The negative self-talk at work that costs us most rarely sounds like a crisis. It sounds like ordinary thinking: the silent prediction you make about your own qualifications before you apply for anything, the story you tell yourself when your boss sends a terse email, the inner voice that keeps you quiet in a meeting when you actually have something worth saying.

There is a name for what your brain is doing. And once you can name it, you can interrupt it.

In this episode, I walk you through the Story Audit, a three-question tool for catching the moment when your brain has crossed from interpreting facts to generating fiction. I start with three specific cognitive distortions that show up constantly at work: mind reading, fortune telling, and catastrophizing. Aaron Beck named them in his foundational work on cognitive behavioral therapy. Chris Argyris mapped the same territory in organizational settings with his Ladder of Inference at Harvard Business School. These patterns are not character flaws. They are what the human brain does by default, and naming them is the first disruption.

The episode organizes around three places where believing your own thoughts can genuinely derail you at work: opportunity, where you vote yourself out before anyone else gets a vote; relationships, where you attribute intention to ambiguous behavior and then act on an intention you invented; and performance and visibility, where you stay silent in the exact moment your contribution might matter most. I share a personal story about a week I spent catastrophizing about a client who had not responded to a video pitch, only to discover her reply had been sitting in her drafts folder and she loved the idea.

The Story Audit is the practical tool at the center of the episode: three questions to run when you notice a strong reaction at work. What are the facts? What story did I add? What else could be true? Then one action question: given what I actually know, what is the most useful next thing to do? Episode 84, Why Talking to Yourself Makes You Smarter, is a companion episode that goes deeper on the research behind putting your thoughts into words out loud, including Karl Weick's observation that we often do not know what we think until we hear what we say.

Listen and catch the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch it and replay it on my YouTube channel, JanelAndersonPhD.

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Episode 84 — Why Talking to Yourself Makes You Smarter

You have a coworker who talks to you all day long. They question your decisions. They speculate about what your boss thinks of you. They remind you of all the mistakes that you've made, and they predict how your very next meeting is going to go.

And here's the really dangerous part: you tend to believe them. That coworker, it's you. Today we're going to talk about why you should stop believing everything you think at work. Now the problem here isn't that we have negative thoughts.

We all have an internal dialog that's going on all day long. Every brain generates interpretations of events constantly, automatically, and often before we're even aware that it's happening. We can't stop it. We absolutely cannot stop it.

The problem is that we fail to distinguish between what actually happened and the story that our brain immediately tells us about what happened at work. That distinction can determine whether we speak up or stay quiet, whether we pursue an opportunity or talk ourselves out of it before anyone even gets a vote, or whether we initiate a difficult conversation or let a relationship quietly deteriorate. So here's how it works. Let's say you send your boss an idea and you get a terse reply.

Let's discuss it tomorrow. That's the fact. Forwards, then your brain takes over. She hates the idea.

I probably overstepped. Oh, I should have thought this through more before I sent that email. I bet she's wondering if I even know what I'm doing. And now you're feeling anxious, and you spend the whole evening preparing to defend your idea at nauseum.

And you arrive at the meeting guarded. You over-explain. Maybe you even withdraw the idea before your boss has a single negative word to say about it. And then perhaps your boss says this.

I really like your idea. I want to talk about how we could expand it. Now your story wasn't just wrong; it had already changed your behavior. You clammed up and shut down before anyone else even had a chance to respond to the actual work, to the actual idea.

Now this is the sequence that plays out in dozens of in your brain, dozens of times every day in the workplace. Okay, I get worked up just talking about it, just thinking about it. Okay, let's take a look at what's happening here. Obviously, this is some sort of self talk that's happening in your brain, and again, we're going to have these thoughts, this constant narrative running through our brain all day long, and just quick side note: it's part of what keeps us alive.

Your brain's number one job is to keep you, your physical body and brain, alive, and it is always looking out for you and going warning, warning. Hey, maybe we need to be nervous about that, or unsure about that, or anxious about that. So your brain is just kind of on high alert. That's how it runs all the time.

