What does it mean to “listen to yourself”

Listening to yourself or “listening within” means tuning in to how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, and what you need.

This might sound obvious, and something we’d all be doing naturally. But in the modern world listening to ourselves isn’t that easy. We are surrounded by outside attention grabbers. Including devices designed to notify us at their convenience rather than ours.

Listening to your inner voice isn’t some airy-fairy thing. It’s deeply practical. It’s vital to your success.

In this article, find out how and why to go beyond the every day “surface” thinking about what to have for lunch, or what to post on LinkedIn, to elicit powerful insights and personal truths. And uncover blocks to success.

Learn how your inner critic has more wisdom for you than you might think. And discover the “4 Levels of Listening Within”.

• Why listening to yourself matters
• What prevents you listening to yourself, or get out of practice at it?
• What kinds of listening to yourself are there?
• Level 1: Everyday basics
• Level 2: Noticing Patterns
  • Gut feeling and hunches
  • Inner Critic – a special case
• Level 3: Inner Relationship
  • True story
  • Key principles
  • an inner conversation
  • What if I don’t like what my inner voice is saying?
• Level 4: Living in Flow
• Improving your self-listening skills
• It’s not just a “voice” and it’s not just “listening”
• The 4 Levels of Listening – summary and infographic

Why listening to yourself matters – the connection with personal growth

Listening to yourself is being able to tune in to your inner wisdom in real-time. It is central to your ability to live fully, and act in accordance with your values.

I’ve often read that most people don’t know what their values are. Yet at some level, we do know, even if, right this moment, we might not be able to put them into words.

Mismatches between how we are living and our (known-yet-unknown) values create much of the lack of purpose and sense of being adrift that I see in my coaching clients.

Which makes sense: if you don’t listen to yourself, how do you know what you need to find happiness, or feel fulfilled? When you don’t have a reliable way of consulting your current needs, priorities, and values, decision-making becomes a lottery.

Becoming explicitly self-aware of values is crucial for personal growth as well as personal fulfillment.

So developing your ability to listen to yourself leads to more personal growth, and therefore to more life satisfaction.

Self-awareness is a process not a destination.

Your values can change through life. So without listening to yourself, how can you be sure that the path you’re on now is still the right one?

What you need right now to feel inspired, to feel soothed, to think clearly, is not necessarily what you needed yesterday. Listening to your inner voice is important for self-trust as well as self-care. (As is responding appropriately.)

When you know how to listen to yourself you make better decisions. And you have a better chance of understanding your values, and, your actions.

Ignoring your inner voice is detrimental

Conversely ignoring how you feel might mean emotional outbursts take you by surprise, causing difficulties at work, or in personal relationships. A Canadian study suggests that those who don’t listen to their inner voice are more likely to act impulsively. Or you may get caught in a downward spiral of negative thoughts without being aware that it’s happening.

Given its importance, it’s surprising how easy it can be to get out of practice at listening within.

What prevents you listening to yourself?

If you come from a family background where you weren’t supported to be yourself, and to have your own opinions, or likes and dislikes, you might never have developed this skill. Self-awareness is not explicitly taught in school.

For those who constantly self-criticise, or suffer from chronic negativity, listening within can be problematic. (More about this in a minute.)

For all of us, outer voices are so loud and so insistent that it’s not always easy to connect to your inner sense of who you are and what you really need.

Loud outside voices:

• We’re constantly surrounded by “shoulds” – what we should think and how we should feel. Adverts tells us that we “need” their products and are designed to make us want the lifestyles they promote. But do we really?
• Work eats into “me-time” more and more. According to a 2019 report into work/life balance, we take more than a quarter of our work home with us. Most of us spend our days bouncing from task to task or trying to make up for lost time by multitasking. None of this is conducive to tuning in to ourselves.
• And then there’s “life-noise”: Social media, to-do lists, 24 hour news, internet shopping… Videos instructing us on everything from how we arrange our wardrobes, to how we style our eyebrows. We’ve never had more access to more information, or less time to digest it.

That “still, small voice” within? No wonder it’s being drowned out.

What kinds of listening to yourself are there?

The world we live in is far from supportive of listening to yourself.

So getting better at listening to your inner voice requires effort. But the rewards, in terms of personal growth, success, and fulfilment, are enormous.

Many people hear themselves without giving much thought to it. Their inner voices are like inner wallpaper, there but not in awareness most of the time.

Even when people are aware of inner voices, they’re often listening in order to argue with themselves, or reassure themselves. The extent to which most people want to tune in to themselves depends on how they’re feeling. And, how they’re feeling about how they’re feeling.

Rarely do we listen to ourselves in order to understand, despite this being a tenet of effective listening to others.

To improve anything, you need to know where you’re starting from.

I’ve identified 4 different levels of listening. To supercharge your growth, supercharge your listening.

