In this episode, Nick dives into the significance of our inner dialogue and its profound impact on our external experiences. He emphasizes the importance of shaping our inner dialogue to navigate life’s challenges and the ups and downs we experience each day. Nick explores the mechanics of self-talk, the role of awareness in recognizing negative patterns, and the necessity of self-reflection in personal growth.

What to listen for:

“If we understand our internal dialogue, we can then make different decisions.”

“When we have the inner dialogue that isn’t actually healed, it’s not helpful for us; then it makes the rest of our lives more and more difficult.”

About Nick McGowan

I’m Nick McGowan, an entrepreneur, podcaster, and mental health advocate, and I’ve been on a 20+ year journey of personal development, learning to master my mindset, emotions, and the art of living with purpose.

As a Mindset and Self-Mastery Mentor, I work with ambitious men and women who want to live their most authentic and joyous lives by helping them master their mindset, emotional awareness, and authentic communication. My mission is to empower people to lead lives that feel aligned, grounded, and truly their own.

Throughout my career, I’ve built teams, streamlined systems, and improved client experiences across SaaS, media, marketing, and personal development spaces. Whether I’m leading cross-functional projects, optimizing SEO, Podcasting, designing strategies, or guiding clients through transformation, I bring a hands-on, solution-focused approach to everything I do.

I’m also the host of The Mindset and Self-Mastery Show, where my guests and I unpack the stories that shape us, challenge us, and ultimately guide us back to who we are at our core. On this show, we uncover the secret gems others have discovered through trial and error and breakthroughs, so you can fast-track your growth and master your mindset in your pursuit of self-mastery. Check out the latest episode here.

With years of podcasting and two decades of marketing experience, I’ve mastered the storytelling, interview flow, strategy, and technical production that elevate a podcast from “just content” to something truly impactful. Whether you’re a leader looking to amplify your message, a seasoned speaker and podcast host looking to sharpen your edge, or even a beginner who is wondering how to share their message, I mentor thought leaders through every step of having the conversation they’re here to have on this planet.

So, what message are you here to share?!

Resources:

Check out other episodes about our inner dialogue and managing negative self-talk.

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Your Friends at “The Mindset & Self-Mastery Show”

Nick McGowan (00:00.302)
Hello and welcome to the mindset and self mastery show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan. Today on the show, I want to talk about shaping our inner dialogue to get better external results. And on the show, I like to get really macro with things because I think that’s where change actually happens. It’s in those moments where we work on the stuff now before the situation happens that we’ll be better equipped to handle whatever situation comes up.

I’ve learned this the hard way. Sometimes I think I’m really prepared. I’m good to go. Then I get into a situation and something happens. It’s like, my God, I didn’t expect that to happen. I didn’t know how to handle it or whatever it was. And those moments can literally make or break us because sometimes when we’re going through a situation that we’re maybe a little uncomfortable with or not as confident about, we can start to falter on the things like our principles.

or the things that we know to be true and are really consistent within ourselves. So when I think about having an internal dialogue, that’s more of a positive mindset dialogue. This isn’t something to just bypass the stuff that you’ve been through. This is about being able to understand that the moment you’re in right then and there is the only moment that you actually have. So when you’re in that moment, whatever the situation is,

If your inner dialogue is in a negative place, let’s say, then that moment’s probably going to turn out not as good as you want it to be, just straight up. But if your inner dialogue is more on a positive note, and I’m using these as black and whites in a sense, then you’re bound to have a better overall experience because of the inner dialogue. So think about it this way. If you wake up in the morning and you instantly think,

Today’s gonna be such a shitty day. I hate all these things. I don’t even wanna get out of bed. don’t wanna ever. You probably argue with your partner. You yell at your kids or your animals or whatever. You get on the road, you drive to your office and you’re shitty with everybody else on the road.

