You hear it all the time. It’s been there all your life. That voice in your head. The one that tells you what’s right, what you ought to do. This voice can also turn nasty, whispering that you’re not good enough, that everyone sees through you, that you’ll never measure up.
The performance psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr, who has studied countless athletes and elite leaders, says this voice is the key to success. “I began to realize,” he said in an interview, “what really mattered in a really significant way: the tone and content of the voice no one hears. I came to understand that the ultimate coach for all of us in life is that private voice.”
Where does it come from? Where did you get that voice originally? It came from your parents, mostly. As Loehr explains, we “know it begins to form as early as five years of age, and it comes principally from the authority figures in your life . . . however functional or dysfunctional.”
This should sober us as parents. We are responsible for the voice that will live inside our kids’ head for the rest of their lives. We decide whether that voice will belong to a wise and patient ancestor or a cruel and unpredictable ghost. We decide whether it will be a voice of conscience and kindness or doubt and insecurity. We decide that by what we say to them, by what we show them.
In each moment of every day.