Level 1: Basic needs

Listening to yourself can be as basic as noticing when you’re hungry, or tired, or happy. (This is what I think of as Level 1 Listening.) We all know we should listen when our body is telling us we’re in need of a break, or that we’re taking on too much. But quite often, we don’t.

When we don’t pay attention to what our body is saying, it will shout louder and louder until we do listen. Even if that means making us ill.

At Level 1 we take a quick sounding on every day concerns. For example: “What do I want for dinner?”, “What needs to go in this report?”, “Do I want to go to this event?”.

Much of what comes up in level 1 listening is internal chatter, and is influenced by what’s going on around us. For example, what other people say or do, what we read in the news, the song we heard on the radio, the programme we just watched.

Moving deeper, to level 2, involves tuning in to yourself a bit more, and beginning to notice patterns…

Level 2: Noticing Patterns

Gut feelings and hunches

“Gut feelings” come to us unexpectedly in relation to a situation or a person. Have you ever met someone new and got a squirmy feeling between your shoulder blades about them? You, straight away, don’t trust them although you might not be able to say why.

I think of this as Level 2 Listening: noticing that something happens in your body in relation to something or someone one else. You notice that a pattern is emerging.

This is exactly what hunches or intuitions are – awareness of a pattern, which indicates for example: … that deal isn’t going well… that employee is in need of support… that person is up to something…

This also applies to awareness of our own patterns of thinking and self-talk, of which the Inner Critic is a special case.

Inner Critic patterns

As we’ve already mentioned, inner voices can be difficult, critical, and undermining. The inner critic is a pattern of this type of self-talk. When you’re listening at level 2, you’re noticing that this self-critical pattern has appeared (as opposed to just being caught in it and reacting from that place).

And the inner critic does, in fact, tend to talk in patterns, rehashing the same stuff over and over.

Some liken this to “head-tape” that they can’t turn off. Understandably, without support, you can get stuck here if it feels too unpleasant, or too scary, to go further.

Levels 1 & 2 are a bit like push notifications…

Our inner voice talks, our body nudges us, “something” is there.

How deeply we attend to these messages, and how judgmental about them or judged by them we’re feeling, defines whether we go to the next level of listening.

Level 2 Listening is about pattern awareness: noticing there’s something significant showing up.

But what can you do with that?

Level 3: Inner Relationship

This is an example of going beyond level 2: noticing patterns, to level 3: deliberately interacting with them. When you do this, you can access the wisdom inherent in them.

This deliberately getting into relationship with is characteristic of level 3 listening.

Some key principles to level 3 listening:

1. Believing that however the “something in you” shows up, its intention is positive
2. Listening is in order to understand, NOT in order to evaluate, change, fix, argue, or reassure.
3. Knowing that what you resist (through arguing, pushing down, reassuring etc) persists.
4. It is possible to acknowledge that what it believes is true for it, but not necessarily the whole truth.
5. Acknowledging what is, allows it to change

An inner conversation

Acknowledging is the next step

A crucial difference at level 3 is not just listening, but also responding empathically. So it becomes more of a conversation than a series of notifications. How easy or hard it is to interact in a way that produces helpful shifts – like my fog lifting – depends on:

• Whether you’ve learned an effective structure for facilitating the conversation
• How much support you have – it’s far easier to have a useful conversation (especially with difficult inner voices) when you are supported by a guide or companion
• The nature of the inner voice – is it helpful and kind, or critical and judging?
• How you feel about the kinds of messages or feelings that come up.

So what if you feel bad, sad, or frustrated by what comes up?

Is your inner voice always right? What if you don’t like what it says?

There’s no doubt that if your head is full of critical voices telling you you’re no good, or that you’ll never amount to anything, it wouldn’t be surprising if you didn’t want to listen to it.

Many, many people will tell you that if your inner voice is negative, or keeps beating you up and telling you “you’re no good”, then you should contradict it. Push it down. Replace it with positive affirmations.

A different approach

Your inner voice is always right, but ONLY about the part of the puzzle that it has.

It’s telling you what it knows. But it doesn’t know everything.

And what it says shouldn’t be taken at face value, because, although your inner critic might seem powerful and mean, it’s actually scared and out of its depth.

When it says “You’re rubbish at this“, what it means is “I’m worried that you might be rubbish at this.“

When it says “You’ll never get anywhere“, what it means is “I’m scared that you’ll never get anywhere.“

When it said to me, “why bother – no-one will ever read this“, what it meant was, “I’m worried no one will ever read this, and I don’t want you to be disappointed.“

Take a moment to feel this shift.

This is a crucially different mindset with which to listen to your inner critic.

Notice how it changes not just how you listen, but what you’re listening for.

Now, instead of listening to argue with it, or to shut it up, you’re listening for nuance, sense, how it might be feeling.

