Self Talk, Type A Personalities and the Partnership Practice
So often, dominance-based behaviors don’t appear until someone acts in a way to leverage what one wants. In the research literature on type A personalities, hostility is not an uncommon attribute when researchers survey fellow employees and co-workers. Certainly not every type A personality acts hostile towards others, whether as a means to an end, an exhibition of frustration or some other reason.
An old friend of mine, one I’ve often thought of as a type A personality, early on became a high level executive. By age 40 he had succumbed to severe heart attack, resulting in intensive surgery. Statistics show a strong correlation between pronounced type A personality behavior as it was known when researched most extensively between the 1950’s and the 1990’s and risk of heart attack from hypertension.
On the one hand, the stereotypical type A who tends to become hostile—or in the case of my friend expressed impatience easily—could be said to be exercising dominance over themselves. This dominance may have been accompanied by continuously higher levels of stress hormones than many of the rest of us over a period of decades. The key aspect of this internal dominance of note tends to be the self talk or internal thinking that may accompany both stress and aggressive achievement.
Our self talk is usually learned from our primary caregivers and others around us, especially at an early age. Without conscious attention and compassionate listening, we may never really be fully aware of those messages—what we are saying to ourselves—and their effect on us. If we do pay attention to these messages over long periods of time, we may find that they are different when we are under stress than when we are relaxed. Different when we are trying to accomplish goals than when we are just being in the moment. Different when we feel obstructed or wronged—or dominated—by others than when we are in flow or are harmonizing well with others.
A sample of key dominance-based self talk to look out for might include strong or unhelpful self-criticism; inordinate self-blame; rarely being satisfied with one’s performance; or other general recriminations. There may be times when, as with an athletic coach or a drill sergeant, we may feel the benefits of some dominance-based verbal behaviors outweigh the detriments. Many people certainly would attribute their success to characteristics like a strong (sometimes relentless) discipline, or never giving up or giving in (as opposed to perhaps monitoring and cognitively re-thinking high-stress related negative or critical self talk).
We might frame a partnership practice with foremost a compassionate ear. When I’m striving for a goal these days, whether an athletic goal or a complex life goal, I listen closely to my self talk and observe how it naturally changes during states of fatigue, hunger, injury, obstruction and freshness. These states for me all induce different kinds of self talk. Prolonged stress and fatigue are states of consciousness that seem especially prone to strong and often unbeneficial negativity.
In reviewing this self talk—which, because of its frequency and intensity is highly likely to influence how we talk to others, especially under stress—I attempt to offer myself compassion and very supportive coaching. To find the self talk of the voice of your own internal supportive coach, you may need to journal or otherwise listen to the voice of support you carry with you at the freshest part of the day.
You may need to listen and notice if you use that voice to nurture others but not usually yourself. Finally, if you find it impossible to come up with a list of frequent supportive messages you naturally use with yourself, you might listen to others or ask an especially supportive person to share with you what messages of support they hear when they talk to themselves.