Nick McGowan (02:37.462)
if you woke up a little differently and had a overall mindset and experience from waking up, you probably, even if something happened with your spouse, your partner or your animals or the dude driving past you, you’re probably going to handle that situation differently, at least slightly differently. Now, if you wake up in the morning and you hate yourself and you hate everything that’s going on, there’s work there.

be done. It may also be part of your design. I’ve learned about myself that I will wake up in two different states. Super excited, or grumpy as fuck to put it nicely, because in those states, when I wake up and I am unsure of what I want to do or whatever it is that really determines what happens next. I’ve learned about myself that I’m in one of those two states for some reason that has happened the day before. I’ll give you a prime example.

I’ve been busy for the past few months and haven’t been able to play music as much. And I’m actively working on an album. And for me, playing music and even just working through concepts of riffs and just even drum parts for like three hours does magical things for me that helps me at a bass level feel like I’m doing something for myself.

Not just doing things for clients or for other people or even things for my business that are still for myself, but just, you know, they’re not me playing music and scratching that itch. Being able to spend a little bit of time with that has become really, really, really important to me because I understand that the more aware I am of that, the more that it’ll affect the next day. It’s not a magical pill. It’s not like, you know, I play guitar for two hours one night and then the next day it’s the best fucking day in the entire world. It’s not how this works.

But I do understand that that is a part of how I relate to the rest of the world. And I can be aware of that and do something with it. So let’s break down what inner dialogue is. You know what it is. It’s the talking to yourself. If we look at a shitty internal dialogue, you know exactly what that is as well, because I’m pretty sure you do it pretty often. We all do.

Nick McGowan (04:59.702)
Even the people that say, no, I’m constantly positive. I’m constantly this, constantly that. You don’t really know what those conversations are internally. We just don’t. And I think the people that are bypassing and toxic positivity in a sense, they’re hurting themselves. And I know that because I’ve done that before too. Haven’t you? We’ve all done something like that where we’ve said, this is how I want to be. So I’m just going to do it and not do the work with it.

When we have the inner dialogue that isn’t actually healed and it’s not helpful for us, then it makes the rest of our lives more and more difficult. I don’t want to take this down the path of saying this is the only thing that’ll fix everything because I have heard at times where people say you can’t just mindset your way through things. I know that is not what this is about. This is about setting yourself up from a better perspective.

and also being able to look at the thing and say, you know, I’m feeling real shitty right now. Why is that? If we can understand where that has come from, even just to know this is the thing, this is what happened, or this is what made me feel this way, or the reason why I feel this way, or the reason why I’m being negative, or even the reason why I’m being super positive, we can at least understand why that is to then do something with it from there. I think sometimes we as people,

just allow ourselves to be shitty, just straight up. And I get it. I am shitty at times. The people that know me the best absolutely know this. And sometimes I’ve thought that it was part of my process. That’s how I go through things. And that’s not always the case because there’s being curious, there’s being judgmental, and some of that can like overlap. But then there’s also just being really shitty about things because I don’t feel good about a situation.

or feel good in my body or didn’t sleep well enough or whatever it was. But the internal dialogue that says today’s gonna be shitty or this is gonna happen, it’s gonna be bad, whatever. Sometimes those aren’t actually even words. It’s just a feeling. So if we take apart our inner dialogue just over the course of one day and catch the moments where we’re being really, really shitty, I don’t mean to just keep using that, but that’s kinda how it is.

Nick McGowan (07:23.778)
We’re shitty, we’re being grumpy, we’re being negative about a situation and not actually working through the situation.

I’m not talking about sitting there for two hours and processing a thing, but at least understanding that right now I’m feeling this way. So what can I do now to be able to get through your work day or the situation you’re in or what have you? And it can be a mechanical sort of approach of saying, well, I’m going to choose to have a better mindset with this right now. Again, I don’t want you to think of this as bypassing.

