The Mindset to Master in Your Twenties
The Power of Your Internal Dialogue
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I’d never understood the power of storytelling until I took a look at what was going on in my own life. I remember waking up one morning and being in a bad mood. Something about the morning meant I hated life today.
The drive to work was full of internal dialogue. In fact, it often spilt into external dialogue. I was pondering about what I’d do today, what was going on, where else I’d rather be. But there was an elephant in the room (or the car). The silence broke and I said to myself: “why are you in a bad mood?” After thinking about it, I didn’t have an answer. The morning was a cold one and I’d had to defrost my car which had set me back a few minutes but I’d always leave a way to early for work anyway so that didn’t matter — it wasn’t that.
I was going to the same job I had been for the last seven months, I wasn’t a huge fan of it but it had been that way for a few months now so it wasn’t that. Everything was fine at home. I’d not had breakfast but that was normal. So the truth was, nothing was wrong. Absolutely nothing.
We Tell Ourselves a Story Every Single Day
And then I realised something. I realised that it’s me who is determining whether today is a good day or a bad day. It’s me at the proverbial steering wheel telling myself one story or another. If it’s me writing the story, why wouldn’t I write a good one?
I first thought about this idea when I was reading ‘How to Have a Good Day” by Caroline Webb, ex-Senior Advisor to McKinsey. I remember this one chapter vividly. It was about the most wasted time in all of human history. Meetings. It was about a particular meeting Webb was part of. Essentially she and a colleague had both attended said meeting. She’d come away and recited how terrible the experience was She’d done a bad job. It felt like it was a step back. The clients weren’t happy. All the signs of a truly awful meeting. Her colleague then walks into her office and he’s beaming. He’s recounting how well she came across, how he thought it was a constructive meeting, time well spent going in the right direction.
Webb was struck at the stark difference between the two realities. Here she was, talking…