We can't stop that. We can't shut that mechanism down. I'm not asking you to, but the work of this episode is to learn to interrupt the sequence, to learn to interrupt the story that our brain is telling us before it starts running the show. Okay, so there is a Harvard Business School organizational theorist, Chris.

There is a Harvard Business School organizational theorist. His name is Chris Aguris, and he describes this process in what he calls the ladder of inference, and so his explanation for this is in fact a lot longer. I'm going to give you a much shorter way to remember this, but I think this coaching model that I'm going to share with you is extrapolated from his work. So the ladder of inference goes something like this: we observe data and we immediately select and filter it because not our brain doesn't treat all data equally, so we, you know, sort of pick and choose which pieces we really land on, and then we assign meaning to that.

We draw conclusions about that, and from there, that's where we take action or have a reaction, and that all happens in a split second. Okay, so from a coaching standpoint, the way I often talk about it is there's facts, you know, the circumstances that unfolded. Say that terse email from your boss, just four words, and then there's the story that we tell ourselves about those facts or about that circumstance, and then that story generates feelings in us. It it generates an emotional response, just like any good story does.

You know, you're reading a good book and it's suspenseful, and you're, you know, waited with bated breath to find out what happens next, or you're watching a TV, a TV show or a drama that makes you cry or tear up. Okay, so any good story is going to elicit an emotional response. So that's what's supposed to happen, and then based on or from that emotional state, that's where we take action or have a reaction, and then the results that we get are derived from the actions or reactions that we took. Okay, so that's kind of how I think about it from a coaching model.

But again, I want to give credit where credit is due, and this traces all back to the organizational theorist at Harvard Business School. Okay, so the research has been consistent on this for decades. Our brains are interpretation machines, and they work really fast. This all happens in a split second.

Now, the goal in all of this is not to shut down the mechanism that's keeping us alive, of course, but the goal is to stop confusing the story we tell ourselves with the facts. Because what we do is, you know, something happens, like the example I just shared, and we say, My boss thinks it's a bad idea, and we don't even know. But we have layered on the story. My boss thinks this is a bad idea to the forward response we got from the email that we sent.

Okay, so it's not just simply about like washing our story and cleaning it up and telling ourselves a different story. It's really to discern what the actual facts of the situation are now. We can then choose to tell ourselves a different story if we want to, but that's not what I'm talking about here. Now, I want to really first just delve into the distortions that we're making when we collapse the story we're telling ourselves with the actual circumstances or the facts.

So, cognitive psychologists have cataloged the specific patterns that our brains use to generate these stories, and most of them go back to Aaron Beck's foundational work on cognitive behavior therapy in the 1960s and 1970s. Now that's maybe a little bit geeky and a little bit more than you need to know, but again, I like to give credit where it's due. And three are especially common in workplace contexts and worth naming so that you recognize them when they show up. Okay, and these have kind of fun names.

Okay, so play along here. The first one is mind reading. You believe that you know what somebody else thinks or intends without any evidence. He doesn't respect me.

She's micromanaging me. She deliberately left me off that email, off that meeting invitation, okay. Those kinds of things. You're presuming you know somebody else's motivation for why they did something.

So you are essentially telling yourself a story about having read their mind. You have no idea. You just completely made that up. It's total fiction.

Okay, but so that's the first one, mind reading. Okay, number two is fortune telling. I told you these were fun names, didn't I? Okay, again, not my names.

I didn't come up with the names, but they are really fun in and memorable ways to think about what our brain is doing at work. Okay, so in fortune telling, you predict a negative outcome and you treat that prediction as fact. I'm not qualified enough to put my name in the hat for the promotion, or I can't give a speech. I'd embarrass myself, or they're looking for someone more senior to fill that role.

