And then as I'm sitting here looking into this space of nothingness, this whole story is getting built. She has no idea in real life.
but especially if it's like a hot topic, now I'm getting frustrated. So when I finally go to her, I'm already pent up or at least, you know, I'm already feeling a bit frustrated before even chatting with her. And the thing, and the reason why I'm so okay with talking about this is because I know almost everybody does the same thing.
And this essentially in Buddhism as well is this is the aspect of Maya that is talked about. It's a perception illusion essentially because we have all these filters and stories inside of us that doesn't really match reality. And it seems like you just had one of those cases for yourself yesterday that you picked up on.
mike (04:51.918)
And it's been so long now because this used to happen to me all the time, all the time, all the time. And there has been a really long stretch where this doesn't happen. Like I can, like probably in like one year it's maybe happened, I don't know, 10 times, you know? It's like, it doesn't, it doesn't happen. Like when it happened, it was strange. It was like, whoa, what? This is happening. Wait. And then I started to feel it and I go, wait, this is not.
Stephen (05:12.951)
Hmm.
mike (05:21.838)
This is, this is not something I do. Like it was, it was, but it used to be an everyday all day long thing. But this is different. I think before we may look at it and go, well, this is just about being present and not constantly thinking. But this is not just thinking. You know, it's not just thinking because we can sit there and think.
Stephen (05:27.331)
Okay.
mike (05:51.31)
about, think about an idea, think about an outcome, the details of this outcome, what needs to happen, and what will happen when this happens, and then the effect of that, and the effect of that, and the effect of that, and what pieces need to, like we can think about those things. But what we're talking about here is when somebody is,
having a conversation with somebody else in their own head.
that I say this and that he says this or she says this, that, that is different than just using our mind. And...
Stephen (06:28.003)
Hmm.
mike (06:37.518)
That I think is not only just completely useless, but it actually creates so much mental and emotional turmoil. So much mental, emotional suffering. Cause we know it's not happening, but because we are experiencing this event in our mind, we feel it in our body as if it happened.
Stephen (06:54.883)
Mm.
mike (07:07.758)
And then when we actually have the conversation, you know, the meeting, when we actually do the dialogue, we aren't going there fresh. You know, we're going there with already having five dialogues about this in our mind, 10 dialogues for some people, even more. So it's like, we've been, you know, that feeling where you're like banging your head against the wall inside your mind because you can't seem to get through.
Stephen (07:10.187)
Mm.
Stephen (07:30.179)
Thank you.
mike (07:36.782)
That's the funniest you ever had that happen where you're in your mind and it's like, you're like, Oh, I can't get through to you. Why can't you like, you're almost like, like you're literally feeling stuck in your mind and then you don't know what to say to this person. And then this person responds back with this resistance. It's, it's completely, it's completely nuts, but yet this was, this is exactly what happens to, to people's minds and exactly how my mind was before.
Stephen (07:39.425)
Hmm.
Stephen (07:55.971)
Hmm.
mike (08:10.542)
I want to talk about the intentions. I think, I think a lot of people, you know, when they think about this, they're like, okay, well, I can see that, but what else can I do? You know, because I'm not purposely trying to create any issues. It's just that I want, I want to figure out this thing. That's why I'm having this dialogue. You know, I want to make sure I'm prepared for this conversation. I want to know that if I say this and they respond with A.
I know what to respond. And they respond with B, I know what to respond. And they respond with C and so forth. Right? So therefore I want to be prepared. That's why I'm having this dialogue. It's not just for fun.
But if we think about it, like how many alternate responses could a person have? Now, sometimes we go, well, we can come up with as many as we can come up with. But is that, does that mean we're actually covering all the responses? Now, imagine, can you imagine like in the, in our head, we go through, we think that there is 10 possible responses and then we go through 10 variations of dialogue.
And every dialogue is like back and forth, man. Even if we, even if we prepared and now we know what to respond to 10 responses, the amount of energy and attention it took to practice that outcome. Even if we were to say that we are 90 % chance that there's that it's going to be one of those outcomes.
Stephen (09:25.259)
Hmm.
Stephen (09:31.235)
Hmm.
Stephen (09:35.619)
Hmm.
mike (09:51.118)
We invest so much time and energy and I think we have to ask is it even, is it even worth it? Because we feel a lot of times we could feel pretty frustrated. We can feel like upset and we haven't even had the real event happen. We just feel a little frustrated because it's mentally, it's mentally draining to, to run through, you know, 10 different scenarios of conversation.
