The screaming chimp inside you
(Transcribed from video)
So I think this is the sixth or seventh video I’ve posted, and I thought I would muse off-the-cuff about what it’s been like doing this. You can probably tell from the color of my hair, I’m not a millennial. I’m a little bit older than that. I won’t specify how much. But what’s kind of interesting is, it’s starting slowly to become part of my muscle memory: publishing stuff, posting videos, online, writing blog posts. It’s slowly becoming part of part of my life, part of my habit, part of my thinking. And it’s reminded me, when I got up this morning, it reminded me of the time when I did something else crazy, about 11 years ago. Um I started training in taekwondo. The martial art.
It was something I took on. I used to sit in the cafe at the local leisure center where I would take my daughters to, to their dance classes, always a Tuesday evening. And I would sit in the cafe, look down through the window into the gymnasium where Master Gayle would train his students.
And I would look at them and I’d think, Gee, you know, that looks like quite challenging, and quite a bit of fun maybe. But it was also something that, in my head up here (tapping side of head), I thought, No, that’s, that’s too big. That’s impossible. I could never, like, I could never get to black belt status, black belt state. That was, to me, that was the impossible.
But I had gotten just old enough and wise enough by that point, to realize that the impossible is never that. Impossible isn’t a fact, It’s just an opinion. And the only way to find out if it’s correct opinion is to challenge the opinion.
And I remember showing up one Tuesday night, actually going in to the gym dressed. I was just dressed in a T-shirt and sweats. I didn’t even have a proper dobok.
So I was going into my first experience training, and what I remember most was what was running through my head at the time. I wasn’t the only first person to show up. There was two other people there who showed up for the first time. So I wasn’t the only newbie that particular night. (And what’s interesting is, all three us have gone on to get our black belts.)
But going through my head at the time was this, almost like the voice that you can sort of picture, a screaming chimpanzee that is agitated and upset about something, and jumping up and down, shrieking at the top of his lungs. There was THAT voice in my head screaming at me. “What are you doing? Who do you think you are? This is an absolutely insane idea. Get out of here. Stop this. Stop, stop. Just, just stop, stop subjecting me to this.”
And I pushed through. I persisted till the end of the class feeling stupid and foolish. And it felt like everybody was looking at me, mocking me. (Which they weren’t. Nobody was even paying the slightest attention to me. They were all busy training themselves. But that was the voice going through my head at the time.) My friend Perry Marshall calls it head trash. It’s the voice of self- doubt. It’s the voice of, it’s the voice of the screaming chimp.
Every one of us has that chimp inside our heads. You have to learn when the chimp is to be listened to, and when it’s to be told shut up. Fortunately for me, I told it Shut up! in that particular night. It would scream at me in many times again. It was three or four years. I don’t think I, I don’t think it stopped screaming until I got my green belt. By then the chimp had learned, that it was going to be told to shut up, and it stop screaming, and the rest is history. And that kind of chimp is going to scream in your head anytime you do something new, anytime you step out of your comfort zone
And the question you need to ask yourself, whenever you hear that chimp . . . (most people never ask the question):
Does the chimp have a point or is the chimp just screaming actually my clue that I am growing, that I’m taking a big step forward and this is the right thing to do.
Anytime you take the right step in a new direction, that chimp is going to scream. And you need to learn to recognize that chimp screaming as, nine times out of 10, that’s your clue: Ah! This is the right course of action. This is the right thing to do. I’m on the right track. Cool.
That’s what you need to recognize. Learn to recognize that that screech, that chimp, in your head. That’s your clue. You don’t listen to the chimp. You listen to it only insofar as to realize that that chimp is pointing you in the right direction. It’s trying to tell you to go the opposite way, but you ignore it. Or actually, no, you don’t ignore it, you grab it by the scruff of the neck, take it to a closet, throw it in, lock the door and say, Right, what were you saying? Sorry, let’s, let’s keep going.
Eventually the chimp will get the message. You might have to do it a few times. It will get the message anyway eventually. Right. Kirk out!
