For years, I asked myself the question, “Am I drinking too much?” I didn’t know how to recognize the process of change before I was ready.
If you’ve been asking yourself a variation of this question, I believe you will relate, and hopefully feel reassured that you are in the right place on you journey.
For me, it started with nothing catastrophic or crazy. From the outside, everything looked completely fine. But there was this internal little voice inside me saying something was off. Every time I had the thought, I quickly shushed it away. There were many mornings where I woke up and asked myself a question I was simply not ready to answer.
I didn’t know it then, but that inner voice was the beginning of everything. That hum is one that starts long before anyone around you notices anything is different. It’s the one that starts with a voice most people spend years trying to ignore.
You, too? Good. You’re not alone and you’re not behind.
The Voice You Keep Talking Yourself Out Of
I have a friend named Alicia who noticed something about me before I was willing to notice it myself. She was not confrontational about it at all. She just asked, in the most caring way, whether everything was okay.
More specifically, she asked if there was a reason I was reaching for a glass of wine as soon as I got home from work. She told me to “just be careful” and be aware. And honestly, in the moment, I brushed it off. I thought she was making a bigger deal of it than it was.
But I could not stop thinking about what she said.
That is how the internal voice often works. It doesn’t always originate from inside you. Sometimes it arrives through someone who cares enough to say the thing out loud that you have been avoiding saying to yourself. And even when you dismiss it in the moment, something in you files it away. It sits there. And it waits patiently for you to acknowledge it… when you’re ready to hear it.
What I know now is that voice is information. It is your values working exactly the way they are supposed to, trying to close the gap between how you are living and how you actually want to be living. And the longer you stay honest with it instead of talking yourself out of it, the clearer it gets.
Why Your Brain Treats Your Future Self Like a Stranger
Here is something I find fascinating, and it explains a lot about why change feels hard even when part of us genuinely wants it.
Psychologist Hal Hershfield at UCLA ran a series of brain imaging studies looking at how people think about their future selves. What he found was striking. For most people, when they imagine their future self, the part of the brain that activates is the same part that activates when thinking about a stranger. Not themselves. A stranger!
What that means practically is that every time you are weighing whether to change something today, your brain is essentially choosing between your current comfort and the wellbeing of someone it does not fully identify with yet. Present comfort almost always wins that argument. Not because you lack discipline, but because the future version of you has not been made real enough to matter in the moment.
But here is where it gets interesting. Hershfield also found that when people were guided to develop a stronger, more vivid relationship with their future self, through visualization, through writing a letter to that future person, through simply sitting with the question of what that version of their life actually looks and feels like, their present behavior changed. Not because they gritted their teeth harder. Because the future self stopped feeling like a distant abstraction and started feeling like someone worth protecting right now.
Brilliant, right?
You’re turn to try this.
Spend five minutes this week actually picturing the version of you that is two or three years down the road. Not the highlight reel. The real version. How does he feel in the morning? How does he show up at home? What has he stopped carrying? What does he no longer need to reach for?
Let that person become specific enough to feel real. Because the research is clear: the more real he feels, the more your present decisions will start to reflect him.
How to Recognize the Process of Change Before You’re Ready
One of the things I spent way too long believing was that I was stuck. That because I had not done anything yet, nothing was happening. But looking back now, I can see that the process had been moving for years before I ever took a single visible step. It was happening through:
- The questions I was asking myself.
- The conversations that stayed with me.
- The mornings I woke up feeling off and could not quite shake it.
That was all part of it!
This Week on Beyond the Gray
There is a psychological framework that maps out exactly how people move through change, and I get into the full details of it in this week’s episode of Beyond the Gray. But the piece I want you to hold onto right now is this: the stages that happen before anyone takes action are not a holding room. They are where the foundation gets built. They are where seeds get planted and watered. And nothing that follows is possible without them.
I did not quit drinking on July 4th, 2016 when I had my “own enough” moment. It happened 19 days later. But the process that led to that decision started years earlier with a comment from a friend, then another seed, then another, each one landing a little deeper than the last. And in those final 19 days before I made my decision, I moved from questioning to preparing to deciding. It definitely did not feel linear in the moment. (It rarely does!) But the process was working the whole time, even when I could not see it.
If you are in that place right now, asking questions you have not answered yet, noticing things you are not sure what to do with, feeling that tension between who you are and who you want to be, you are not stuck. You are in the process. And that process is already doing its work.
That’s good news, wouldn’t you agree? More this Tuesday on episode #9.
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A Few Questions to Sit With This Week
This is not a to-do list for you, but rather a few honest questions worth writing down.
- When was the first time a thought showed up that you quickly talked yourself out of? What was it? Who said something to you, or what did you notice in yourself, that you filed away and have not been able to fully let go of?
- If you pictured the version of yourself two or three years from now who made the change you keep circling, what does his daily life actually feel like? Get specific. Not just the absence of something. What is present?
- What is the internal voice saying right now, in this moment, that you have been rationalizing away? Not what you think it should be saying. What is it actually saying?
- And finally: if nothing changes, if a year from now looks exactly like today, how do you honestly feel about that?
Let those sit. You do not need the answers today. You just need to stay honest long enough to hear them.
You do not need a rock bottom. You do not need a perfect plan. You do not need to be fully ready. You just need enough honesty to stop talking yourself out of what you already know is true. That is more than enough to begin. And if that voice inside you has been speaking up lately, please do not dismiss it. It is trying to show you something real.
Here’s to living beyond the gray,
Kari
Ready to take the lead on your inner voice? Book a FREE Discovery Call with me HERE.