This is an example of listening for more than just what’s on the surface.

Imagine what would happen if you could have this kind of beneficial, loving relationship with yourself all the time. That’s Level 4…

You’re reading “The Practical Power of Listening to Yourself – Ultimate Guide” Read this article from the beginning

Level 4: Living in Flow

If level 3 is going beyond listening to yourself to deliberately moving into relationship with yourself, then level 4 is when this becomes a way of being.

At level 3 blocks to action, and the things that keep us stuck can be accessed, understood, and shifted.

At level 4, this is an on-going living process of living in harmony with yourself. Decisions and actions flow because you’re in alignment. Thoughts, feelings, and emotions are experienced and regulated moment by moment.

Doesn’t this sound lovely? Of course, for most of us, most of the time, this isn’t where we’re at.

Yet nearly everyone will have had the experience of being in “flow”. Calm, “in the zone”, open to whatever is arising, responding from a sense of a larger, more connected Self, or apparently divine presence.

The doorway to Level 4 of listening within is to make listening to yourself, and being in relationship with yourself, into a regular practice.

There are a variety of approaches to this. The one I teach is Experiential Focusing (a.k.a. “felt-sensing”) and you can read more about that here: What is Experiential Focusing or “Felt Sensing”?

Here are some other ways you can improve your self-listening skills…

Some of the ways you can improve your self-listening skills

Most active listening courses emphasise “listening to understand” over “listening to respond”. Above I suggested that attending to your inner critic in order to understand it, was more useful than listening in order to tell it that it’s wrong.

Imagine what would happen if you applied active listening skills to yourself. This kind of listening to yourself is at the heart of most change processes, from psychotherapy to coaching. My main job, as a coach, is to help you listen to yourself more effectively.

Working with a professional listener is always going to help.

Other ideas for improving your ability to listen within:

• Keep a journal. Writing your thoughts, feelings and idea down helps you listen better to yourself, partly because the page is completely non-judgemental, partly because getting it down on paper can be cathartic. Plus it helps you notice patterns that might slip past you otherwise.
• Have you ever been stuck trying to write something and found that putting your brain in “idle” by going for a walk or taking a shower, brings all sorts of new ideas? (This has been a 4-walk article for me!)

• “Active reading”, especially self-help books – make sure you do the exercises they suggest, and stop every so often and ask yourself “how might that apply in my life?” Some suggestions in the image below
• Take an active listening class – then try applying the skills you learn on yourself.
• The biggest thing is to set aside time for yourself – uninterrupted by children, or social scrolling, or chit-chat.
• Learn Experiential Focusing… Listening within is always a conversation between your wise body, your wild heart, and your smart brain. Experiential focusing IS the facilitation of this conversation in a way that generates insight, and produces shifts in how you experience and hold your problems.

It’s not just a voice

Bear in mind that inner wisdom doesn’t always come as a “voice”. It can be a physical sensation (a headache, nausea, tension, or relaxing), an atmosphere or an “energy”.

It can show up in metaphors – our bodymind speaks to us in metaphorical terms a lot, for example in dreams. And also when we say things like “I feel like I’m walking through treacle” or “She was spitting nails.”

In fact it’s arguable that more inner communication comes in these forms, than as actual voices.

So when we talk about listening to ourselves, especially at the higher levels, we’re really talking about sensing into ourselves, rather than necessarily listening to an actual voice in our heads.

Supercharge your listening, supercharge your growth: a summary of the 4 levels of self-listening

Level 1 Receiving notifications.

Everyday messages about your body’s health and vital systems – like hunger, or sleepiness, as well as more global senses about how tired we are, how stressed we are, or how happy we are. Depending on how responsive we are to our own needs, the body may be shouting at us by the time we attend to it. Everyday cognitive decision-making.

Level 2 Noticing patterns

Either in your body i.e. that something happens in your body in relation to something/one else (outwith it’s normal living cycles) For example,

• When your brain feels “fuzzy” and sleepy, even though it’s mid-morning and you’ve had a good night’s rest.
• That squirmy feeling between your shoulder blades every time you interact with a certain person.
• When a particular task seems to have an invisible force field round it and you just. can’t. get. to. it.

Also noticing patterns of self-talk, like the Inner Critic.

Level 3 Inner Relating

Being able to reliably access the knowing underpinning these felt/heard in the body senses. You notice there’s “something there” and you are able to tune in more closely. You focus your attention, in a friendly, open, and curious way. This moves you from just listening, to a more globalised “attending to” your inner experience. You are in relationship. This gives you access to an abundance of wisdom about, and resources for responding to, your situations & relationships.

Level 4 Living in Flow

When this kind of attending to the body and your inner experience becomes a regular practice – shifting long held blocks and nurturing growth. Living in this way in an ongoing fashion i.e. growthful inner conversations become a way of being.

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