The first voice is your mind talking to you.  It’s a voice from the past that continually reminds you about who you are and what you can and cannot do.  It replays all the beliefs installed in your mind by your parents and culture.

The first voice doesn’t discriminate between beliefs that are true or false, and often its message is irrational and self-destructive.  Nevertheless, the first voice doesn’t care.  It’s simply in replay mode and makes no attempt to critically assess the message.  Whether your beliefs are true or false is irrelevant to your mind while it’s in replay mode.  Once it latches on to a belief, it tenaciously clings to it and treats it as if it were true.  When your mind is in replay mode, it doesn’t split hairs over the veracity of what it’s saying.

Your inner voice is a backward look into your past.  It reflects all of the thoughts you have had up until the present.  In it, you find all of the limitations that have prevented you from living your dreams  The lingering immature ideas from your childhood and youth hide in that internal monologue.  When you became an adult, you didn’t leave all that mental baggage behind; it’s still present and constantly asserts itself in your self-talk.

This backward look can either help or hurt you.  If you listen to what it has to say and believe the message, you will adopt a lifestyle dominated by the limitations of the past.  This ancient self-talk will shackle you to the problems of the past, and your dreams will recede into the distance.  Your limiting beliefs will trap you in a time warp in which every day is a replay of all the days that went before.  Instead of living three hundred and sixty five new days each year, you will live one day three hundred and sixty five times, and you will do it for the rest of your life, repeating your old mistakes, trapped in the limitations of the past.

About five percent of people listen to their inner voice, and what they hear motivates them to change.  Nothing could ever convince them to adopt the limitations of the past and join the Life Long Disoriented.  When their inner voice starts its litany of limitations, these people say, “Thanks for telling me that,” and then they banish those limitations from their mind.

Excerpt from :

Zero Tolerance To Negative Thinking : Good-by Depression - Hello Positive Mind

David J Abbott M.D.