Whilst we can discover many things about ourselves by listening in to our conversations with others, we can just as powerfully become conscious of hidden aspects of ourselves by tuning into our inner conversations with ourselves.

Examples of some of the things we say to others are:

• ‘You never listen’
• ‘You’re never there when I need you’
• ‘You only think about yourself’
• ‘You’re impossible to talk to’
• ‘You’re sorry you ever got involved with me’
• ‘You’re perpetually late’
• ‘You think you know it all’
• ‘You have no feelings’
• ‘You make me so angry’

The messages quoted above are known as projections – messages about yourself that you unconsciously put over on others. When you come to a realisation that everything you say is about yourself and you replace the ‘you’ with an ‘I’ in the above messages, you then consciously see what you are saying about or want from another is what you need to say or give to yourself; the messages now change to: