For leaders, overthinking and negative self-talk can lead to decreased productivity. This is something that Ethan Kross, bestselling author of Chatter, is a leading expert in. He offers proven methods to take control of your inner voice, helping you transform your thinking to one that works for you, not against you. Last week, Ethan Kross, who teaches at the University of Michigan, was featured in The New Yorker article “How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking,” for his groundbreaking research on how to turn your inner critic into your inner coach.

Ethan’s national bestselling book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness it looks at how our internal conversations shape us, and how taking control of harmful thinking helps every aspect of our lives. His work continues to help leaders all over the world learn how to talk to themselves constructively, ultimately improving their physical and mental health and deepening their relationships.

In the article’s exploration of Ethan Kross book, The New Yorker sums up one of Ethan’s many methods to improve your thinking:

“Kross’s bottom line is that our inner voices are powerful tools that must be tamed. He ends his book with several dozen techniques for controlling our chatter. He advises trying “distanced self-talk”: by using “your name and the second-person ‘you’ to refer to yourself,” he writes, you can gain more command over your thinking. You might use your inner voice to pretend that you’re advising a friend about his problems; you might redirect your thoughts toward how universal your experiences are (It’s normal to feel this way) or contemplate how every new experience is a challenge you can overcome (I have to learn to trust my partner). The idea is to manage the voice that you use for self-management. Take advantage of the suppleness of dialogue. Don’t just rehearse the same old scripts; send some notes to the writers’ room.”