Okay, so you are, you know, presuming that you know what the future holds, and that you are probably not qualified or shouldn't put yourself out there. So you'll notice that all of these have you telling yourself a very disempowering story. Okay, so fortune telling was that second one, and then catastrophizing is our third. Again, I told you they were fun.

Okay, so when you are catastrophizing, you are overestimating the probability or severity of a negative outcome. If I ask this question, everyone will know I don't understand, and they'll all think I'm a fool, or my idea just isn't ready. I need to work on it more. Okay.

Well, even my idea isn't ready. I need to work on it more. That's not even that much of a catastrophe. But when we think like I can't possibly say this outside out loud.

I will totally embarrass myself. I'll be the laughing stock of the team. Okay, those kinds of thoughts are catastrophizing. Now, these are not character flaws.

These three different types of of thinking. Okay, let me run through them again just to remind you. Okay, mind reading, fortune telling, and catastrophizing. Okay, again, they're not character flaws.

We all do them. They are universal cognitive patterns. Human brain is running its default software, its interpretation software, at full speed, and the programming isn't that you should stop doing this. The problem isn't that you should stop doing this.

The problem is that you're doing this without realizing that you're doing it. Okay, so you're going to still do it, but what I want you to do is to start to catch yourself. Okay, so let's look at where this shows up at work. So there are three categories where believing our thoughts can totally derail us and have negative consequences for our career.

The first is when there's an opportunity. So if you are telling yourself, I'm not qualified enough, they're looking for for someone who's more senior. I'd embarrass myself if I tried for this role. Okay, those things you are again doing yourself a massive disservice.

People self-select out of opportunities before anyone else gets to evaluate you, before anyone else gets a vote. You've already voted yourself down, so the hiring manager never sees your resume. The stretch assignment goes to somebody who actually raised their hand and volunteered for it. The idea that might have changed the conversation never gets said out loud because you shut yourself down before you even opened your mouth, and the brain files it under evidence that I was right when they choose somebody else when somebody else's idea gets advanced when the only and the only evidence that we have is that we didn't try.

Okay, now the distortion at work here is fortune telling. We are predicting the outcome and then behaving as if the prediction were already true. And of course, it is a self fulfilling prophecy because if we tell ourselves we're not qualified or we don't have enough experience, and then we don't put our name in the hat, and then they don't pick us, then we tell ourselves, See, of course, I was right. They chose so and so.

She has more experience. Well, how would we know if they might have chosen us or not if we didn't put our name out there? Okay, all right. So, opportunity is the first place this shows up.

Second place this shows up is in relationships. Okay, listen for these thoughts and see if you haven't maybe had some of these thoughts. Oh, he doesn't respect me. She deliberately left me out of that meeting.

They don't value my input. Okay, so we are attributing intention to ambiguous behavior, and then we're interacting with people based on an intention that we have invented. Okay, we made up that the person deliberately left us off the meeting invitation. It might have been a legit oversight.

Okay, have you ever thought of that? All right, I'm jumping ahead of myself to how we're going to navigate this, but it could be that somebody was distracted. It could be that somebody was in a rush. Okay, there's all of these other ways in which this behavior could be entirely explainable.

Okay, so somebody didn't copy you on the email or invite you to the meeting. It again, it doesn't mean that they're deliberately sidelining you or trying to keep you out of the loop. But when you start to believe that, then the relationship starts to erode. Because if you believe that about the email or the meeting that you didn't get invited to, then when you show up to the meeting later in the day that you both are invited to, let's say somebody else's meeting, you've already got a chip on your shoulder about it, and you think that person is slighting you, and you know, and is going to probably slight you again, again, not because of anything that actually happened, but because of the story that we have built around something that could have had a dozen different explanations, but we came up with an explanation that completely was a disservice to us.

Now the distortion here is mind reading. We are assuming that we know what someone else thought or intended without checking with them, or without checking to see if there was a plausible other explanation. All right, and then the the third place I want to talk about where this happens is with performance and visibility. So visibility around the organization.

