Silencing your inner critic
You’ve heard of the inner meanie, that voice inside of yourself that tells you awful, unkind and untrue things, the devil on your shoulder eroding your self-confidence. We all have stories we tell ourselves, but the people who live a values-based life are those who know how to unhook from their stories and make choices about how they respond.
There are very few of us who don’t have inner stories that pop up from time to time telling us things that are patently untrue. When I think of myself, my friends and my clients there are some common themes:
• You’re not pretty enough
• You’re just a bad mum
• You’re not smart enough
And that’ll do- I can feel my skin crawling even writing these stories!
As a leadership and life coach, I am a bit of a hybrid . My approach aligns directly to the needs and goals of my client and I apply methodologies to address them. My model for developing emotional intelligence is one that views attitude change as essential to behaviour change which then, in turn, achieves results, and there are a number of approaches I embrace to help people learn the tools to shift their mindset and make changes to improve their perceived quality of their lives.
The key word above is ‘changes’. My work is aimed at behaviour change. My tagline (and coaching philosophy) is self-awareness + self-empowerment = a better life. However, this isn’t about focusing solely on the good things. Toxic positivity has no place in my work. Life has its challenges, and so rather than suppress the emotions related to this (disappointment, frustration etc) self-awareness involves allowing and acknowledging them without judgement. As you’ve no doubt heard me say again and again, emotions serve a purpose. We need them all. But we don’t allow our emotions to inform our responses. It’s our responses to a trigger that relate to the actions we take in. Self-awareness and self-empowerment allows us to ensure they are values-based.
Fancy an example?
Your phone rings. You glance at your screen. It’s a friend, the one who will keep you on the phone for hours as she rants and vents about her work, her husband, her weight, the traffic, the price of eggs and not once ask how you are going. You really aren’t in the right mindset to listen to her challenges at the moment. But if you don’t pick up the phone, your inner gremlin is saying to you; what type of friend you are? A horrible one, the gremlin says. What kind of horrible person doesn’t pick up the call? So, although you know you’ll be drained after the call and that you have 101 things to do right now, you answer the call, because you have been completely sucked in by your own judgement aka – inner critic.
Firstly, let’s shhh the inner critic and secondly let’s bring in some self-compassion and explore what’s going on.
The real question is, are you a horrible friend? Yes or no? What are we feeling here? Perhaps a smidge of guilt, there’s resentment and there’s judgement both of yourself and your friend. There’s conflict because you had a full list of things to do today, and spending 2 hours consoling your friend wasn’t on the list. The real question is; are you truly a bad friend because you can’t talk in that moment? The key is not allowing your emotions or the inner critic to rule your behaviour. It’s to step outside of yourself for a moment, take a deep breath. Then think about what you want to do, instead of being reactive based on your inner voice. Observe those emotions and then decide what to do. Be responsive not reactive.
Self-awareness leads to self-empowerment. Respond don’t react. We change what our thoughts are telling us, we consider what’s true vs what’s a story, we question the validity and veracity of the thoughts and we make a choice to answer the phone or not, based on this.
This is how we unhook ourselves from a story. We bring ourselves back to a simple concept: what do we know to be true? What are the facts? Is what I’m thinking based on assumptions or on cold, hard data?
Another way to silence that critic is to make them ludicrous. A client I work with has a name for her inner critic- Debbie Downer. Debbie Downer tells my client not to go have fun with her friends because she’ll drink too much and she’s too fat already and she’s too tired and lacking in energy. Ugh, ugh and ugh! By naming her critic, by highlighting the effect this critic has ie downer, it strips it of power and automatically lowers her attachment to it.
That inner voice can be a real piece of work. The danger of buying into our stories is they are powerful blockers to achieving our goals and to living in a way that lights us up and allows us to light up others. When we listen to our inner critic we overthink, we’re unwilling to try new things, we overanalyse and unfairly judge ourselves and others. And for what? Stories that are inherently untrue and that serve no purpose other than to keep us small. It’s time for change! Are you ready to start recoginising when your inner critic is taking over?
