Can Talking To Yourself Save Your Marriage?

Hey brother, I wanted to talk to you about your morning routine. This came up on last night's weekly Mentoring Men group call when I asked the question, "What is your morning routine?"

Some men didn't have a routine, and that's okay. We're not talking about "doing it right" or doing it wrong.

What we're talking about is the benefit of having a routine of having something that works for us.

Each morning I make a cup of coffee, read, and then I journal.

I write down my thoughts to brain dump whatever's going on in my head.

This allows me to purge my thoughts and work through whatever feelings I have got going on.

Most of the time we have chatter going on in our brains.

We have thoughts from yesterday.

We may have little pieces of thoughts that we need to organize and process through. 

Many times we'll even have competing thoughts that will conflict with other thoughts.

Each time we have a thought, it produces a feeling in us. Those feelings are like vibrations and they aren't always something we can put words to.

They are just something we feel and many times if we have more than one thought and more than one feeling, we'll have a lot of different vibrations going on in our body.

We'll have a lot of different thoughts and feelings bouncing around on the inside of us, and we need an opportunity to be able to work those things out.

We need to self-soothe, self-coach, and be able to acknowledge and process what's going on.

And so having a morning routine is extremely important to me.

I do it every day. Even when I travel, I take at least, 10 minutes to sit down and do my reading, and do my journaling.

Even if I just brain dump a little bit, it helps exponentially.

On last night's men's group call, some of the guys said they have a hard time with journaling.

Writing down their thoughts consistently is something they struggle with and I understand.

For many years, I couldn't quite get that consistency either, but that was mainly because I hadn't fully enjoyed the benefits of journaling yet, and once I understood the benefits to me, it became easy for me to find that consistency and make journaling a priority.

But for anyone who is in a perfectionist mindset, thinking they can't make any mistakes, they have to get everything right, they are afraid that somebody else is going to read their thoughts and judge them. This can be a barrier to being able to sit down and write because you're staring at a blank page.

You're trying to figure out what to put down on it. And this is why I recommend to men that they. Push that stuff out of their mind, that this journal isn't for anybody else. That they're just keeping it for themself. That they're, what they're doing is they're essentially just brain dumping whatever comes to mind.

And there's no right or wrong. The teacher's not gonna pull out a red pen and grade them. They're they don't have to get the grammar right. They don't have to get the handwriting right. They don't have to get the spelling they don't have to do anything. They don't even have to make coherent sentences.

As long as they're writing. Kinda what's going on in their mind and then being able to work that through. Then this is the benefit of writing it down. Now. Now again, if this is still a barrier to. To the creative process to working this through. One of the things that we can do, and this is what we talk about a lot in the renewed masculine man, is that we recommend doing three minutes.

Dumps. So you turn on the camera like you're, we're doing right now, and for three minutes you just brain dump. You just say the things that are on your mind and anything that's associated with that right or wrong, good or bad, right? Whether it's what somebody else is thinking or what you're thinking or what you think the details of the situation are or whatever.

And this is your dump. This is your three-minute dump. , it could end right there. You could just have the three-minute dump and not do anything else. You could just maybe leave that on your camera roll or delete it or whatever. It really wouldn't matter. But a lot of times what we can do is we can go back and listen to that three-minute dump and we'll hear things that we didn't hear before, that we didn't recognize that we.

We'll hear things that we're like, I said that, what did I say I don't even remember saying that. And so that's important. And then of course, being part of something like the renewed masculine man inside of mentoring men is that you're gonna share that with the group.

You're gonna upload that and share that with the group. And then you get a series of men who are objectively outside of you, right? Who can, who are not necessarily intimately familiar with your speech patterns all the time? Who will be able to hear something that you didn't hear, right?

They'll be able to challenge, they'll be able to ask questions, they'll be able to highlight pieces and parts and that is exceptionally useful. And so if you don't have a community like that if you don't have men in your life or others that you can share those things with a highly recommend checking out mentoring men.

. But if you don't have that, you can still do the three-minute dumps. You can do those in dumps and you can say, Hey, this is. What's going on in my mind? And then you can go back and listen to that again now. So we've got journaling. We've got the three-minute, three-minute dumps. Where's the camera?

We got the three-minute dumps. There are two. Okay. One and one. And one. There are two. And now, so the third thing is that you can just. Talk out loud to yourself. Get in the habit of talking out loud to yourself. And this is something that people, the first thing that they're, they go to is their mind is what are people gonna think?

Are people gonna think I'm crazy? Are people gonna judge me? But let's be honest, these days everybody has, look at me. I'm walking around in the park with a camera record. Everybody these days, everybody's got something going on. Nobody's paying attention to what you're doing. They're all thinking about what everybody else is thinking about them.

And we've got earbuds, we've got phone calls, we've got Zoom calls, we've got videos that we're watching. We're just, we're not in that space anymore. Where if we saw somebody talking to themself on the street, we might think that they were crazy. So I say, talk to yourself like a crazy person.

Talk out loud. , get your thoughts out. Be able to hear yourself say things. And here's the interesting thing is that a lot of times what we do is we're afraid of ourselves. We're afraid to say the things that we want to say. We're afraid, to be honest. And what, when that shows up is when you say things out loud.

So if you are saying this bothered me, she was upset. I'm angry I'm pissed. Whatever the expression is, you start being honest about how you're feeling about something and you'll start to get uncomfortable. You start to get to a point where you might begin to recognize that, wow, this makes me uncomfortable.

And so it gives you some insight into how your thoughts are making you feel, how you are holding yourself back, how you're resisting, how you're holding something in and stuffing it down. And so that's important. So I say, talk to yourself like a crazy person. Be able. Get that stuff out, be able to say it out loud, and then be able to hear yourself, because a lot of times when we have that inner dialogue going on with all the other thoughts and stuff, it, it sounds very different than in our head, then it does out, out loud.

And we, there, there's a phrase for that. So there's an expression for that, right? Oh, it sounded much, it sounded better in my head. That's exactly what it is. We're, when we have these thoughts, when we have these feelings, these. Going on in our si in our head, in our body. When they're bouncing around with each other, when they're conflicting.

They sound very different in our head than if we say them out loud and can hear them. So there you go. Journaling, three-minute dump, and talking out loud. These are the ways that we can purge what we've got, what we've been holding in. It's how we can process what. Have been holding in and it's a way that we can heal, that we can move forward, a way we can let go of things that aren't serving us.

Much Love brother,

Charlie McKeever
Happy Man Coach & Freedom Fighter
HappyManCoaching.com