Hal Elrod: Hello, friends. Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast. This is Hal Elrod. And we have all heard the joke or the stipulation that people who talk to themselves are crazy, right? Conjures up the image of the person on the street corner gibbering and jabbering and talking erratically to themselves. But I’ve come to realize that if you don’t talk to yourself, you’re missing the single most powerful form of mental training that there is. One of the most effective ways to impact your mental and emotional state is to talk to yourself. And I’m not talking about just the thoughts that you think, yes, that’s crucial, but I’m talking about out loud, actually verbally speaking the words out loud that impact your consciousness.

And you think about when you speak something out loud, when you say something verbally, you’re literally creating sound waves that reverberate out of your mouth and then into your eardrums, and they have an impact on you. Think about if someone else is talking to you. The words, the tone, the intensity, the energy, all of verbal communication impacts us significantly. Now, when we think thoughts, and you’ve probably experienced this, where if you meditate before, have you ever had that happen where you’re meditating and while you’re meditating, you can’t help but the thoughts in your head are, “Am I doing this right? Is this working? Am I wasting my time?” Most of us can relate to that.

So, today I’m going to show you how to use your voice literally to transform your inner state, to strengthen your focus, to improve your productivity, and lead yourself through any situation, and I will walk you through a 14-day experiment that will prove it to you. All right. First quick backstory, I’ll take you back to my twenties. I was 23 years old, and I lived with my good friend Matt Recor. Now, Matt was extremely successful by most people’s standards. I rented a room from Matt in his primary residence, and that was one of his six homes that he owned. So, he had five other houses that he rented out, and he was building a real estate empire, if you will. That was, gosh, I’m 46 now, so it was 23. Oh, that was half my life ago. Wild.

Now, again, so I’m renting a room from him in one of his six houses. So, Matt was very successful, but he wasn’t just successful in terms of his financial success but he was, to me, success is how much you give back. Like, that’s the real measure of someone is how successful you are to me is how much have you achieved, and then how much have you either helped others achieve or given back to those that might be less fortunate for one reason or another. And Matt led, for example, the basket brigade every year. We used to get usually 15 or 20 of us together, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and we would go to the grocery store.

We would spend an hour shopping for turkeys and stuffing and all the fixings, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes, and all of it. Then we would create an assembly line, and we would make a bunch of Thanksgiving meals. And then Matt had always gotten an address, a list of people from some sort of nonprofit that were struggling financially. And we would drive all around Sacramento, and we would knock on their door, and we would just say, “Hey, we have a gift for you,” and we would hand them, I think, two or three bags of groceries, say, “This is a full Thanksgiving meal for you for this Thursday.” And when they asked who it was from, Matt would instruct us, “Just tell them it’s from somebody that loves them, and if they press, just say that’s all you know.”

And so, that’s what we would do. By the way, that went on for, I don’t know if Matt still does it, but I know I think for 10 years I did this with him every single Thanksgiving. So, anyway, I’m going on a tangent, but the point is Matt was someone or is someone that I really admire, I always have admired. He was very successful. Now, the thing that I wanted to share with you that stuck with me with Matt is I used to hear him yelling from his bedroom. In fact, I wrote about this in The Miracle Morning book. I would hear him yelling from his bedroom. Now, keep in mind, I rented a room from him. It was a two-story house. On the upstairs, he lived at the end of the upstairs in the master bedroom. And then I lived in a bedroom down the hall.

And I would hear him yelling, and I would go, “Oh, what does Matt need?” I would walk over to his bedroom, thinking he was yelling for me, but he wasn’t yelling for me. He was yelling to himself. He was yelling things like, “I am the voice. I will lead, not follow. I will create, not destroy.” Now, Matt was a big Tony Robbins student, and if you are familiar with Tony, those are Tony Robbins declarations. And what happened was, at first, I was like, “Matt’s such a weirdo, man. He always talk, like he yells at himself all the time.” This is like a daily occurrence. So, eventually I realized he wasn’t yelling for me, but that’s when it clicked. He was programming his mind with the mindset, the emotional state, and the belief that he needed to create the life that he wanted.

And he’d been doing that for years, and it was working. He wasn’t crazy. He was just highly intentional. And here’s the thing, you fast-forward a couple of decades, I’ve done personally now, right, I’ve done thousands of hours of meditation and affirmations and visualization. But sometimes when I sit in silence, my mind doesn’t quiet down, as I said earlier. It questions, “Am I doing this right? Is this working? Am I wasting time?” I’m sure you can relate to that, and it’s when I realized that sometimes we need to override silence with intentional verbalization. Is that the word I’m looking for? We need to actually lead our mind with our own voice.

