Who's actually talking?

“You’re selfish.”

“You’re a great speaker.”

“You’re bad at math.”

Notice how fast each one lands — not like an opinion someone once handed you, but like a plain fact about who you are.

Grab a sheet of paper and draw a giant circle on it. In the center, write your name.

For the next five minutes, write down every other voice that gets time in your head. Not “family,” not “friends,” not “celebrities” — the individual names. The specific people.

I did this earlier this week. Then tonight I sat with a room full of teenagers and walked them through the exact same exercise.

Why?

Because the voice at the center of that page (the one you think of as yours) often gets buried and shaped by every voice around it. And most of us have never once stopped to ask a simple question:

After they filled the page with names, I had them circle the five people who they believed shaped their voice the most. Not the five they love the most. The five with the loudest pull.

Whose voice has an oversized impact on you?

I spent a lot of this week alone with that question. I was in Scottsdale for another marathon, and 26.2 miles is a long time to think (especially with how slow I went).

I’ve spent my last two races making space for my own voice — no music, no podcasts, no audiobooks. But this time, it hit me:

My voice isn’t really mine. It’s a composite of thousands of other voices.

Some of them I invited in. Some of them paid to buy space in my head. Some of them just got power because of where I happened to live, go to school, and work.

Every one of them left a mark.

So yes — the voice that starts talking the second I’m alone with my thoughts is my voice. But it’s really a collection of many.

And those voices don’t have to still be in your life to still run your life. I can hear specific teachers, church leaders, and old friends at certain moments — not their actual voices, but the messages they planted years ago that quietly took root. (I can still hear Mr. Garza telling my Algebra 2 class that one day I’d be working at McDonald’s as Ronald McDonald because I was so bad at math.)

The problem is that without any intention, your voice gets built by other people, by accident. And when that happens, you end up talking to yourself with total certainty when it’s really the composite of everyone who ever got in.

That’s what makes a quick audit so valuable. Even just doing the circle will show you how many different people are shaping the voice you call your own.

Now look at your list again and ask yourself this:

Who’s helping you move toward the person you’re trying to become?

Amplify those voices. Give them space.

Who’s dragging you down?

Time to hit the mute button.

Once you realize how much these other voices shape you, it really can be that simple: turn up the ones you want, turn down the ones you don’t — until the voice in your head is finally one you can rely on.

Keep Asking,

Kyle