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Chapter 1 | Why Banish the Inner Critic?

This chapter examines:

Creativity and Creative Flow

Inner Critic Origins

Creativity v. the Inner Critic

The Need to Reclaim Creativity

A Call to Action

“What is this self inside us, this silent observer,

Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorise us

And urge us on to futile activity,

And in the end, judge us still more severely

For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?”

— T.S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman

Our Intrinsic Creativity

The idea first comes to you unbidden. A glimmer on the edge of your perception, it’s hazy, not fully formed, its edges fuzzy and indistinct. “Where did that come from?” you wonder briefly. But once you put your full attention on the idea, the longer you focus, the more clear and distinct it becomes. You begin to feel a welling within: a push from your gut and a quickening of your heart.

You have to capture it, this idea. You grab a piece of paper and jot down notes or do a quick sketch. Or maybe you record a quick voice memo on your phone. But the idea won’t leave you alone, and returns to you with increased insistence and clarity. Your brain starts to explode with related ideas as you start to connect the dots. Your imagination takes over, visualizing how to execute this concept that has stolen your attention.

Nothing – no mental barrier of self-doubt or questioning – comes between you and your creative work. Nothing in you says “no” or

“I don’t know.” Instead, everything in you says “yes” as you begin the process of making your idea manifest. And the more the details fall into place like puzzle pieces coming together, the more “yes” you feel. A rush of energy flows through you, compelling and motivating you to prioritize your brainchild. Interest, curiosity, and fascination take over.

Hours fly by as you are engrossed in your project. In the midst of making, you feel clear, super-focused, and confident. Once you’ve finally acted upon your idea, you feel a sense of completion and satisfaction.

While it is not the same for every single creative endeavor, this is the essence of the experience. Most people coming out of the throes of creating will tell you, face aglow and eyes still shining, that the experience, on the whole, was amazing. Regardless of whether you were designing an interface for an app, getting down ideas for your startup, writing a blog post, developing software, cooking a six-course gourmet dinner, or choreographing a performance – the process going on in your head and the sensations you were having were universal.

In fact, in my keynotes and workshops, one of my favorite pieces of audience participation is when I ask the attendees about what creative flow feels like for them. The responses – regardless of the audience location or demographics – are remarkably similar. Here are the words that come up time and time again:

Timeless • Connected • Happy • Good • Strong • Clear • Focused • Confident • Alive • Vibrant • Energized • Everything flows • Euphoric • Trance-like • Enjoyable • Empowered • Capable

When we are creative, we are blissfully “in the zone,” engaged in soul-satisfying making and producing. In his book Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the pioneering researcher who first identified the state of flow, says, “when we are involved in creativity, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.” Yes! Creativity makes us feel fully alive.

Before you fall back on any limited ideas around what creativity is, allow me to dispel a few myths. You don’t have to be a visual artist, writer, or musician to be creative. You don’t have to be eccentric, neurotic, tortured, or starving. Creativity isn’t solely the domain of a group of “special” people whom you’ll never be a part of.

We are born creative. Creativity is about seeing possibilities. It’s a spark, a stirring, an impetus: a powerful force that compels us to create and bring an idea to life.

This power is in everybody. We all have the desire to create something out of nothing, be it a recipe, a poem, or a business. Creativity isn’t what you produce or the medium you use to produce it.

What’s more, we each have our own unique form of creativity, so don’t be fooled into believing that just because what you are great at creating isn’t “art” that it’s not valid. In fact, if you are an engineer, scientist, or anyone else of an analytic bent, and you believe yourself to be in the category of “people who aren’t creative,” you’re wrong. Instead, you are one of the most creative and imaginative kinds of people on the planet.

I’m here to tell you that you are creative. Yes, YOU.

Creativity is the essence of our being and a part of our DNA. Indeed, neuroscience shows that we are literally wired for it.

Your Brain on Creativity

Everyone has the capacity to experience the “optimal state of consciousness where we both feel and perform our best.”1 One of the great paradoxes of creative flow, however, is that you can’t force it; you can only create the proper environment for accessing it. The conditions needed to get into a flow state are a confluence of uninterrupted time to concentrate, clear goals, the correct ratio of challenge to skill, and immediate feedback from our actions.2 Then the magic happens.

