Words Can Change Your Brain (10 page)

On the other hand, positive self-talk improves attentiveness, autonomy, confidence, and work performance.
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It doesn’t seem to matter what the words are, as long as they are positive, repetitive, and realistic. And you have to use your words to generate a plan. For example, just wishing you’d make a million dollars won’t make you a penny, but if you use positive inner speech to plot out a sound financial plan, you’ll increase your chances of success enormously. The moment self-doubt creeps in, it will sabotage your drive toward achieving your goals and dreams.

Sara White, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and a distinguished leadership and communication coach for the medical community, recommends these steps for turning negative inner speech into positive self-talk. Doing so will help enhance your performance, satisfaction, and professional success.
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• Observe your inner speech and keep a “thought record”
  
• Confront your inner critic and rewrite self-limiting scripts
  
• Replace negative thoughts with positive inner dialogue
  
• Look for the gift and opportunity in every obstacle you meet
  
• Focus on your accomplishments, not your setbacks
  
• Review, reinforce, and practice your new self-talk
  

Obviously, self-talk serves many purposes, but it does have a hitch. It can distract us from paying full attention to what another person is saying. Instead of listening, we’re often unconsciously rehearsing what we want to say next, and whenever our attention is split like this, it interferes with the processes that govern memory, cognition, and social awareness.
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Inner speech takes us out of the present moment. It may be essential for solving difficult problems, but it can distract us from truly listening to other people.

The Voice of Insight

With enough practice, deep awareness of our inner speech can lead to a surprising discovery. A new voice will occasionally appear: the voice of intuition. Often it is preceded by a long period of inner silence. Then a sudden insight may burst into consciousness. In that moment you might get a glimpse of the larger picture.

This kind of intuitional insight is often difficult to put into words, but it
feels
true. It’s the “eureka!” or “aha!” experience that has for eons been associated with creative flashes of insight. This too turns out to be a unique language-driven experience, one that is governed by the right hemisphere of the brain.
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The insula and anterior cingulate, which also govern our feelings of compassion, are stimulated,
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and in these moments of deep awareness gamma-wave oscillations in the brain spike as everyday consciousness falls away.
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Cognitive restructuring takes place, and suddenly the world looks different.
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The feeling may last a second or stay with you throughout life, but anecdotal stories about the experience are surprisingly the same: a new consciousness emerges that allows one to function more fully, more efficiently, and with a deeper sense of personal satisfaction and inner peace.

The Language of Silence: Is It Really Golden?

So far we’ve given a lot of attention to inner speech and thoughts and the effects they have on consciousness and the brain. But what about silence? Does it have any neurological value? Yes. In fact, if you don’t pause for a few seconds between each brief phrase, the listener’s comprehension will decrease.
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The same holds true when you use unfamiliar or technical words; it takes more time for the listener’s brain to process them. Thus you need to speak briefly and then pause, leaving a few seconds of silence at the end of each phrase or sentence.

Great teachers, therapists, actors, and public speakers know the power of a silent pause, and they consciously use it in their work. Salespeople and CEOs do the same, because they know that such pauses create a deeper connection between people. They also know how important it is to let the other person talk: it’s the only way to gain true insight into their desires and needs. Deep listening requires silence, which means we have to train our mind to distance itself from the inner speech it continuously generates.

This raises an interesting question: is it really possible to achieve a true state of inner silence? Yes, but only for brief periods of time. Even if you are placed in a soundproof space, the auditory part of your brain will immediately become activated, and you’ll automatically hear verbal “messages.”
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In other words, the brain is not used to silence because from an evolutionary perspective too much silence can be a sign of danger. When the normal bird and animal sounds in a forest stop, it usually means there’s a predator afoot.

Listening to the Silence between Words

Here’s a little experiment we would like you to try. It’s going to feel very strange at first, but it will help you to hear how busy your mind can be as it thinks up the words it wants you to say. You can do this exercise alone, but it’s far more interesting to find a partner to experiment with.

All you have to do is to say a single sentence aloud. But we want you to pause for one second between each word. Then we want you to say another sentence, but this time leave two seconds between each word. With each additional sentence, pause for an additional second and notice how your inner speech begins to react. I assure you that it will become quite noisy and agitated.

Interestingly, when we conduct this experiment in workshops, the speakers usually feel increased anxiety, but the listeners tend to feel increasing calm. To get a brief sense of this experience right now, read the following sentence aloud, pausing for four or five seconds between each word:

AS     YOU     SPEAK     THIS     SLOWLY,

NOTICE     WHAT     YOU     EXPERIENCE

BETWEEN     EACH     OF     THESE     WORDS.

Read the sentence again out loud, with even longer pauses, and when you come to multisyllable words, say them even slower than you did before. Stretch out each word and pay attention to the sounds of the consonants and vowels. Instead of worrying about what the message is expressing, just take some time to notice the experience
of speaking slowly.

Most people, when they do this exercise, will hear all kinds of inner commentaries in the silences between the words: “This is silly.” “This is weird.” “It’s ridiculous to speak this way.” Sometimes the inner speech slows down, but often it will speed up. It’s as if the mind feels it has to talk fast so that it can fit in everything it thinks it is important to say. People often speak rapidly, and for long periods of time, for fear that if they don’t describe everything in full detail, the other person won’t be able to understand. But if you remember the golden rule of short-term working memory, you’ll know that the other person is only going to remember a very small portion of what you say.

