What is Mind Mutter? Part 4 - Collective Voice

A nagging teacher! A perfectionist mother! An impatient father! The image or nature of the voice in our heads can take on the personality and tone of someone we know. Sometime this voice can be our own voice, with a sterner stance.  Whatever the character that voice assumes, it is a collective voice of all the roles you play in your life.

A nagging teacher! A perfectionist mother! An impatient father! The image or nature of the voice in our heads can take on the personality and tone of someone we know. Sometime this voice can be our own voice, with a sterner stance.  Whatever the character that voice assumes, it is a collective voice of all the roles you play in your life.

Efficient wheel alignment is required in any vehicle that has more than one wheel. The more wheels a vehicle has, the more important the wheel alignment becomes. Wheel alignment is an economical and a safety concern. Incorrect wheel alignment will cause the tyre-tread to run off quickly and incorrectly, thus resulting in the need to buy new tyres sooner and more often.

Misaligned wheels cause the vehicle to handle difficulty, and makes it hard work to drive. Any laps in concentration from the driver could quickly result in the vehicle leaving the road, or being involved in some sort of incident or accident. Alignment requires all the wheels to be round (does this seem a bit obvious?), all wheels to be the same size (obvious too, but a common mistake), Pressure in all the tyres to be correct and equal (frequently incorrect), and lastly - running in the same direction!

Our lives can be compared to eighteen-wheeler trucks. The cab and trailer are our thoughts and lives. The wheels are the various roles we play in our lives in order to carry us to where we want to be. Each of us has many roles that we use on a daily basis, depending on when and where we find ourselves. For example, the roles I play in my life would include: a male, a man, a dad, a son, a brother, a friend, a business owner, a manager, a lecturer and a writer. The identity of any role is defined when we complete the sentence "I am..."!

Each role has its own identity, its own name. Each role has values and beliefs that answer the question "what is important to this role?" Each role has a set of skills and abilities that are translated into behaviours and actions. On closer inspection you may discover that each role has its own set of lingo, words and quirks that are unique to that role. Maybe the role even has its own dress code. What sets a role apart from others is its unique experience which has formed and refined the role. This experience is coded into a belief, and regulates the roles worth or value, like a score card.

If I honestly evaluated the various roles in my life, giving them a score out between 1 and 10, with 1 being very poor and weak, and 10 representing excellence, my score card would look like this: A male - 7 (I am not the perfect sample, but I got all the required bits to be male), a man - 7 (Male is matter of birth, manhood is matter of choice. I believe respect and characteristics of a gentleman make a good man), a dad - 8(I love my daughter, and I think I'm a pretty good dad), a son - 6 (My mother is aged, I'm not always there for her like I feel I should be), a brother - 4 (I don't spend much time with my sisters. We are not a close family unit), a friend - 5 (I have a few, this I'm okay as a pal), a business owner - 4(I am not spending the time on my business as a leader like I should), a manager - 7 (I manage efficiently, but there is room for improvement), a lecturer - 8 (I enjoy the lecturing) and a writer - 6 (it is a developing role that I enjoy).

The coded belief and experience gives each role a guiding voice. The role uses the experiences and overall score for the role to advise and counsel us as we grow, develop and move forward in our lives. This little quiet voice of the role has our best interest at heart, and advises us according to the role score combined with the roles goals and expectations. The purpose or aim of the guiding voice of experience for that role is to ensure that our standard of living around this average score of the role.

So, when I take the scores for the various roles and add them together I get a score of 62. If I divide that score by the number of roles I have (10) I get a score of 6.2. This is the average score of all my roles. This average score becomes the score for my life average, or otherwise known as my worth. This life worth becomes the "target" value for my life to focus around. We then set our ambitions and goals, guided by the voice of experience from each role, according to this life worth.

Here is the catch - not only is the score of the various roles combined to give us a collective score, but the voices combine too. As the Truck generates sound (a voice) from its motor, and the noise from each wheel in contact with the road, that is heard not individually, but collectively. In the same manner the roles in my life combine to form a united voice that is hard to distinguish individually.  This unified voice is not a quiet voice of experience that suggest options for our present and our future. Rather, it's a strong voice of authority that almost dictates the outcomes of decisions based on experience. Each voice combines to form a strong voice of reason and experience, that I have labelled Mind Mutter.