Silence Inner Criticism & Write Better Characters with Robbie Steinhouse

How was that? That was fairly

good.

Yeah, we're basically getting in our own way a lot of the time, aren't we? We need a bit more positive thinking, thinking that for myself.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

A lot of it comes down to confidence, doesn't it? And like you say, believing in yourself and actually just doing it for the sake of doing it because you want to do it and you love doing it rather than the end result.

And actually there's the book Let Them Theory that everybody on the earth has probably read at this point.

And that book, when I listened to it actually on Audible and you wouldn't think that such a simple theory and such a simple way of living could make such an impact but what you said there Robbie about just you can't control what other people think or do but you can control your reaction and how you go about dealing with that specific thing that's happened And I think that's really, really important.

You can't, if somebody leaves a bad review on your, I don't know, your Trustpilot or your Amazon or whatever about your awful book and it's the worst thing that's ever been written on the entire planet, you can't change their mind.

You can't do anything about that.

But what you can do is read it and forget about it or learn from it or do whatever it is that you want to do.

But you can't, what I'm trying to say is you can't control other people.

So I think that that's a really important lesson to learn that we all need to learn a little bit more of as well, actually, because as much as you can say, oh, just let them, it is very difficult.

this yeah

yeah i mean the thing that inspires me about what you said there in a sense is that there is also a kind of if you like a shadow negative side to to having a skill with narratives is inner negative narratives because i think the human mind this is something that um you know, I believe it's true.

I think I'm sure you will if I say it, is you walk along in a perfectly good mood and suddenly you have a negative thought and you just suddenly it pops into your head and, you know, it could be some kind of, I don't know, you're annoyed with somebody or somebody did something or you remember something and it just pops into your head and then you feel not very happy about it.

You could be angry or something or hurt.

Now, at that moment, your mind naturally can start some kind of narrative.

where you're saying it's not fair, and then you can remind yourself of that story and go into a groove.

So that narrative is, in some senses, the thing you do to yourself.

Because if you appreciate that, as humans, we're going to have these negative thoughts appear in our head, and it's just going to happen, at that point, if you can just accept the feeling and say, I feel, I don't know, hurt, angry, sad, whatever, and just be with that and say, it's okay to feel that way and just be with it, it sort of dissipates.

But the minute you start a narrative, she, he, they did whatever, and then you begin to sort of run that narrative.

Somebody used this expression, it's like the second arrow.

Like the first arrow hits you and that sort of is painful because you've started to sort of, you know, spontaneously out of nowhere, suddenly you just suddenly found yourself in a slightly bad mood.

But then there's the second arrow and the argument is you shoot that more deliberately.