Your Inner Director

Learn how to assess and interpret your observations, thoughts, beliefs and intentions that give your actions a clear intention.

Your Inner Director creates thoughts and makes them available to your Inner Actor to rehearse and choose which ones to act on, and reveal your Way of Being to the world. For your Inner Actor, they emerge as visualisations, ideas, insights or the imaginings of your Inner Producer – from your mind. To observe these aspects of your being that produce reality, you have to experience them through self-awareness.

Syd Banks talks about how our mind “produces” thousands of thoughts every day – some helpful, some troublesome. Our Inner Actor ignores the bad thoughts and acts on the good ones. When bad thoughts are acted on, we become aware of the disruption and discomfort they generate. Our Inner Director has the job of selecting healthy interpretations for our Inner Actor to implement and make better choices.

As well as interpreting the story that is created by your Inner Scriptwriter, your Inner Director creates thoughts that make the story more interesting and believable to you and others. Your Inner Actor then has the freedom to emote, speak and move in whatever way it chooses for the performance to be perceived as “real” or authentic. It is your Inner Director that comes up with fresh insights and new thoughts and aligns them with the intentions declared by your Inner Producer.

The Role of Inner Director

Like movie directors, your Inner Director assumes responsibility for overseeing and interpreting the story presented by your Inner Scriptwriter and is under the overall control of the producer. Directors can play a creative role in deciding how the story will be told to guide and strengthen the actor’s performance. Your Inner Actor makes the story come to life, making it a meaningful and satisfying experience for the performer and the observer.

As Steve Jobs reminds us, our ideas and insights stay in the mind until we bring them into the world through action. Paradoxically it is the mind that stops us from acting out our thoughts. For example, a “hedgehog mind” fears vulnerability, whilst an “octopus mind” turns vulnerability into a tool for learning and adaptation.

Think of your Inner Director as that part of your mind that create the thoughts, actions, and feelings needed to deliver on the Inner Producer’s intentions; visions or dreams. Your Inner Director is constantly observing, interpreting and making changes to your life movie as it is experienced, in order to serve your best interests. The ability to observe these aspects of your mind at work is a skill that can be developed with practice. This website contains a range of practical exercises and strategies that you can use to increase your level of self-awareness, enabling you to lead and act more consciously.

All of these thoughts are structured by the brain and nervous system as Adaptive Action cycles that question:

WHAT have you noticed?

SO WHAT are the implications?

NOW WHAT next wise action is needed to respond?

“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates

You can train your brain

Cognitive scientists refer to this Inner Director phenomenon as the brain’s “executive function”. It sits “above” other functions and adopts a “top-down” role that monitors thoughts generated by the brain and selects thoughts that resonate with the inner Producer’s intentions. With clarity, your Inner Director can tap the sensory resources of the body to give meaning and coherence to the story created by the Inner Scriptwriter and the performance of the Inner Actor. By using an ontological approach to change your “way of being” you can learn how to access the innate wisdom in your mind and body by using your Inner Director skills.

Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain is mutable. It means it’s constantly learning and can change every time you shift your attention. This is referred to as self-directed neuroplasticity. It is your Inner Director that creates an optimum environment for learning from monitoring experience to help your Inner Actor to rehearse and focus attention on what’s important. You learn from what you pay attention to.

“You learn when you pay attention to your intention.” – Deepak Chopra

Your brain’s proprioceptive system automatically locates you in time and space. Interoception does the same thing for your internal world. So, how well you can integrate and control these two processes is a measure of your mindfulness. My Life Movie Model can enhance your sense of how your reality is created and allow you to practice living in the present moment. Triggers are an opportunity to pause, for you to quieten the mind and create space for new thoughts to break through. This happens when there is a breakdown in the normal flow of your performance. You are observing your inner observer at work, as it takes stock of your concerns and considers your options before moving on.

Neuroscience research has thrown new light onto how your brain creates a mental map of the connections that simulate the outside world. There is your inner Actor’s map of lived experiences and your inner Director’s map of what meaning is to be applied when assessing those experiences. This is like a Director’s storyboard that’s used to ensure continuity. It enables you to blend past assertions with future declarations into your present assessments.

Your Powerful Observer

Your Inner Director takes on the role of the “leader” in directing your life movie or life story. It works with your Inner Producer and Inner Scriptwriter as the creators and interpreters of your worldview. Once you are aware of these “rules of engagement” you can stand back and observe the actions you are practising as your Inner Actor. For example, when you have to make a decision that takes the form of a gut feeling, or an intuition that you generate, it is coming from the “inside-out”. When you are guided by other people’s perceptions of how you should observe the world, you are driven by desires imposed from the “outside-in”. You are no longer being your authentic self, just playing a role in someone else’s movie.

To be more effective in the way you lead your life, you must train your Inner Director to observe and shift your thoughts to what you care about, so they serve deeply held intentions. For example, you send a birthday card because the person is important to you, not because it’s expected. Your Inner Actor could be blind to a belief or a behaviour that is causing an internal conflict or poor performance. Your Inner Actor also needs to learn how to observe its authenticity and impact on your whole Way of Being. Your Inner Director, therefore, plays a crucial role in observing how language, mood, and body movement/gestures are being used to deliver a powerful performance for observers in the outside world.