Once we get into flow, time perception becomes altered. Hours seem like minutes, and/or minutes seem like hours. We feel a euphoric sense of control and personal power, but paradoxically lose our sense of self. Performance of all kinds is heightened tremendously – creative performance in particular. But it gets even better: the effects of flow go beyond the immediate moment. Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile discovered that people continue to feel creative the day after.3 I call this “the flow afterglow.” As we increasingly achieve creative flow, we train our brains to be even more creative.

The good news is that if you don’t think of yourself as creative or trust your creativity, you can now relax. Being creative is built into the way our brains are designed to work. On a cellular level during the flow state, serotonin and dopamine, which are the pleasure-inducing brain chemicals or neurotransmitters, wash over our brains. Another neurotransmitter, endorphin, improves focus – helping to shut out distractions. This increases our ability to make new mental connections, further enhancing performance. Anandamide, a neurotransmitter whose name is derived from the Sanskrit word for bliss, enters the scene. In addition to encouraging the brain to practice lateral thinking4 and to release even more dopamine, anandamide helps generate pleasure and motivation

Speaking of the brain, creativity does not happen because the “imaginative” right brain takes over the “analytical” left brain. In fact, scientists consider the concept of creativity being seated in the right side of the brain as archaic.5

The most exciting finding about creativity in the brain is this: researchers now consider creativity to be based in the part of the brain responsible for planning, self-evaluation, and self-censorship.6 The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is where the majority of higher cognitive functions of working memory, mental imagery, and willed action (specifically self-monitoring and impulse control) lives. In other words, this is the part of the brain that interprets situations, envisions consequences, and then adapts behavior accordingly. Contrary to what you might think, the goal is not for this area to be active. Rather, creative magic happens when the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex powers down and stays quiet. Simply put, creativity comes from relaxing self-evaluation and self-judgment – and the self-criticism and self-doubt that result from them.

Therein lies the rub.

Creativity, Interrupted

Children are terrific examples of unfettered creativity; they effortlessly create worlds with their imagination. As a child, you did this too. When we were younger, we trusted the creative spark that lives within us, and we easily played with ideas and let them out into the world. Imagination was our boon companion, and creativity, our best friend.

Over time, our once close relationship with our creativity becomes strained. Instead of exercising our ability to bring forth something new and positive into the world, we begin to practice creativity’s evil twin, destructivity: using our imagination in ways that sabotage our creative efforts. Why? Because a new player crops up, wedging itself between us and our once best buddy of creativity. Posing as a sworn protector, this interloper begins to whisper doubts in our ear after every letdown, every unexpected criticism, and every perceived failure.

Where we used to trust in the flow of inspiration and ideas from our creativity, we now begin to second-guess these messages through the filter of this new interpreter. We start to fall prey to the incessant internal critical voice that tells us that we don’t know enough, that we might look stupid and be criticized, that our ideas aren’t original, that we aren’t working hard enough – and that we have to do, be, and produce more in order to be accepted. We fall victim to our anxiety that we’ll be found out as a fraud, that our work has to be executed perfectly to be recognized and valued, that we will fail at the challenges we take on, or that we can’t keep up with the skills and technologies that we need for our work. It’s no wonder we crack under the weight of the belief that we aren’t enough.

What happened to the unselfconscious state of flowing creativity that we used to enter so easily? What happened to the life-in-Technicolor experiences that left us with a sense of wonder at what we produced and excitement at doing more in the future?

My friend, your enjoyable creative process and access to your creative power have been usurped by internal critical thoughts rooted in old fears and mistaken beliefs. May I introduce to you: the Inner Critic.

Meet the Inner Critic

While we are born creative, we are not born self-critical. Strong self-reflection is necessary to help a child evaluate her or his behavior in order to make good choices. However, self-judgment and self-criticism replaces self-reflection, and it then grows unchecked during adolescence, through adulthood, and to the ends of our lives into a force that blocks us from reaching our creative potential. Excessive self-criticism can become the predominant influence in our lives, erecting obstructions to opportunities and holding us back from stepping into our creative greatness. What is this particular form of unchecked self-criticism? This psychological construct is known as the Inner Critic.

