Thinking Outside the Inner Game

Mindset management is often called "the inner game" because of the self-talk going on inside your mind, invisible to the outer world.

But those mindset self-talk efforts to make things different are for naught when the self-talk conversations are all occurring only within the space between your ears. Self-talk keeps you stuck when you fail to re-identify who it is you think you're talking to. 

But wait a minute, from inside the current situation, who else IS there to talk to?

Whither thou goest?

Here's a picture of a hamster happily running on its endless wheel. Covering a lot of distance but going nowhere. But It happily keeps seeing road ahead, evidence of its moving somewhere. But as outside observers we know differently. We have a different frame of reference.

Self-talk that only re-hashes from that place of what you already know, the place where you currently are, is like that hamster – you are fervently reaffirming your wishes, but the effort excludes you the person doing the talking being any different. You are still the same-old hamster. To experience any change of perspective you need to change your point of view, which changes you. Things only change when you change. 

For mindset self-talk to achieve desired results you need to change who you think you are, and you need to change who it is you think you are talking to.

Look again at the picture of the hamster. We can easily see its "going nowhere fast" predicament because we are looking from outside the space that confines it. To free ourselves from our own hamster wheels we need to do the same thing, stand outside the current predicament.

Self-talk that really changes things means talking as the person you want to be when you can't yet see anyone there, that desired 'person-to-be' standing in the place outside of your current situation, even if you don't know where that is or what it exactly looks like.

Some might call this prayer. I call it "thinking outside the inner game".

As native Americans like to say, "Somewhere there is a dreamer and he is dreaming us". 

Successful mindset management is self-talk speaking with that dreamer.