Your internal dialogue may be the loudest voice you hear most of your waking hours. It is the real-time, real-language conversation you have with yourself every moment of every day, and it has a profound effect on the way you perceive the events and choices in your life. It gives you feedback constantly, judging, assessing, warning you or chiding you, cheering you on, praising you, disapproving of you, painting a rosy picture, or sending messages of doom and gloom.

If you want to return to your authentic self and live a life that will satisfy your deepest needs, you have to get real about your internal dialogue. Everyone, you included, is subject to distorting or missing the truth. Think about how many false messages and ideas have been introduced into your internal life over time. I’d bet that you admit that the loudest messages and ideas you’ve received have been negative, no matter how many positives were included in the mix. Humans are designed to pay attention to pain and negative messages like criticisms, condemnations and rejections. The journey back to authenticity depends on you looking squarely at what you say to yourself and weeding out the false messages you’ve made part of your internal dialogue.

The false messages can even create self-fulfilling prophecies. You believe — despite all evidence to the contrary — that you are inadequate to make some important change or decision, and when the time comes, that negative message that you are sending yourself creates exactly what you don’t want. You think it, do it, and become it.

It’s time to change the dynamic. Tune into your internal dialogue to hear what you are telling yourself, assess its source, and test its accuracy. Only then can you challenge the false messages and live more in accordance with your authentic self.

Modified excerpt from The Self Matters Companion: Helping You Create Your Life From The Inside Out by Phillip C. McGraw, PhD.

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