This Sunday is a short one due to the insane LACK OF TIME I’ve had over the last week and this weekend. It’s a busy Sunday with Pokepalooza, Indianapolis Colts first home game of the season, soccer, and basketball. So I’m going to focus on one topic: talking to your head trash. 

On top of that, I’m preparing to have the entire Docebo marketing leadership team in Indianapolis on Tuesday and Wednesday to plan for 2027. I’ll be sharing our agenda and tips to a successful offsite in next weekend's edition. 

Enjoy and have a great week. 

Go Colts!

♥️ kyle

Affirmations, Head Trash, and Inner Work

I keep telling myself Entry 72 was the one where I'd finally said everything I needed to say about the voices in my head. Achiever, Approval Seeker, Worrier… etc. etc. etc. But inner work is never complete.

The tweet above showed up in my feed this past week and I couldn’t stop thinking about it… so I wrote about it.

Your brain produces somewhere around 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day, according to a figure widely cited from the National Science Foundation. Up to 80% of them are negative, and up to 95% of the same ones you had yesterday. That means the voice in your head is running on a loop, and the loop is biased toward threat because the brain evolved to keep you alive, not to keep you happy.

A thought like "I'm not ready for this" fires the amygdala, your brain's alarm center, which floods you with cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol makes you more reactive and more likely to have some thought again, and the repetition digs the groove deeper each time. 

This is why affirmations work as counterprogramming. When you repeat a sense like "I can handle this," you're building a competing pathway. The first few times, it feels empty because the old groove is deeper, but the brain wires based on what it practices. A 2015 study from the University of Pennsylvania found that a repeated values affirmation activates the prefrontal cortex, the power of the brain that handles reasoning and quiets the amygdala over time.

The research suggests that the mechanism works the same way whether you write the affirmation, say it out loud, or read it from a card. What matters is repetition and personal relevance, choosing words that connect to something you care about. Generic positivity does not land the same way a sentence about something you care about does. The more specific the statement, the stronger the signal.

PS: I couldn’t find the NSF study he mentions in the message, but the University of Pennsylvania study is there, and it gets the point across.

I digress… 

It’s absolutely insane how many thoughts the average brain produces a day. 60-70,000 of them. And 80% of them are negative… 95% of the thoughts are repeated over time. Wild.

Back to the Penn study. Researchers put people in an fMRI machine and had them reflect on their core values. The ones who did it lit up two systems: the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate, which handle how you process your own sense of self, and the ventral striatum (crazy to type that because I have no idea how to even pronounce the words), which handles reward. The best part? The activity actually predicted real behavior change afterward. 

That's basically a brain scan of the 1-3-2 model Michael's been walking me through. Same entry, I described it as creating a gap between the loud voice and my reaction to it. Turns out that gap isn't a metaphor. It's those two systems doing the actual work while the amygdala calms down.

Which lines up exactly with the airport spiral I wrote about in the same entry. I was behind on team updates, convinced I was physically falling apart. My ACHIEVER part was running the whole show. I didn't want to shut him up, I wanted to understand what he actually needed. It turned out to be twenty minutes and an email.

Something like "I am calm, I am enough," barely registers. Your brain doesn't know how to deal with it because it’s generic. But something specific, something tied to an actual value or an actual part with an actual name, is what activates the reasoning system.

That's the difference between "I'm fine" and "Hey, I hear you, The Achiever, you've gotten me pretty far, but this one's not a threat, it's a Tuesday."

It also explains something from Entry 65 where I wrote about the Shadow Tool. "I see you, but I'm in charge now" worked for me long before I had a framework for why. Compare that to something like "I've got this," which sounds nice and does nothing.

That voice asking what if you get this wrong, doesn't go away once you make VP or CMO. Kyle as a Director always wondered if he's strategic enough. Kyle as VP wondered if he actually belonged in the room. The research says you don't out-argue that voice with a general pep talk. You out-argue it with something exact enough that the reasoning part of your brain actually listens.

Which is wild because it’s my brain. I should have complete control. :) 

So if you're building your own version of the 1-3-2 model, or the Shadow Tool, Head Trash, or whatever you want to call the thing, skip the vague stuff. Name the part. Say what it's actually protecting. Tell it what you're choosing to do instead.