Listen to Yourself, Too

In the last ten years, I've walked over eighty half-marathons. While runners tend to finish a half-marathon in about two hours, us walkers take 3 to 3½ hours. I've walked about twenty with friends, one with an aunt, and the rest without music or audiobooks. Instead, I listen to the thoughts passing through my mind.

One of the most surprising discoveries? No matter how many races I've completed, at some point a thought enters my mind to cheat. "You could cross right there and join the faster folks who are already headed back." I don't relish admitting this because I know some readers will assume I must act on that thought eventually. It pops up when I see an easy opportunity—a set of port-o-potties serving both outbound and inbound participants, or a small race where I'm one of only two or three walkers on a curvy turnaround. "No one would see."

Then, like clockwork, come the retorts:

"What?!? You're practically at the turnaround!"

"You'll never be able to look at this finisher medal with pride if you cheat."

After dozens of races, I've recognized that this thought pops up automatically as my mind tries to protect my ego from the disappointment of failure. It's a fear-based pattern that emerges regardless of my track record—all eighty successful completions mean nothing to this anxious voice. If you ever see me walking somewhere between miles eight and eleven with a little laugh to myself, you probably caught me listening in on the mind chatter thinking, "So, mile nine this time. Even when I'm hitting my stride. Hilarious!"

Don't worry—this isn't leading to a recommendation that you spend 3 hours in silent walking. It's an invitation to pick some solo activity you participate in regularly and casually notice the thoughts that come and go. Times when you're engaged in repeated activities of thirty minutes or more: cooking, working out, cleaning, folding laundry, time in the sauna, extended grooming, and so on.

The gift of recognizing these thought patterns isn't just self-awareness—it's discovering that not every thought deserves our attention or energy. Some thoughts are just mental habits. Once you realize that certain thoughts think themselves, you can observe them as they cross your mind like watching a speck of dust floating through air. Engagement not required.

What I've learned from listening to these repetitive thought patterns is that they're incredibly predictable—and often not very original. The cheating thought, the doubt, the shortcuts our minds offer—they're like background programs running automatically. Once I recognized this pattern, something shifted in how I listen to others. When someone shares their struggles or uncertainties with me, I'm less likely to jump in with solutions because I understand that they, too, have an internal dialogue happening. They're sorting through their own mental chatter, and my job as a listener isn't to add more noise but to create space for their own clarity to emerge.

This awareness transforms us into a different kind of listener entirely. When we're familiar with our own mind's tendency to wander, interrupt, or offer quick fixes, we can catch ourselves before we hijack someone else's processing time. We learn to sit with the discomfort of not immediately responding, not filling every pause, not solving every problem. The result is that we become the kind of listener who creates space rather than fills it—and that's where transformation happens, both for the speaker and for us.