When you speak super slowly, you’ll begin to use the silences to carefully select the next word. You can actually think about what you want to say while you’re saying it. In a matter of minutes, you may even begin to notice that you can communicate a great deal of information with half the words you would normally use.

When doing this experiment with a partner, say only one sentence; then let the other person speak. Continue this slow-paced exchange for at least ten minutes. You’ll find that listening to a person who is speaking slowly is rather enjoyable, and you’ll soon have the sense that you are beginning to understand them with greater accuracy and depth. It’s an incredible experience, so we strongly suggest that you try this exercise with several friends and family members, and then try it with several colleagues at work.

Here’s what happened when Mark first tried this exercise with his wife, several years ago. The first few minutes were spent just getting used to the unusual rate of speech. Then Mark, speaking super slowly, asked Susan a question: “How . . . does . . . this . . . way . . . of . . . speaking . . . feel . . . to . . . you?”

“I . . . like . . . it,” Susan responded just as slowly.

“Why?” asked Mark, after pausing for about five seconds.

“It . . . doesn’t . . . make . . . me . . . nervous.”

Mark slowly responded, “But . . . there’s . . . no . . . emotion . . . in . . . my . . . voice.”

“I . . . know,” said Susan. “When . . . you’re . . . emotional . . . , I . . . sometimes . . . think . . . you’re mad.”

A long pause followed before Mark spoke. “My . . . mind . . . is . . . racing . . . right . . . now.” Another long pause. “Without . . . emotion . . . , my . . . speaking . . . career . . . would . . . end.”

Susan didn’t respond.

Mark listened to his inner thoughts, gradually deciding which would be the most relevant to share. Trusting his intuition, he finally said, “Do . . . you . . . really . . . want . . . me . . . to . . . speak . . . this slowly?”

“Yes!” said Susan without pausing.

“Why?”

“I . . . don’t . . . know . . . I’m . . . just . . . noticing . . . it . . . for . . . the . . . first . . . time,” she replied. “When . . . you . . . speak . . . normally . . . , I . . . get . . . anxious . . . by . . . the . . . amount . . . of . . . emotion . . . in . . . your . . . voice.”

Mark thought a long time about that. It didn’t make much sense, but, then again, if it distanced his wife from him, why not give it a try? “How . . . long . . . do . . . you . . . want . . . me . . . to . . . do . . . this . . . for?” he asked.

“Till . . . Christmas!”

“Five months?” exclaimed Mark, forgetting to pause between his words.

“Yes. . . , five . . . months,” Susan replied with a smile.

All kinds of thoughts raced through Mark’s mind: “Christmas? Five months? No way! Wow! I make my wife anxious? Wow! She never said that to me before. Her problem? My problem?” His mind continued to race, and then it eventually calmed down and turned quiet.

They agreed to continue talking super slowly, and although they didn’t do it for more than one or two weeks, it was one of the most transformative periods in their relationship. That afternoon they talked for four hours about disturbing events that had occurred ten years earlier, and which they’d never been able to address with any mutual satisfaction. Over the next couple of weeks, they continued to resolve one conflict after the other, and they now have a formal agreement to speak very slowly to each other whenever a difficult conversation arises.

Emotions play an important role in the communication process, but when they are presented with too much drama, they can evoke defensive reactions in many listeners. Often we’re not aware of the emotional impact that our speech has on others, and the example given above serves as a reminder that we should always get feedback from others. Ask them what you can do to become a better communicator, and remember that different people will feel comfortable with different styles of interaction. If we want to excel in our conversations with others, we need to realize that every dialogue is a unique experience, and that each dialogue—even with the same person—might require us to adjust our tone of voice and the time we give to speaking and listening to each other.

Furthermore, when conversing with people who may have deep inner wounds brought about from previous interactions, we may need to take even more time and care to ensure that our words do not push hidden buttons that the listener may be unaware of.

As an exercise, practicing slow speech is an excellent way to ensure that we are choosing the best words to convey what we really want to say. And when emotional buttons get pushed, if we consciously slow down our speech and use the warmest tone of voice possible, our words and body language will help the other person to relax. Trust and empathy can be undermined with a single negative expression, but it can be rebuilt if we consciously generate compassion for each other.

Improving the Silence

When you consciously learn how to be a silent observer of your own thoughts and feelings, a different type of silence emerges. In that silence people often have a curious insight. They become aware that they are watching themselves. But then another thought occurs: who is this person who is doing the observing? This “self,” if we can call it that, is different from all the ideas we normally have about who we are, and it tends to be calm, serene, and mostly silent. It watches but doesn’t react. It listens and rarely speaks, but when it does, most people experience it as a form of inner wisdom.

In the silence created by this unique form of awareness, we can improve our ability to make predictions about the future, and this allows us to make better decisions concerning our work and our life.
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According to researchers at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, the observing self “appears to be needed to maintain the conscious state.”
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It’s an interesting paradox: we need to have an observing self to be conscious, but most of us are unconscious of the observing self! Instead we give far more attention to the more superficial self-image of who we think we are. These impressions are filled with our fantasies and judgments about who we want to be and who we fear we might be, but none of these ideas is accurate. When we learn how to use our observing self to watch these other images, we begin to realize that they aren’t necessarily real. They’re just opinions—from ourself and others—that we’ve come to accept over the years. The emerging research on consciousness suggests that the observing self can take a more accurate view of reality. It doesn’t seem to get upset like our normal selves do, and the more we reflect on this deeper form of awareness, the less anxious and depressed we become.
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