All year I’ve been seeing, hearing, and experiencing this refrain in my head: Everything starts with the conversations we have with ourselves.

These conversations determine how we feel…

… what we do….

… which conversations we engage in with other people. And which we don’t…. (Grammar! I know. But you get my point.)

… the quality of our days.

And when I say “the conversations we have with ourselves,” I don’t mean the little motivational quotes we frame and hang in our office. Or the personal pep talks we write with Sharpies and stick via Post-It notes to our bathroom mirror. Not the oversimplified concept of “self talk".

I mean the rich dialogue each of us has with ourselves. Or that we could be having with ourselves, if we don’t currently cultivate that inner dialogue.

Do we have an inner dialogue? Sometimes, inside, we still have an inner monologue. One side of us dominates the conversation unnecessarily. The part that is the harshest self-critic? The eternal pessimist? Or the part that is ever the optimist, even as all the data at hand paints a very different picture of reality? What is possible if we have an inner dialogue that invites multiple points of view, and different ideas, from our own selves? (Is this where healthy self-regulation comes from?)

Maybe we write in our journal regularly, and feel free to express our innermost thoughts with ourselves. We can write literally anything down, and seeing the words, and acknowledging that they came from our truest selves, feels both terrifying and freeing. And informative!

Maybe we balance our inner dialogue with a healthy number of conversations with other people, about the same topics. So that we can find a baseline for values and our moral compass.