We are never bypassing. If you need to do work on these things, do the work. But that doesn’t always mean you can do it right then and there. It’s not about just saying, all right, world, time out. I need to process through a thing. Now granted, there are some people that can do that. And for business owners, sometimes it’s easier for us to do that. Sometimes it’s straight up not because there’s just a lot going on. There are many things happening, lots of questions. And as the owner of a company, we, you know, we’re the ones.

so the buck stops with us. So we need to be able to answer those things or be on or what have you. But understanding where our internal dialogue is will ultimately shape how the rest of the outcomes are. And it took me a long time to really understand that. And it took me even longer to start to put it into action. And it’s taken me even longer for it to become part of who I am. I joke now about certain things that should have

I thought should have taken me a lot faster to get through, but that’s not how it works. So understanding why we have the inner dialogue that we do is almost as important as what we do with that inner dialogue from there. So the ongoing beliefs, the ongoing thoughts that we have, the self-talk that just running through us day in and day out, that’s our inner dialogue. But what’s the inner dialogue like?

Nick McGowan (09:27.988)
I heard somebody say to me years ago, if you had a friend that talked to you the way that you talk to yourself, you’d probably want to kick his ass. If not, take them off the planet. They’re totally right. I think about the stuff that you say to yourself. Think about it. Think about the stuff you probably said to yourself a fucking hour.

Just let that sink in. If some other human said that to you, you’d potentially have a restraining order. You would not want them to be part of your life. Now you may actually have people that are part of your life that do that. You don’t have to do that to yourself. I want to make that clear. You don’t have to do that to yourself. It’s not a penance or anything, depending on what you had done in the past. It’s being able to actually take the dialogue that you have right now and say, well, today’s this day.

This is what I have going on today. And if I don’t like those things or I want to change those things, great. Can I do it right now? Can I instantly change it, pivot to something else or what have you? And if you can, wonderful. If you can’t, then that’s what it is. You need to work through that and you need to be in that moment to do it. I think about it in the sense of people going to jobs that they hate. I can think back to different experiences I’ve had at different jobs. I remember sitting there watching the clock.

Being like, fucking hate this. I can’t be here anymore. This is nonsense. Part of it was that I knew there was a greater calling for myself. Another part of it was me just being shitty about the situation that I was in and beating myself up because I put myself in that situation. Haven’t you done that? Think about the different times that you’ve done that. Think about the amount of times maybe even today that you’ve done that. And if we just pause that and say, I understand.

And yeah, I don’t want to be in this spot right now. But I also understand that I’m just not able to snap my fingers and make a change instantly, and that things will take a little bit of time. That’s where you actually get to mechanically change your mindset and say, this is what I’m going to do. This is how I’m going to put my mind into motion in this specific situation. So if we think about inner dialogue and we think about the external results from that.

Nick McGowan (11:44.63)
you can start to look back at different situations where you say, you know, I experienced this differently than I had in the past because of the way that I thought about it going into the situation or because of the way that my way of being is now or whatever it was. If we break it down to a very black and white level, there was probably some positive or negative emotions and thoughts and feelings tied to whatever you were doing. And

Even if it was subconscious where your subconscious was like, you know what? We’ve done this before, we can do it again. And you didn’t have to really think about it. It just kind of came out. That’s fine. That’s almost like it’s how you’ve healed from it. At least to some extent. Subconscious isn’t there to make us feel better. It’s there to keep us alive and safe. So you’ve probably experienced the opposite side of that more often than not.

of I don’t really know what do in this situation. So I feel uncomfortable. I feel weird. I feel this. I feel that that’s normal. We all go through that stuff. I’ll give you an example with myself. I’ve had something recently local networking where I’ve gone out and met with different people. And whenever I get called up to the front to talk about my business, talk about myself, et cetera, there’s always a little bit underneath that’s like, Oh, do you look weird? Do you sound weird?

Are you saying the right things? All of that. That’s our subconscious trying to just keep us safe. It’s abnormal. And if it’s not something you do every single day, or even if it’s something you’ve done for a long, long, long time, that can still be there. It’s trying to keep you safe and trying to keep you comfortable. But I know in those situations, I can look at that and go, I’m just going to go out and do what I do. And I’m going to rest on me being authentic. And worst case scenario, somebody says,

You said something weird or you looked weird or you did whatever and think about it. Honestly, in most situations like that, if somebody says, I don’t like your shirt, fuck you. Who the fuck cares? Go away. It doesn’t matter. It’s all in our own heads and we’re the ones beating ourselves up about it. And for the most part, everybody else, when they’re having their own problems or thinking of you about, don’t like your shirt or they don’t like whatever it is. That’s a them problem. That has nothing to do with you. We can take that.