Now it might sound, or you might hear yourself running thoughts like this. Well, if I ask this question, everyone's going to know that I don't understand, or they're going to presume I'm not qualified for even the role I already have. Another thought you might hear in your head is my idea isn't fully formed yet, so I'm not going to say anything because I don't want to put a half-baked idea out there and then have them think that I don't know what I'm talking about. Or you might also hear yourself thinking this in a meeting: Oh, somebody else probably has a better answer.

I think I might know the answer, but somebody else probably has a better answer. And then you stay quiet. People stay silent precisely when their contribution might actually matter the most and really make a meaningful difference. So, a couple of researchers, Milliken and Morrison, their research published in the Academy of Management Review found that employees frequently choose silence not because they lack good ideas, but because of anticipated negative evaluation.

Most of which is not based on evidence. Most of which is just made up in our heads. So it is the fear of looking incompetent, the fear of being judged or saying the wrong thing, and those fears aren't generated by this inner voice, by our thinking inside of our head, not by actual feedback that we've gotten from other people. So we silence ourselves preemptively and call it good judgment.

Now I talked about some of this why we don't speak up in meetings in an earlier episode, and we'll link that episode up in the show notes to this episode. This episode, by the way, is episode number 287, and you can find the show notes at my website Janel anderson.com forward slash 287 for episode 287. Now, the distortion that is present in the examples that I just shared is catastrophizing. So, treating a very low probability thing with an outcome that is supersized and of course negatively supersized, so and imagining that outcome as a near certainty.

Now, just to prove that we all do this, let me tell you about a time when I did it not too long ago. Okay, so I have a long-term client who's booked me for a bunch of different things. I've done some executive coaching for her top leadership. I've done I've executive coached her.

I have done offsites for her team and just a whole variety of things over a span of I don't know five or six years. Now she was looking for a specific offsite experience for a leadership retreat of the top level of folks who report into her, so I don't know about eight, eight to 10 different people, and she sent me an email and she described generally that she wanted to do an offsite experience, and she was looking to see what ideas did I have to lead a bit of like you know sort of team building, so they get to know each other better and have stronger relationships, but really had some you know heavy content behind it as well. And so I I shot her a quick email back that I said great. I'll think on this for a couple days and I'll shoot you some ideas.

She replies really fast with excellent, great, can't wait to see what you come up with. Okay, so I did what I often do. I thought about it for you know a day or two, came up with a few different ideas. One's a little off the wall, one that's pretty straightforward, and one that's kind of in the middle.

And I again, I did what I often do: is I sat down in front of my computer and I shot a quick video, and I said, Hey, so and so client, I have three ideas for you for how this offsite could go. Idea number one is the and you know and I thought I'd make a little video because it's easier for me to explain it than for me to type you know paragraphs of information trying to get the point across. So I make her a little video and I say idea number one is this and I pitch that idea. Idea number two is this.

I pitch that idea. Idea number three. Okay, you get the idea, and I make this video and I send her an email with a link to the video, and then I wait, and I wait, and I wait, and I wait. I heard nothing back for a full week, and I just assumed that she hated all of my ideas.

I was absolutely catastrophizing. So finally, I put on my big girl panties, and I pinged her on email, and I said, Hey, so and so client, not sure if you saw my email from last week, but I pitched you three different ideas about what we might do at the at this offsite. Well, she emailed me back within seconds how embarrassed she was that her email back to me was in her drafts folder, and she loved idea number one, and she wanted me to send over the contract information. Okay, so I was catastrophizing for like I mean, the first couple days I didn't think much of it.

I was just like, okay, send her the I sent her these ideas. She's got to have time to like look, you know, watch the video, open the email. Watch the video. Think about them for a couple days.

But by the time like day five was rolling around, I was starting to get nervous. Day six. Day seven. I was you know again totally catastrophizing that she hated all of my ideas and she never wanted to hire me again.