Stephen (09:56.247)
Hmm.
Stephen (10:07.011)
Mm.
mike (10:19.406)
in our mind of what we're going to say. Right. And you know how our mind goes. We're usually just coming up with, well, what happened? They say this and really extreme this. And now how am I going to be able to overcome this really difficult response? What happened? They asked me this, what can I really say? And we're saying they're feeling stuck when in reality, this has never even happened. We, our mind made it up. And then now our mind feels stuck because we don't know how to answer it.
Stephen (10:22.049)
Hmm.
mike (10:46.414)
Yeah, it's completely nuts.
Stephen (10:46.711)
Hmm.
Stephen (10:50.947)
I remember when I was a teenager in my late teens, you know, I started picking up some of those books about picking up women and that there was a lot of that going on, which is just like, if she says this, then you can say that. And then and then there's just like whole paragraphs and whole storylines of things that you can say based on what they say. And after a while, I was just like, man, this is absolutely crazy insane.
mike (11:19.246)
Did you memorize the paragraphs?
Stephen (11:21.315)
And I remember there was that one side, essentially, knowing that dialogue, but then there was another side, which is essentially just shifting your state.
And, you know, essentially if you just shifted your state from, let's say like a nervousness or like this, this in, in your scenario, more frustratedness and change it into more of a calm, relaxed state. Now, all of a sudden, essentially almost have more access. You don't need all that dial. You don't need to know all that dialogue. It almost just feels like.
The, when you're more calm and centered, you can walk into that scenario just feeling more confident, more calm, and essentially feel like the outcome that you're looking for essentially has a much bigger probability of happening because of that.
mike (12:28.302)
So in other words, you know what to say. You'll know what to say in the moment. Don't need a planet because you just jumble up the words.
Stephen (12:34.945)
Hmm.
Stephen (12:39.201)
Hmm.
mike (12:41.55)
I think a lot of times this, um, I think this happens when some, when we are, when we are in our head planning out what to say in this situation, when we're having these inner dialogues and these conversations and we're trying to remember when they respond this way, I'm going to say it this way. So we're not even present in the real life conversation because they're trying to go back into a, a scenario in our head. So we're not fully present with what is being said. It's almost like we are.
Stephen (13:02.593)
Hmm.
mike (13:11.022)
selecting, we're selecting at this moment, which, you know, which line can I drop in? So we're not fully present with what a person is saying. We're not fully present with how this person is feeling. And we can't really, we can't respond well because we don't see everything. We're just partially here and partially in the background, just seeing which, you know, which line, which thing we can say. And.
Stephen (13:21.569)
Mmm.
Stephen (13:32.161)
Mm.
mike (13:40.014)
Even if we found the line, it doesn't come out very genuine. When a person is listening to us, they may feel like, Hey, um, I don't think you really heard me because we didn't. We just picked up on certain cues that stood out and we go, yep, this response would be really good versus actually listening to a person saying and responding to what they say versus responding to what we.
Think is the best response.
Stephen (14:14.115)
Hmm. You know, it's so funny. This reminds me of like the political landscape right now that's going on. You know, you don't follow too much, but sometimes I'm on YouTube. I'm looking at all this crazy protest going on. And essentially it's like this person says something and all of a sudden out of nowhere, it's like, no, you're being racist. And there's nothing about race talks about at all, but they just had all this preplans.
kind of speech or reaction that they're ready to spill. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's essentially this on steroids.
mike (15:01.344)
So.
By all means, we gotta cut out the inner dialogue.
And instead of focusing on what we would say and what a person will say, we need to focus on what the outcome that we want to happen. And we can focus on the effects of that. We're still using our mind. This isn't just about being present or not present. We can be in our mind, which means we're not present in real life here and not fully, but we can be in our mind.
analyzing outcomes. When this happens, this will happen and this will happen and this will happen. And these outcomes are what we want, not what we don't want. We need to focus on what we want and make sure we're clear on that. And then we can focus on, hey, if things don't work out, this will happen. And with this will happen, what can I do to steer it towards what I want?