Nick McGowan (14:05.112)
And we can say, I can do something with it or next time I’ll wear a Hawaiian shirt because fuck you, whatever you want, you know? But being able to understand your own inner dialogue can be affected by other people, other situations, other things, but it’s really up to you to do something with your inner dialogue to then turn it into something external. Now I’m not saying that this is a hustle or grind sort of situation.

Like you need to have better mindset so you can go out and make millions of dollars because everybody needs 50 fucking homes. That’s not the case at all. What I’m talking about is being able to actually work through your own inner dialogue to feel confident in yourself to do the thing you’re actively doing. But this happens in a nanosecond, which is again why I like to break down these macro pieces because we can work on it right now.

where down the road when you get into that situation, you don’t just instantly flounder because you’re falling back on the negative mindset. You’re falling back into the mindset of, I don’t know what to do here, so I’m just gonna shit a little bit. And like, what the fuck? What do I say? What do I do? How do I act? You wanna be able to work on this stuff before you get into those situations so you don’t actually have to think about it while you’re in those situations. Getting back to my example of speaking in front of a room. I speak all the time. I talk to people all the time.

I also really love being by myself. When working on my music or going through my sports cards or reading or whatever it is, just by myself, everybody leave me alone. But I know in those moments when I’m in front of people, I have to be on in a way that is truthful to me. Now past me, years and years and years ago, I would have turned on to become somebody else. Almost like the persona, the mamba mentality in a sense.

Like I would just become somebody different. And there was always a bit of authenticity to it, but there was also tying into my winning strategy of how I could be loved and how it could be admired and how I could win and all of that. If we understand those components and those pieces, because those make up our internal dialogue, we can then make different decisions. But it’s understanding why our internal dialogue is the way that it is. Some of that may be trauma.

Nick McGowan (16:28.3)
Some of that may be somebody said something to you as a five-year-old that led you to believe a thing either about yourself, good or bad, or about other people, good or bad. And then that affected the way that you handled things from that point on. That changed the story that you lived from that point on. What I’m talking about is being able to understand why the components make up your internal dialogue and that your subconscious mind is just there to keep you safe.

doesn’t really give a shit how you feel or how confident you are in a situation. It’s just there to keep you safe. If you can understand those things and you can understand how you’re acclimated toward things, then you can do something with that. So when you’re in a situation where you have to be in front of people or pick anything that makes you uncomfortable or it’s a little outside of the norm of what you’re used to, you’ll be in a better spot at that point to be able to not only handle that situation,

handle yourself because you’ve extracted what the internal dialogue is. Now with me, like I said, I’ll wake up and I’ll either feel great or bad. That’s really black and white. And I’ve asked myself, I’ve started to ask myself each morning, how am I feeling right now? Am I feeling great? Am I feeling bad? And being honest with myself. There’s sometimes I wake up in the morning and I’m like, how are you feeling right now? I’m feeling great, feeling bad. I feel like shit.

And I can understand it’s because maybe I ate something too late the night before, or I didn’t sleep well, or there’s something nagging in the back of my mind about some project or something that’s going on or something around the house or whatever it is. But if I can look at that and say, it’s that thing. It’s being able look at that thing and go, cool, well, I see you. And deciding, do I get to do something with it now? Do I need to? Do I not? Whatever it is.

being able look at it and just see what it is has given me a lot of confidence to go, okay, cool. Well, now I know what it is. So I’m just going to move along instead of the fear of the unknown in a sense. Now about maybe, I don’t know, 15 years ago or so I was in a a rock band in Philadelphia and we had a song called white bear because of a concept that I learned where somebody said, if I asked you to not think about a white bear,

Nick McGowan (18:54.146)
Whatever you do, just don’t think about a white bear. So get the white bear out of your mind. It’s whatever you do, don’t think about a white bear. How many times did a white bear pop in your head? Pretty much every time I said it, right? So if we’re focusing on, be shitty, don’t be negative, guess what you’re gonna be? More than likely, probably shitty, probably negative. And the same goes for being positive.

