The Running Commentary You Rarely Notice

Most people carry a kind of running commentary in their heads — a steady stream of reactions to what they're doing, saying, and about to do. It plays automatically, in the background, closer to weather than to a decision. Almost nobody stops to actually listen to what it's saying.

That's the part worth noticing: it runs on autopilot. You don't sit down and decide to narrate your own performance — it just starts, usually the moment something is on the line, and it tends to lean critical rather than neutral. A missed word in a conversation gets flagged instantly; a dozen things that went fine pass without comment.

None of this makes you unusual. It's just how the narrator tends to work for most people — quick to flag what went wrong, quiet about what didn't. The first useful move isn't fixing it. It's simply catching it in the act, which is harder than it sounds precisely because it usually runs unexamined.

According to this lesson, how does most people's internal narrator typically behave?

The first useful move with the internal narrator isn't fixing it — it's simply ____ it in the act.

This lesson claims that most people regularly sit down and consciously decide what their internal narrator will say.