So this is how our brains work. And again, I share that example so that you totally know that it happens to me too. It happens to all of us. Okay, let's talk about now.

What do we do? How do we unpack this? Because of course, I was catastrophizing. Whether you are catastrophizing or whether you are, yeah, whether whether you're catastrophizing or you are mind reading, or you are fortune telling.

The method for dismantling it is the same. So let's walk through the method for dismantling these. Okay, it's a very practical and simple tool. You're going to ask yourself three questions, and the time to ask yourself these three questions is when you sense yourself mind reading negatively, catastrophizing, and so on.

Like any one of these three, and and there's usually a strong negative emotional response that you're having. It could be anxiety, defensiveness, hesitation, resentment. Okay, any one of those, or other negative anger, any one of those negative emotions. Then I want you to run these three questions before you ask.

Okay, so here is your methodology and your framework inside of this episode. Number one, what are the facts? Okay, so strip away everything you've added, all the story that you have added. What actually happened?

So in the case of my client and I, she sent me an email asking for some ideas. I sent a video back. Well, I sent a quick email back. She acknowledged that email, so we had this pattern of rapid response time.

Then I sent a video connected to an email that had a long response time or no response time after a week. Okay, that those were the facts. Those were the only facts. So, what actually happened?

What was actually said? What do you actually know? Okay, that was it. Okay.

Question number two to ask yourself: What story am I telling myself about those facts? You need to name the story that you're saying to yourself. Say it out loud if you need to. Now, there is research on self-distancing, including Ethan Cross's work at the University of Michigan, and it shows that when you give your thoughts language, like when you say your thoughts out loud, it helps you observe them rather than just experience them.

So my story in this case was she doesn't like any of my ideas, okay. When I tell myself that story out loud, I was, and then it then it causes me to question that story because I was like, well, wait a minute. I've had her as a client and her team, her organization as a client for like six years. She's never told me that she doesn't like any of my ideas.

So by saying it out loud, you can start to identify how much of a fabrication that it really is, and how much of a total fiction you're telling yourself. So you you need to say the story ideally out loud. Sometimes you could just think it through and go like, of course, that's probably not really what's going on. Okay, then question number three to ask yourself: What else might be true?

What else might be going on? Okay, and this is the positive intent question. This is the question that does the real work. It doesn't ask you to replace a negative story with a positive one.

It asks you to recognize that you don't actually know, she might have concerns about my work. Can still be on the list. The goal is to hold uncertainty instead of treating your story like a verdict. Okay, so those three questions again, and they're in the show notes too.

But I'll just run through them one more time for you. What are the facts? What story am I telling myself about the facts? What else could be true?

Okay, so you run yourself through those questions. It's a story audit. That's what I like to think of it as. You're auditing yourself on the story you're telling yourself.

So the story audit, and then one action question: Given what I actually know, what's the next useful thing to do. Given what I actually know, what's the next useful thing to do? Well, in my case, the next useful thing to do was to reach out to my client and say, Hey, did you see the video that I made for you with the three ideas? Was there one of them that stood out as one that you would that you're interested in moving forward with?

And if not, I have some other ideas too. Okay, so that was my one thing: is to send a follow up email. So this is the move from introspection to action, and maybe the useful thing is to ask your manager a direct question. Hey, when you ask to review this before it go out, before it goes out, is there something specifically that you'd like me to do differently?

Like, so for example, if your boss said, Hey, run that by me before you send it out, like, is there something specific that I've done wrong in the past that you're looking for a certain error? Okay, so like now you have the information to know what they're looking for, so you're not making up a story about why your boss wants to see a draft of something before it goes out to everybody else, and this is a much better place to work from because you're no longer working from speculation. You're interrogating your own thinking and then asking a simple question of somebody else to get some feedback, so that again you stop your brain from making up stuff about yourself. Okay, so there's an important distinction here.

This is not a positive thinking exercise. This is a meaning. This is more of like finding a meaningful difference between your negative thinking and accurate negative information. Okay, because at this point there is no negative information.