Born from experiences internalized early in life, the Inner Critic is an amalgamation of every critical thing we’ve ever heard (or thought we heard) from people of influence. In their attempts to push us to conform to the norms of society, parents, older family members or caretakers, teachers, coaches, siblings, peers, and friends are a fount of criticism-filled messages. In our impressionable state, we internalize these criticisms. We model them, viewing ourselves from a place of criticism and judgment. We may even unconsciously emulate the negative beliefs that the people closest to us hold about themselves.

Thus, messages from our childhood like, “you will never be successful” or “your ideas are no good” embed themselves into our psyches. As we get older, these criticisms and judgments become so deeply ingrained that we no longer can recognize them as messages that originated from outside of our own minds. We then believe these critical messages to be our own truths, forming the warp and weft of the fabric of how we relate to ourselves.

Although the Inner Critic is also known as the inner critical voice7, you may not detect its presence by actually hearing a voice. The Inner Critic can be sneaky, working to avoid detection by trying to appear as your native thoughts. So familiar as to be invisible, your Inner Critic reflex may be so automatic that you may not even register the thoughts. If you do not detect its presence, you’ll most likely recognize the Inner Critic through the habitual negative self-talk that directly influences your behavior.

What drives the Inner Critic? The desire to protect ourselves.

Our emotional minds developed the Inner Critic as a protection strategy against situations in which we could be judged, rejected, or criticized. In its determination to keep these potential future threats at bay, the Inner Critic defends our well-being and social safety the moment we have a sense of losing either. I think of the Inner Critic as a proactive mental threat-to-self system.

But all of this still doesn’t answer the question of what’s the true source of the Inner Critic. What do our inner critical thoughts have in common at their core? One word: Fear.

If you’re feeling anxious, guilty, or ashamed around your creativity, it’s likely a result of the Inner Critic’s handiwork. When we are deep in the woods of our inner critical thoughts, in essence, we are experiencing fear. Having these feelings disrupts relaxed and ordered thinking, and in its place, we experience what Csikszentmihalyi calls “disordered attention.” In this state, we turn our attention inward and focus on the negative, destroying our ability to pursue positive external goals or even accomplish the task at hand. The more we are in this state of mind, the more our capacity for enjoyment plummets as it become more difficult to learn anything new. Instead, we rehash old information, wandering the forest of our fears with no means to problem-solve our way out of it.

Creativity vs. The Inner Critic

Earlier, we learned that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that judges, criticizes, and rules self-inhibition, falls silent when we go into creative flow. This is the seat of the Inner Critic. Research shows that not only does a quiet Inner Critic facilitate creative flow, but creative flow conversely keeps the Inner Critic quiet. Creativity and the Inner Critic, then, are inextricably connected. But they are binary: they cannot coexist. If your Inner Critic is in control, then accessing your creativity will be elusive at best and impossible at worst.

Yes, you’ve had success with creative projects, and yes, you may have been fairly satisfied with what you produced after the fact. However, if you had an overly active Inner Critic during the process, the fact that you were able to produce was despite its overbearing presence rather than because of its allegedly beneficial input. Instead of feeling protected, you had to slog through a quagmire of anxiety. Is this really how you want to create?

Any self-judgment, self-criticism, or doubts about your abilities will obliterate creative flow, ripping you from your creative high to cast you back on the ground while you grapple with your fears. Your prefrontal cortex, which was previously favorably inactive, fires back up with a litany of allegedly rational reasons to go into self-protection mode. All while this transpires, the door to your creative power slams shut and you cannot fully realize your vision. The Inner Critic is the enemy of creativity, productivity, and sanity.

In contrast, when we are in creative flow, we feel the full potential of our personal creative power, an enhanced and strengthened sense of self. People who experience creative flow regularly report feeling focused and creative, engaged and motivated, active and connected, and strong and in control. This place of empowerment is our true creative home.

Feeling fully creative like this is what we want and need. But so many of us cut ourselves off from this power, by judging ideas before they have a chance to develop, attempting to attain unreachable standards, creating barriers for ourselves, keeping our imaginations under wraps, or denying that we are creative at all. But we can do better. We can do more with this powerful force.

If you think of creating as an unpleasant and agonizing process – then you’re not thinking about actual creating. Instead, you’re recalling the sensation of the Inner Critic triggering your fears and supplanting the process. It’s the Inner Critic that makes creating painful. Your critical thoughts are the main blockade to your creativity. They thwart the fluid process of ideas moving from your internal subconscious universe to your conscious mind to access and make tangible.

