it is your actions that most accurately reflect your deepest beliefs—those that are implicit, embedded in your being, underneath your conscious apprehensions an articulatable attitudes and surface-level self-knowledge. You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don't know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself
12 Rules for Life ~ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
"Actions speak louder than words," according to the old adage. What you do means more than what you say. In fact, what you do can reveal much more than what you say. It can show that, even when you think you mean what you say, you really don't. You're not trying to deceive others; it's just that you've fooled yourself into believing that what you're saying is true.
Consider promises, those instances when you 'give your word.' It's one thing to break a promise—we all know people who've done it, and we're all guilty of doing it ourselves, on occasion—but it's another thing entirely to make a promise you can't fulfill.
Most people make promises with the fullest intentions of following through ... the moment they say the words. But, afterwards, the promises slip their minds. They mean whatever they said at the time, but it actually wasn't a priority to them. Other things arose that they deemed more important, and they chased after them instead.
The problem with these people is not that they don't mean what they say but that they don't understand what they say. They aren't very aware of themselves or others. They think they are but they're really not. They don't realise what their own priorities and values truly are, and they don't realise what they or their words mean to others. They don't realise the commitments they're making and that commitments cost something, usually a great deal. They don't realise that they compromise their own integrity and the trust others give them when they don't mean what they say.
Economist call this phenomenon of discordant words and actions 'revealed preference,' termed by Paul Samuelson in the 1930s. Your actions are the manifestation of the desires of your emotional subconscious overriding the statements of your logical conscious. Instead of being rational, you rationalise. You look back at what you did and make excuses for it. You decide what you're going to do and make up a story for how it still fits your narrative. That's what your words become: a narrative, a story you convince yourself and tell others.
Words are powerful, but they can also be quite painful—still powerful but crushingly so. It's not that broken promises and empty words don't meaning anything but that that they don't mean what they're supposed to. Empty words don't mean nothing; they mean you have nothing to hold onto.
Many of the people I listen to have no one else to talk to. Some of them are truly alone in the world. There are far more people like that than you think. You don't meet them, because they are alone
Don't listen to yourself. That's a very passive thing to do. It's better to watch yourself and be aware of yourself. Then, when you say something, you mean it. You're not simply listening to yourself as you would someone you don't know; you're creating yourself