And so, when I speak to myself in a positive way, so either I read my affirmations out loud, even quietly, or I say my prayers out loud, even quietly, like my family’s sleeping, so I’m not like Matt where I’m shouting it out. But when I say my affirmations or I say my prayers out loud, I feel differently. My emotions shift faster. I’m able to redirect my mental and emotional state much more effectively. And if you think about it, it makes sense because if someone is talking to us and they’re saying mean things, that’s going to impact our nervous system. It’s going to impact our psychology. It’s going to impact our mental and emotional well-being. And the same as if someone’s saying something positive to us.

If they’re saying, “Hey, you’re doing a great job. I’m really proud of you.” You go, “Oh, thank you. That feels so good. I so appreciate you saying that.” And what I realized is that if we can speak to ourselves that way, again, not just the thoughts in our head that are bouncing around like a pinball but actually speaking our affirmations and our prayers out loud, it’s talking to ourselves in the least crazy way. It’s not crazy. It’s actually extremely effective. And here’s the thing. This isn’t just motivational fluff. Science backs this up. In fact, psychologists call it distanced self-talk. So, instead of using your own name like, I, “I am worthy. I am deserving. I am capable. I am committed to _____,” you use your first name. I might have spoken that wrong, but so you say to yourself, “Hal,” in my case, right? Instead of, “I’ve got this,” it’s, “Hal, you’ve got this. Hal, you’ve overcome this so many times.”

Think about how powerful you can talk to yourself when you’re using your own name. Now, where is that voice coming from, by the way? Now, you might think, well, that’s my own voice, right? I would argue that it is your highest consciousness, that it is spirit. It is your line to the divine. And what I mean by that is our ego, which is, in this context, our identity, right? So, as you’re growing up and you’re a kid and you think, “I am Hal. I am a good kid.” And then maybe you fail at something, or maybe your parents tell you, “Hal, you’re a bad person.” Sarah. I’m going to pick another name other than my own. “Sarah, you’re wrong. You’re bad. You shouldn’t have done that.”

Now, all of a sudden, when someone tells you using your name, Sarah, you then internalize it as part of your ego, part of your identity. “Oh, I am bad,” or, “I am stupid,” or, “I let people down,” or, “I misbehave,” whatever you’re told by other people. But the other people are the ones telling you using your first name, and then it becomes part of your identity. So, you think about this, where you’re actually now taking the reins of your self-talk and using your first name to talk to yourself in a way that then will reprogram your identity. It will elevate your consciousness based on the words that you choose.

And that’s where affirmations are so powerful. If you have written affirmations, then you read the affirmations to you. Now, for me, there’s something I reference sometimes on the podcast that I call divine downloads. And this is wisdom, inspired thoughts, nuggets of wisdom that come to me when I’m not asking, or maybe I’m asking, maybe I’m open for it, but like I’m not thinking these thoughts. These thoughts are delivered to me, and they’re usually for my highest good. And the way they are delivered to me, divine downloads is what I call them. In the past, I’ve called them breakthroughs. Now, I call them the divine downloads. And divine downloads, the thing is, they come to me using my first name.

So, it’s some other voice that is saying them to me. Oh, I wish I had, gosh darn it. I should have had my journal with me so I could read some of these to you. But they will be something along the lines of, “Hal, you need to connect with your daughter by spending more time with her in the evenings.” Actually, this came up for me recently. Because I like to go to bed early, but as my kids are getting older, they’re teenagers now, they want to stay up late. Well, my preference is so strong to go to bed early so I can wake up early that I recently got a download. In fact, I got it a long time ago, like years ago, or maybe not years, but maybe in the last year, and then it came up again today.

And it was, “Hal, you need to be willing to sacrifice your preference of going to bed early to spend quality time with your children for the limited amount of time that they still live at home.” And I was like, “Wow.” So, that’s an example where that’s not a pump me up statement, right? That’s not, “Hal, you’re amazing and you’re capable and you can overcome anything.” Not at all. No, that’s, “Hal, hey, you need to make some changes because your kids aren’t going to be here that much longer.” And to me, that voice, you could call it conscience, it’s our conscience. It always knows the right thing to do. We’ve had it since we were a little kid. It always knows the right thing to do. We don’t always listen to it.