So now we can use our mind to, to help us get clear on what's happening and to still create the best possible, best possible scenario. Because that was really the point of why we would even have all the inner dialogue anyways. We're just trying to create the best scenario for our life. We're just trying to be mentally prepared. But instead of spending time on that and energy on that and just creating a lot of sabotage for ourselves, focus our energy, focus our, our attention on.
mike (16:38.126)
what the actual outcome is. Like if I'm talking to Natalia and, and I want her to, I want her to start doing this thing and I think it's going to be great and all this stuff, instead of focusing on, I'm going to present it this way, she's going to say this and I'm going to say this and go back and forth. Instead, just focus on, okay, so now I want her to do this. So now when this thing happens, what's going to happen from there? What's the effect?
And then this thing's going to happen and this thing is going to happen and this thing is going to happen. Right. How can she do this thing? She can do it this way by doing it this, this, this, this. So then you see it just, just focusing on all everything that I want to happen. The steps to how to get there. If I know it, right. Focusing on the steps, focusing all of this and not giving any attention to the dialogue part. Because essentially the dialogue part is.
Stephen (17:15.043)
Hmm.
mike (17:37.582)
The only time we even think about that is when we have doubt of what we want to happen will happen. So then we think about what we need to do to convince the other person to do what we want to do. That's what the dialogue is really about.
Stephen (17:44.961)
Mm.
mike (18:00.238)
So that in itself, the moment we even start the dialogue, what we're saying is that we're focusing on them saying no. We're focusing on a person causing resistance for us. That's what we are putting out there in the universe. That's what we're focusing on, the resistance that we're going to run into. And because we focus on that through this dialogue in our mind, we create this resistance in our everyday life.
Stephen (18:23.767)
Hmm.
mike (18:31.598)
because that becomes the filter in which we see our life. So then when we have this conversation with somebody, we've already played all of these scenarios in our head about the resistance and about how they're going to not listen to us, how they're going to come back with this and that. We're already play those scenarios. So when we're having the conversation, we're literally looking for when someone says that we're looking for when they're going to go and show us the resistance, just like how we played it out in our mind.
And that just creates that. That just creates the resistance. That just creates the obstacles. You see, so that our inner dialogue actually is the one that's creating all the problems, creating all the resistance of us getting what we really want.
Stephen (19:04.995)
Hmm.
mike (19:19.618)
What's it absolutely makes no sense. It's completely useless. And if we really want to go and prepare for a conversation, we want to go make the best possible outcome happen. Let's focus on the specific thing we want to happen. All the moving pieces it takes to go and make that thing happen. How we're going to make that happen. What's going to happen. All right. All of that and give no attention or time to the possibility that a person's going to stop us.
Not because that may not happen. It could happen, but I'm not going to be promoting it. If it happens, it happens. You know what I mean? It's like, we actually, we actually promote those things that we don't want because we create the freaking, the conversations in our head. It's literally when you, when we take a step back and think about what we actually do as people with these dialogues, it's completely insane.
Stephen (19:58.563)
I'm sorry.
mike (20:14.414)
And people just don't realize it. They think it's normal, everybody's doing it, but they don't realize what they're doing. They're creating all the resistance of everything they want.
Stephen (20:23.809)
Mmm.
mike (20:26.382)
So I'm really glad I had that. I came up to I came to this realization as I was driving because I.
Stephen (20:26.403)
Mm.
mike (20:33.518)
And this is something that's happening all the time. This used to happen every day for me. This was my normal life. And since it hasn't happened, I haven't thought about it until, until yesterday. Oh, and guess what? That conversation I had today in that, in that meeting earlier, all those scenarios I played out, I played out scenarios for about five minutes in my head and it felt really frustrated last night. And then I let it go. Today, the meeting, nothing.
None of that even played out. It was total opposite to what I thought. It was received entirely different.
It was just a waste of time yesterday. A completely energetic drain. And luckily it wasn't that long. It didn't even happen. It was just, I was, I was, this is what we call overthinking, but I want to be specific because we can think about what we want and all the ways of getting it and all the details. But what I want to be specific on is these useless inner dialogue conversations. We got to cut those out.
Stephen (21:14.467)
Not just time, but just energy.
Stephen (21:46.787)
So hopefully that helped you guys. That promotion part, that was hilarious. Hopefully that was as beneficial for you as it was for me. And we will see you on the next episode.
mike (22:10.894)
Yeah, it's a little cleaner, right?
Stephen (22:16.043)
Yeah.
