Ending the War with your Inner Critic

Exploring the Self-Sabotage of Self-Criticism

Hey Friends,

This is the last issue of the Leadership Lab for 2023, so I wanted to take a moment to say thank you.

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for supporting. An extra special thank you to those of you who so frequently like and comment. It means the world to me, every time.

This was a big year for the Leadership Lab. Readership grew from around 100 to over 700!

I appreciate each and every one of you, whether you’ve been reading from the beginning or you joined throughout the year.

Here’s to another year of exploration together.

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Ending the War with your Inner Critic

We live in an epidemic of inner criticism. So many of us walk around plagued by internal monologues of self-criticism and self-judgement.

Mine is here right now as I write this.

Our inner critics are tricky to work with. As much as I’ve worked on mine, it never ceases to resurface.

I’ve found that it’s because inner criticism serves a purpose: so many of us use it, consciously or unconsciously, as a way to motivate and push ourselves.

The inner critic is like a jockey on top of a horse, whipping us to go faster.

My experience is that inner criticism can work, in the short-term. It can help us sprint to get things done.

But it’s a fuel that burns DIRTY, and the cost is born in the most important areas of our life: our mental and physical health, our relationships, and our sense of happiness and fulfillment.

When inner criticism gets really entrenched, I’ve found that we even start to believe that we need our inner critic to motivate - that we somehow owe our success to them.

Here’s a fun experiment: plug into the possibility that you would’ve done much more without that critical voice. Imagine what you would’ve done if you didn’t have it berating you, doubting you, slowing you down and holding you back. What shows up for you?

It took someone else pointing this out to me for it to click. “You mean beating myself up isn’t the only way?”

It isn’t. But it takes work to shift away from inner criticism and toward a new way of relating to ourselves. That work requires we identify and separate ourselves from that voice, that we get curious about it, and we develop the skill of lovingly telling that part of ourselves to step back and sit down.

Getting to Know your Inner Critic

You’re probably already familiar with your inner critic, whether you know it or not.

It usually shows up as a mean, hyper-critical voice in your head that tells you all of the ways that you mess up and do things wrong. It fixates on how you’re not good enough.

Take a moment now to pause and find it. Is there a moment when it recently showed up?

It might not be a voice. It might be an emotional flash: of shame, fear, embarrassment, or unworthiness.

A big sign you’re struggling with an inner critic is that you don’t feel like you’re on your own team.

When you wake up in the morning, show up at work, are in relationship with others, make mistakes: are you fundamentally on your own team? Do you believe that you are enough, worthy, worth it, and deserving?

If not, you’ve probably got a big inner critic that it would be worthwhile to get to know. The first step to rewiring your relationship with self-criticism is to get aware and separate from the critical voice in your head. You are not your inner critic and your inner critic isn’t you.

Imagine your inner critic is a different person that lives in your head and give it a name. You can even ask it: what’s your name?

Not a mean name. Not a terrible name. A name that feels like it fits its personality, motives, and origin.

Next: visualize it. What does your inner critic look like when you imagine them? Are they big or small? Are they a person or something else? Let your imagination run wild and your subconscious fill in the dots.

When you’re clear on what your inner critic’s name is and what it looks like, take a moment to have a dialogue with your inner critic. Get curious and ask it a few questions. Take it slow and give your subconscious the time to answer:

• Inner Critic, what’s most important to you?

• How have you most served and helped me in my life?

• When did you first appear in my life?

• Who did you learn to be this way from?

• What are you most afraid of?

• In your deepest heart, what’s most important to you?

• What do you protect me from feeling?

• What is your superpower, your gift to me?

Get to know what triggers and motivates your inner critic. What is it seeking when it shows up? What is it afraid of? What does it want to protect you from?

These are the first steps to ending the war: awareness, separation, curiosity and understanding.

Ending the War

Now that you’re more intimately acquainted with your Inner Critic, I want to explore how to rewire your relationship with it. There’s a “jedi move”, as my friend Mike Trugman put it, to working with this part of you.

A lot of people get trapped fighting their inner critic. They manifest a critical voice toward it, telling it to shut up, go away, or stop.

Here’s the thing- when you do that, you’re still stuck in self-criticism, except now it’s criticism for the critic.

Escaping self-criticism requires an entirely different avenue: meeting your inner critic with curiosity and love.

Imagine your inner critic like a small child, frustrated and throwing a temper tantrum. What would you do then?

You’d probably slow down. You’d acknowledge what that child was feeling, create some space to feel and regulate, and then inquire into what they wanted.

The shift is meeting your inner critic like a loving child and asking: what’s up? What is it you’re wanting?

For me, it’s frequently:

• For me to focus on an area of improvement

• For me to pay attention to a spot where failure is likely

• For me to step away from something because it scares me (I might not want to listen here!)

When we meet our inner critic like this, we are both able to be less reactive and use our inner critic as an advisor. It doesn’t run us and we’re available to any wisdom it might have for us.

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After you hear your inner critic out, it may settle down altogether, or it may not.

If not, there’s one more avenue to explore: choose to move forward how you are going to, and tell your inner critic to sit down.

Back to the example of a parent handling a child throwing a temper tantrum.

Getting curious and asking the child what they want works, up to a point. And if they still don’t listen and align with what you believe is best, love may direct you to acknowledge that YOU are the adult, and they’ll have deal with what you decide regardless of their preference.

The inner critic frequently shows up like a scared child, making a lot of noise to get your attention. And while it’s useful to dialogue with it, it’s not so useful to let it run the show if it won’t settle.

Sometimes, you have to consciously choose to walk forward regardless of what it has to say, taking in its information and choosing based on your values, purpose, and knowing, not based on its fear-based ramblings.

Know that this is also a radical act of love, for yourself and your inner critic. In that moment, like a loving parent, you can return to presence, conviction, and love, knowing that you’ve heard and loved every part of you—even the part of you that doesn’t seem like it’s loving you back.

Going Deeper

In E12 of No Clear Answers, we discussed everything inner critic. If you want to shift your inner monologue away from criticism and toward compassion and kindness, I strongly suggest you give it a listen:

Apple

Spotify

YouTube