Even as a kid, it’s like, “Hey, don’t take that candy.” And you’re like looking around, “Nobody sees me.” And that voice in your head is like, “Hey, don’t take that candy,” and you just shut the voice down. We all do this, not just as kids. We do it as adults, right? We know, “I shouldn’t do it.” “Eh, be quiet.” And we literally shut out that voice that is trying to guide us toward our highest good. And what I am encouraging and inviting, and I’m challenging you to do, is to bring that voice to the surface. It’s a voice that’s been with you since the day you were born. I believe Christian religion would call it the Holy Spirit, right? It’s that voice within you. I call it your line to the divine. I call it your highest conscience.

I mean, there’s lots of different words, but it’s that voice inside you that will guide you toward your highest good. And it is always there, but we drown it out with our ego, with our identity that is self-limiting. Or we utilize our ego like we actually tap into the ego to just go, “No, I want this. I don’t care. I know that little voice inside of me that I refuse to listen to it because I want to smoke the cigarette. I want to eat the junk food. I want to have the affair.” Right? But that voice is always there going, “Hey, you shouldn’t do this. Sarah, you shouldn’t do that. John, you shouldn’t do this. You know better than this.” And we shut the voice out. But if we listen to the voice always, if we just decide I’m going to start amplifying that voice, I’m going to start listening to it, our lives will improve.

If we do what our inner voice, our conscious, our highest self, our spirit, our connection to God, our line to the divine, call it whatever you want. And again, the most practical, like non-spiritual, is your conscience, right? Your conscience. It’s always been there. It’s always with you. Sorry, I’m getting a little passionate. Let me give you a 14-day challenge, and we’re going to keep this really simple. For the next 14 days, alternate between, on day one, say everything out loud. Say, and again, it can be quietly to yourself, you can murmur, “Hey, I am…” You can whisper to yourself. You don’t have to shout it out like my buddy Matt did, although there’s value to that.

If there’s nobody within earshot, shout, “I am grateful for this life that I am living. I am blessed. Thank you, God. I am so blessed. Look around. I have a roof over my head. I have food in the refrigerator. What in the heck am I upset about all the time? Why do I allow myself to get…” Like, this is a conversation with yourself where you’re talking to yourself that voice, that guidance system, you’re amplifying your positive voice. So, day one, say everything out loud, your affirmations, your prayers, your positive self-talk, and even ask questions. Ask for guidance. Ask God for guidance. Ask your subconscious for guidance. I always try to give options in case you’re like, “I don’t believe in God,” or whatever. I want to make sure that this is applicable to every single person.

So, day one, say everything out loud. And day two, do it silently. Don’t say it out loud. Pray to yourself, say your affirmations to yourself, and keep switching back and forth. For two weeks, for 14 days, day one, say everything out loud. Day two, keep it silently to yourself. Simple. So, I encourage you to do this during your Miracle Morning. Each day, rate your mood before and after in your journaling practice, right? So, during your ‘silence practice,’ you’re actually going to swap the S every other day for speaking. So, day one, say it out loud, speaking. Day two, silence. Keep it to yourself. And each day, rate the impact that time has on you. Rate your mood. Rate your mental and emotional well-being before and after.

So, do this in writing and so you can see on your speaking days how does that verbal processing, that out loud guidance and self-leadership, self-coaching, how does that impact you compared to the days where you do it silently? And by the end of two weeks, you’ll have your own dataset. You’ll know whether talking to yourself improves your state or not. And I’m confident that it will because it has been night and day for me and for the reasons that I’ve just shared, right? When people talk to us out loud and they use our name and they talk to us with intensity, the way that I just did, and like when I go on my morning walks, I pray out loud. I go, “God, thank you for the nature. Thank you for these trees. Thank you for this fresh air. Thank you for the sunshine.”

And I mean, I hope you can get just hearing me do it right now. How much more effective is that than me just thinking to myself, “God, thank you for the trees. Thank you for…” Like, when I say it out loud with intensity, it has a far more profound impact on my mental, emotional, and my physical nervous system. Alright. So, that’s the challenge. Talk to yourself out loud. Be a crazy person, if that’s what you think it is. It’s not a crazy person. The challenge is for the next two weeks, talk yourself into it. Don’t just think positive, speak positively, and record a note. It could be on your phone or in your journal, or on social media. Tag me if you try this. I want to hear your results. And remember, silence helps you observe your mind, quiet your mind, but your voice can lead it. Your voice can lead your mind. That’s the miracle of mindful self-talk.

Alright. Until next time, keep showing up. Keep speaking truth to yourself and keep creating your miracle life because this is the one life you’ve been blessed to live. You might as well fulfill your potential. You might as well enjoy every moment. You might as well be at peace with the challenges so they don’t rob you of the joy that you deserve. Because you get one life, make it a miracle. I love you so much. And I’ll talk to you next week.