In succumbing to the voice of doubt, we relinquish our creative power to the Inner Critic. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the struggle for wrestling control from the Inner Critic is no less than the battle for the self. Make no mistake: the struggle is real.

Here is the simple truth:

To be creative, you have to silence the Inner Critic.

Banishing the Inner Critic is what we need to do to reclaim our creative power.

Reclaiming Creativity

First, the bad news: we each have an Inner Critic, and try as we might, we can neither run away from our Inner Critic nor completely destroy it. The Inner Critic is a part of our psyche and being human.

Don’t throw up your hands in despair! Despite all of the psychological power that it holds, the Inner Critic is really a way of thinking – a series of thoughts. Even more simply put, it is electrical impulses in the brain. Neurons firing. Chemicals being released and recognized by receptors in the brain. Just as we can learn to control our breathing, we can learn to have a better handle on these processes in our brains to be more in control of our thoughts, beliefs, and consequent actions.

Now here’s the good news: if we can learn to switch off (or at the very least, tone down) the self-evaluation, self-judgment and criticism, and self-doubt, then we can activate and light up the areas in the brain associated with self-expression. We can create the space and lay the foundations for getting into our creative flow.

Remember that child full of wonder and unfettered creativity at the beginning of the chapter? That’s you deep inside. Also inside is the self that embodies all of the inherent potential you were born with and that will always be there: the capacities you’ve realized and those that you have yet to actualize. I like to think of this as your true self, your Creative Self. It existed before the layers of societal expectation were heaped upon your shoulders, and it will stand triumphant once you shake off the shoulds, musts, and oughts. This part of you is what you started with: completely connected to your own flow of ideas, with a perspective on the world which only you have, and an experiential filter that comprises your own unique creativity.

This inherent Creative Self is key. It is what fills people with awe when witnessing an inspired musical performance or a gifted athlete. This complete absence of friction, self-doubt, and self-judgment entrances and inspires us. It’s beautiful. Their complete expression of the Creative Self gives us something to aspire to ourselves.

Did you know that there is no word in the Tibetan language for creativity or being creative? The closest translation is “natural.”7 In other words, if you want to be more creative, you have to be more natural, more of yourself. However, the Inner Critic tells us that only if we’re hard on ourselves can we become the people we’re meant to be. This is a lie. The people who we are meant to be are exactly who we are. We’re meant to become more of ourselves – not cookie cutter copies of those around us.

Your Creative Self is where your creative power lies, the source of your brilliance. This is your powerful self; it is your brain clicking into gear and activating the wonderfully complex network that is hardwired not only into your brain but your soul. The Creative Self trusts itself, knows its strengths, and delights in pushing its boundaries. The Creative Self is far stronger, far more knowledgeable, and infinitely more capable than the Inner Critic.8 We need to reduce the Inner Critic’s interference so the Creative Self can do what it does best: creating.

The Inner Critic is like static, while the Creative Self is the station you’re trying to tune in to. We do have a choice: we don’t have to listen to the static. By giving the Inner Critic less of our bandwidth, we access, express, and cultivate our creativity; we take back our creative power. From this place of reclaimed creative power, we can go after even bigger challenges.

Reclaiming creativity is an act of courage: choosing to act in the face of the fear that the Inner Critic generates, and making a conscious choice to think differently in order to access your Creative Self.

How do we reach this Creative Self? Trying to fix the affliction of the Inner Critic with its own tools is not going to work. You can’t bully, threaten, or coerce the Inner Critic. It wrote the handbook and knows all of the tricks. No, we have to use a totally different approach to banish the Inner Critic.

With training, the mind can replace distorted patterns of thinking. To release the Inner Critic’s hold on our creative thinking and access to our creativity, we’re going to set out to learn new approaches, practices, and tools. In the coming chapters, we’ll discover much-needed antidotes to the Inner Critic’s pernicious guises of the fear of judgment and criticism, being highly self-critical, feeling deficient, having a habit of comparison, and denying creativity.

Are you ready? Let’s retrain our minds so that we can banish the Inner Critic, access our Creative Selves, and reclaim our creative power.