If this sounds too abstract or theoretical to you, watch tennis players as they engage in self-talk, even shout at themselves out loud to hear what their inner observer is telling them, and to visualise what their Inner Director expects of them. “Come on, this is not you! What does your best self do in this situation? Do you relax, and clear your mind of unhelpful thoughts? Do you pay attention, breathe in, refocus and see yourself delivering what you really want to happen?

The diagram below helps to explain how, in order to do something better, your Inner Actor reflects on previous experiences and makes habitual adjustments. But when your Inner Director is fully engaged and reflective, you feel empowered by new insights and can make new distinctions and interpretations. The best results come when you allow your Inner Producer to show you a different worldview, which enables you to transform the way you think, feel and act to produce a more satisfying performance.

Developing your Inner Director is an important part of self-coaching as it helps you see that it is your way of observing the world. It shapes the values and beliefs that produce your Way of Being (your choice of language, mood, and body posture), the actions you take and subsequently the results you get. In the domain of ontological coaching, you are learning to integrate your Inner Director (mind), Actor (body), Producer (soul) and Scriptwriter (language).

You can enhance your personal power by paying attention to all four parts of your ontology. Watch this video by Paul Linden as he explains the link between the body and mind. spirit and the power of language to influence all three.

With practice, you can access your own Inner Director to get a third-person perspective on yourself and your situation. You will find practices on this website that show you how to access different perceptual positions from which to assess mental maps, social situations, challenging events, etc.

Improving Your Actor’s Performance

It’s your Inner Director that is silently watching the movie that is your life unfolding, and making observations to improve your performance. Listen to your inner Director as it creates thoughts for you from which you make observations and question the words you choose to give you more influence, presence of mind and impact.

Rom Harre & Fathali Moghaddam in their book ‘Psychology for the Third Millenium’ make a distinction between “event causality” which looks for causal explanations and “agent causality” which looks for conversation, interaction and the emergence of meaning. Your Inner Director focuses on what it can observe. For example: “What will you notice when you perform with more compassion? How will you respond? What will other actors notice? What else might be observed?”.

“We focus on what the person wants and we assume that he or she has all the skills to get there. In short, the work should focus on what happens between the noses of individuals and avoid being diverted by speculation of what may be happening between the ears of the individual” – Mark McKergow

As a consequence, it’s your inner Director that’s interpreting your Inner Actor’s performance by observing how:

words are being used to create emotions and actions through dialogue
your assessments create the words and emotions that result in those actions
thoughts and moods that are predisposing you to act and react in specific ways.

Your Inner Actor can perceive things unconsciously, so your Inner Director looks to reveal those transparent habits that are having a negative impact on your performance. You may be unaware of how behaviours and events can be interpreted differently, or how to let go of any self-imposed limitations you are not aware of, that are producing resentment or anxiety. Your Inner Actor cannot change behaviours that it cannot see, so training your Inner Director to be a more powerful observer can help raise awareness of what your Inner Actor is creating and change to enhance your effectiveness.

“Insight is more than knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that has deceived us and held us captive” – Hans-George Gadamer

Monitoring Your Life Story

The insights and distinctions being made by your inner Director will give structure to the life story that you are creating in your head as your Life Movie. Seeing your life this way can help you see how your thoughts can be toxic and create unhelpful illusions. Your ‘Actor’, ‘Director’ and ‘Scriptwriter’ are just parts of your awareness that work together to create your story from moment to moment, and generate your Way of Being.

“You don’t just have a story – you’re a story in the making, and you never know what the next chapter’s going to be. That’s what makes it exciting.” – Dan Millman

A powerful Inner Director (observer-mind) adjusts its functioning by using language to see distinctions and interpret those thoughts that give meaning to the reality you are perceiving. Your observant Inner Director works with your influential Inner Scriptwriter and intuitive Inner Actor to improve your performance as a leader of your life and so achieve the results desired by your Inner Producer. You are then performing as a whole person, more self-aware and self-responsible.

This way of seeing a whole person is shared by a process for accessing a person’s innate wisdom, known as Psychosynthesis. Below is a quote from the Psychosynthesis Institute.

“Psychosynthesis believes that each human being has a vast potential that generally goes largely unrecognized and unused. It also believes that we each have within ourselves the power to access that potential. Psychosynthesis is often seen as an unfolding process of the mind where the person actually possesses inner wisdom and knowledge for what is needed to facilitate the process at any given time.” – The Institute of Psychosynthesis.

References

Take the Lead by Betsy Myers. Atria Books 2011

Your Brain at Work by David Rock – Harper 2009

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – Penguin 2011

The Passions by Robert C Solomon – Hackett 1993

You Are What You Say by Matt Budd & Larry Rothstein – Three Rivers 1993

Language and the Pursuit of Happiness by Chalmers Brothers – New Possibilities 2005

The Open Focus Brain by Les Fehmi & Jim Robbins. Trumpeter 2008

Focus by Jurgen Wolff. Pearson 2008

Practices

Observing the Observer
Reviewing Your Life Movie
Getting in Control