It's just negative thinking, and it's not just to like slap sunshine and roses and a pretty story on it and make your try to make yourself feel better. You're going to actually take some action to get to the bottom of whether or not there's a there there with your negative thinking. Okay, so again, in my case, it was just send a simple follow up email. Hey, did you see my previous email that had the video attached?

That's it. So sometimes your manager might really be dissatisfied. Sometimes my client might really not like any of the three ideas that I put out there. That's entirely possible.

Sometimes, sometimes a presentation didn't go well. You genuinely weren't ready for the assignment. Okay, the story audit doesn't ask you to discount those possibilities. They still get to be possibilities.

It just asks you to make sure that you have evidence before you actually take action on them. Okay, so the next action probably is to get more information instead of actually take action. Okay, hope that makes sense. All right.

So the question isn't whether the thought that you have is negative or not. The question is whether you actually have evidence for it. So you don't have to stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself you're brilliant. Okay, you know that's a that's a different episode.

If you want to do those positive affirmations, you certainly can. I'm not here to discount those. I'm just here to talk about this. In this case, we want to take those negative thoughts that you have that are preventing you from moving forward in your career, or getting in the way of relationships at work, and dismantle them because you don't actually have evidence for them.

Okay, you just need to stop treating something that your brain invented 14 seconds ago as established fact, because it's not. Okay, so let's just name what this episode was all about as we wrap things up. Number one, the brain generates stories automatically and immediately. That is not a flaw.

That is not a character defect. What becomes a flaw or a character defect is when you treat those stories as facts. All right. Number two, there are three distortions to watch for that we talked about in this episode: mind reading, fortune telling, and catastrophizing.

Okay, naming the distortion is the first disruption because you're calling yourself out on it. Number three, ask the action question before you take action. Before you act, given what I already know, what is the most useful thing I should do next? And you know, overall, here the goal is for accurate thinking, not positive thinking.

Some concerns are real. The story audit helps you find out which ones of those are actually true, and what additional information you might need to get before you know any sort of truth whatsoever. All right, now. here is how you can put it to work. The next time you notice a strong reaction at work-anxiety, defensiveness, resentment, hesitation, anger-stop before you act.

Run the story audit. Ask yourself these three questions: What are the facts? What story am I telling myself about these facts, and what else could be true? Again, you may have to even say it out loud, and then ask yourself: Given what I actually know, what is the most useful next thing to do?

That's it. One reaction, one audit. Start right there. I teach this framework in some of the workshops that I do right now, and if you want to bring this kind of work to your organization, by all means, reach out to me at dranelAnderson.com on my website.

Find the contact page, drop me a note there, or just find me on email or LinkedIn or wherever our paths might cross, and shoot me a message. You can find the show notes for this episode at Janel anderson.com forward slash 287 for episode 287, and if this episode resonated with you, I would love for you to share it with a colleague that you know maybe has a particularly loud inner critic who might benefit from this reminder that we tell ourselves stories, you know, because that's just the way our brains work, but that we have to stop and question those stories so that they don't get in the way of things like career and career advancement and you know strong working relationships with our colleagues in the workplace. This is the kind of content that's more useful in conversation with somebody else rather than consumed alone. So it might be the kind of thing that you share with your team.

I know that there are some folks who do some team team building by either doing a book club. One of my clients did a book club on my book. They've also done. I have several clients who will do kind of like a book club, but their whole team will listen to an episode of the podcast and then discuss at their next team meeting or discuss over lunch, kind of like a lunch and learn sort of thing.

So again, this is one of those that is really helpful to have these conversations with one another and do this kind of learning together. Maybe it's with your work BFF, maybe it's with your actual BFF, and you don't even work together. But whatever way it makes for makes sense for you to consume it and consume it with others, by all means, go for it. All right, my friends, I'll catch you back here next week for another episode of Working Conversations.