Say be really positive be this and be that and be external and do all these things The the thought of that can spur that on But it’s the act that happens within it and what happens after it that is the most important Because even if I said don’t think about a white bear You’re probably gonna think about it because I put it near the foreground here you think about a white bear and then from there you get a choice to be able to think do I want to

build out what that white bear looks like. Do I want to think of that as a Coca-Cola bears or do I want to think about it as a bear that I saw when I was younger or whatever and you will start to kind of go through that path. But if you look at the negative and positive internal dialogue that we have, if you try to force yourself to push past something and bypass it, it might work for you right then and there, but it’s going to come back to bite you. So with all of this,

your internal dialogue, if you start to understand why do you typically think about X while you’re in this sort of situation, or why do you feel this sort of way when you’re in X situation and think about that now before that situation happens again, I guarantee you will at least be in a better spot to be able to handle that. I can’t guarantee that it won’t look the way that it did before, but it will start to shift a little bit. had an experience a couple of years ago where

I was doing a lot of internal work and folding inside out and it was fucking messy. And I remember having a conversation with my partner and I could feel myself welling up and there was a reaction that was about to come out. There was literally a part of me that told myself, Nick, shut the fuck up and leave the house. And guess what I did? I kept fucking talking and I didn’t leave the house and I was aware of it.

Nick McGowan (21:19.242)
And it was maddening because I thought, you know, I thought about this. I can just do this and like grab myself and leave. No, there was still trauma that needed to be worked through. There were things that were part of my subconscious that I needed to extract. I needed to reframe and needed to look through. And it took me a long time. And there’s still moments where that happens. Not exactly how it did before, but moments where I’ll start to come up and I go, I see you, you fuck. I’m not going to go down that path again.

because I was able to do that work in those moments, but I also did work after those moments to say, all right, what happened? What do I do differently? How do I do this differently? It’s sort of like in sports where they watch game tape. They’ll go back and they’re not watching it to say, you fucked up here, you did this wrong. They’re saying, what could we do differently in these situations? And there’s a reason why those people do that. In a black and white way with sports, it can be easy to say you’re tape and film from a previous game or whatever.

us. If you had a really shitty day and there was a lot of negative self-talk going through and then by the time you go home all you want to do is just watch TV and veg and look I get it. Especially somebody who’s found out that he’s more of an introvert than he ever thought he was. I really enjoy being able to spend that veg time of relaxing and just being away from people. I’ve also understood in those moments there are certain times where

I’m really escaping. We’re trying to escape from something.

I may be a little different than you. You may be a little different than me. We’re all different than each other, but we are also very similar and we go through the same sort of things. This is why I have the podcast for us to be able to talk about this stuff and actually call this stuff out because I can almost guarantee that you’ve had some sort of shitty conversation with yourself today. Even like, why did I do that? Or why the fuck didn’t I wash this thing? Or why didn’t this thing happen? Or what about this? and maybe you don’t call yourself an idiot anymore.

Nick McGowan (23:22.958)
the sentiment is still there at times, right? You know, like there are different things that come up where you’re like, man, what a dumb bastard, I shouldn’t have done that, blah, blah, blah. Again, if you had a friend or somebody else that was like that, you’d call the cops on them or you’d have a restraining order or something. So if you think about your inner dialogue and the stuff that you go through every single day and how it relates to not only the dialogues, either.

