Tune out the self-defeating voice in your head
The experience every woman I work with shares is a voice of doubt that lives inside them. That voice is a universal part of the human psyche: the Inner Critic. Its purpose is to keep you safe. One way it does that is by demanding in not-so-nice ways that you maintain the status quo.
It wants you to maintain your status quo and society's. It wants you to stay inside the lines of what's expected for women, or any other identity or intersection of identities.
When you stretch yourself, even in small ways, the Inner Critic shows up. The bigger the stretch, the louder the critic gets. The voice is inside you, but you inherited many of its loudest messages from external sources.
The voice of the Inner Critic will never go away.
You can’t outsmart it, and its presence doesn't mean you’re failing. It may defeat you to know the voice will never go away, but that can also free you from its shackles.
When you hear it, know you’re up to something important, meaningful and different.
How to hear — and quiet — the Inner Critic
I want you to have a more pleasant experience and let the Inner Critic do less of the talking. I want you to learn to spot it faster so you can invite a more truthful voice into the fold. To do that, you need to know what it sounds like.
The greatest indicator your inner critic is talking is that it makes a value judgment. It assesses whether you’re good or bad. It tells you that what you want, say or do is a sign of whether you’re a good person or a bad person. It has an idea of what a good or capable person looks like and endlessly compares you to that idea. No matter what you do, you'll never be a good, capable person in its distorted eyes.
The Inner Critic is so sneaky that its idea of good or capable changes. If you take a step toward what it values, it’ll shift its idea of what’s good or capable. Its ideals for you are forever out of reach, no matter what you do.
The goal is never to satisfy the Inner Critic. The goal is to hear it, label it and widen your lens to a greater truth of your experience.
An Inner Critic might give you messages like:
Not enough. You are not enough of something. You are not smart enough, resilient enough, calm enough, consistent enough or good-looking enough.
Too much. You are too much of something. You are too ambitious, too smart, too demanding, too needy, too emotional or too sensitive.
Should. You should know better, be better and do better. You should think different, feel different, be different, do different.
Need to or Have to. These are sly suggestions it feeds you to shape you into its idea of who a good person is.
“Yeah, but” and “What if.” These messages remind you that if you dare step outside of the status quo, you will inevitably find you’re not capable. They’re dream killers.
When you attribute these messages to the voice of the Inner Critic, you can activate strategies to dim its influence.
You’ve likely used a wide range of tactics to shift away from hearing the Inner Critic. It's been speaking to you your whole life. Most of us need a full and growing set of options, because of the Inner Critic’s sneaky tactics. What worked before may not work anymore.
The common threads in strategies I hear from women are:
Things that connect you to your body and thus quiet the mind.
Tuning into something or someone inspirational — books, podcasts, quotes.
Anything that connects you to humanity and the emotional reality of being a human.
Getting outside your bubble by connecting to another human, pet or nature.
A supportive structure that evokes a value or grounded inner knowing.
A structure to remind you of your brilliance.
And the one I use in my program is connecting women to their inner little person.
Call for Reflection:
What’s one thing you want your Inner Critic to know about you? What will help you remember that truth?
Shine On,
Alicia