Positive or negative influence on you But how the long-term effects actually relate to you because you’ll keep doing that over and over and over And sometimes it can be so ingrained that it’s really difficult to get ourselves out of it So one of the things that I really like to do and that I find to be the easiest thing to do in those situations Yep, oftentimes it’s kind of difficult when you’re really charged. So just be aware of it. Just straight up see it

and go, man, I’m being shitty again. But catch it and don’t be an asshole to yourself. Don’t be like you’re being shitty, you dumb fuck. Don’t, be nice to yourself about it. You also want to, in some ways, of parent yourself with that. Like, yeah, don’t do that anymore. Let’s look at what’s going on. Let’s actually talk through it. Let’s work through it. So if you have that simple awareness practice of just saying, I see these things.

Maybe for you, it’s taking notes of it and saying, I saw this today, I saw this today, this happened, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe it’s just mental notes. Maybe it’s things that you’ve seen over and over and over and you actually don’t want to touch them. Oftentimes that’s because there’s a fear of the unknown or some blocker that’s blocking you from that. And that’s where professionals come into play. People that can help as therapists or different modalities or mentors or…

anybody that can kind of work with you on those things that have been through some of that. But at least you can be aware of those things. And I think there’s such power in awareness. The more aware you are, the more aware you are. Like you can’t not see a thing after you’ve seen it. Sometimes it’ll take seeing it 10, 15, 20 times or even more. But you know that you probably have bad dialogue with yourself at times, but you know, I’m better off than I was before.

Nick McGowan (25:41.826)
or whatever excuse you add in. And that’s fine, because it’s your life, you get to do whatever you want. The question is really, how long do you want to sit in that shit for? And that can be, it can be a dumb question to certain people. They’re like, of course I don’t want to sit in that shit, but yet you’re still sitting in that shit. And look, I do this as well. Every day there are things that happen. And I ask myself, do I want to be shitty about this? No, but you’re gonna fucking damn it, blah, blah, blah. like, all right, Nick.

get through it, and now let’s have the conversation. Sometimes you need to let that energy out. Sometimes you also need to go through it a bit to then understand, it’s really in these situations when this happens because I feel this way, or I think this thing. And all that inner dialogue really shapes the way that our external worlds are because we’re setting ourselves up for either success or failure when it comes to that. So I wanna reinforce.

that there’s a massive link between the way that we talk to ourselves and the results that we get in the world. And that there isn’t anything to do with hustle or grind culture or going out and making bunches of money or even the total opposite of that and like saving all the homeless people from the entire world. Talking about being able to actually incorporate this into your daily life in every aspect of life.

but it takes breaking down how are you having those conversations in your head and what’s coming out of those conversations every single time. And do you want to change that? Do you not want to change that? I want you to think about two things. Think about two situations where, and I’m super confident and comfortable in this sort of situation. Some people might be public speaking. Some people might be playing music. It might be whatever the thing is. And then I want you to also think of what are the situations?

One or two situations that make me super uncomfortable. And I’m not telling you have to go share this with the world or talk to other people about it, but to yourself. Like there might be things that you go, I really feel uncomfortable about this, but this is a major part of my job or whatever it is. Great. Look at that. And then start to write out what comes up when I think about this. What comes up in those exact situations.

Nick McGowan (28:05.838)
because we can all recall a situation and we can put ourselves back in that spot. That’s a fun little playground. It’s like a simulation in the sense to be able to go through and say, I remember being in this spot and maybe feel this way and whatever. But in reality, if you’re able to actually understand why you do the things you do because of the conversations you’re having in your head, you’re able to change the way that you move through the world and therefore able to change the way that you impact the world. And that’s what this is all about.

I don’t believe that purpose is just for us as selfish human beings. I believe that purpose actually incorporates the rest of the world and even just our small little corner of the web of life. But if we can change the way that we look at things internally, we can then change the way that we act around and toward other people and ultimately change the way that we live life. You also need to do the work of the things that are coming up that are blocking you or stopping you.

So if you have questions about this, you wanna understand what has worked for me or what you could potentially do different than what you’re doing now, please feel free to reach out. I’d love to hear from you. And if there are certain topics like this that you want more discussions on, you want me to unpack more of, I’d love to hear from you. So thank you so much for being with me today. I hope this is helpful and I hope you do something with it.