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ОглавлениеChapter 2 | Take Back Your Creative Power
This chapter examines:
Neuroplasticity
Attention and Focus
Meta-Cognitive Learning
Mindfulness
Self-Compassion
Identifying the Inner Critical Voice
Guises of the Inner Critic
Inner Critic Questionnaire
“Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and conquer Resistance.”
– Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
Feeling the flow of ideas rushing forth from inside of you to interface with the world is an amazing sensation. What is not such an amazing sensation, however, is when this outpouring is met with judgment and criticism. In the absence of a strong sense of self, it’s easy to feel like you need to do something to try to prevent the threat of criticism in the future.
As the self-appointed protector of your sense of self, the Inner Critic strikes a deal. “Tell you what,” it says, “You listen to my guidance, and I’ll keep you safe. In exchange, all you need to do is hand over the creative part of yourself to me.”
You’re skeptical. “But...how will I access my creativity?”
“Oh, you can still get to it – you’ll totally have visiting rights,” says the Inner Critic. “You just have to go through me, that’s all. You’ll feel better and I’ll get to do my job. It’s a win-win situation.”
You’re still not entirely convinced, but you don’t know what else to do. Reluctantly, you relinquish your Creative Self, your best buddy and keeper of your creative power, to the care of the Inner Critic.
As time goes on, however, it’s clear that you got a bum deal. The only time you can get through to see your Creative Self is when the Inner Critic is relaxed, distracted, or asleep. And because it’s so dedicated to its job, you rarely see your creativity anymore. In fact, it’s been so long since you’ve seen your Creative Self that you’re not even sure you’d recognize it.
The so-called “protective” guidance of the Inner Critic is misleading, based on incomplete or inaccurate information, or just plain wrong. Instead of feeling protected and safe, you feel more vulnerable to the prospect of external criticisms and less confident of yourself and your abilities. What’s more, the Inner Critic lacks both bedside manner and compassion, so its messages are often hurtful – and now they come from inside your head instead of from other people.
But even worse than being hurtful, the Inner Critic’s messages have poisoned you, leaving you mesmerized and confused, causing you to wander around in a daze of self-criticism, self-judgment, and self-doubt. You’ve become so disoriented by the spurious messages of the Inner Critic that you don’t realize you’ve gone astray, wandering farther and farther away from your Creative Self and creative power. Now you’re lost and don’t quite remember how to get back to where the Inner Critic is keeping your Creative Self. Under the influence of the Inner Critic, you’ve forgotten that your Creative Self and your creative power actually haven’t gone anywhere. They are both still home.
You were duped. Things aren’t better with the Inner Critic in charge. The Inner Critic’s guidance isn’t helping. The messages aren’t even original – they’re all based on what other people have said to you. What’s worse, the Inner Critic is not protecting your Creative Self; instead the over-zealous guarding causes it to starve.
When you made the deal, what you didn’t know is this: the reason the Inner Critic is keeping your Creative Self so tightly under wraps is that it is aware of one of paradoxes of creativity – that expressing creativity is an expression of power, and because it is so powerful, it’s also a threat.
The expression of creativity opens worlds of possibilities and activates probable futures. Within this is the potential of becoming more visible, and therefore being open to the threat of criticism. Such vulnerability triggers the fear of losing our sense of belonging and safety in the world. The Inner Critic is keenly aware of this. Its goal is to prevent this eventuality at all costs. Unfortunately, because creativity is something that gets stronger and expands the more we use it, your Creative Self now slowly languishes.
Allowing your Inner Critic to continue barring your access to your creativity is a grave injustice; the Inner Critic doesn’t really know what to do with your power, it just fears the potential ramifications of it. But you do know. You’re the one who knows what to do with your creative power: how to channel it, leverage it, and expand upon it. You know what you are drawn to create, what comes effortlessly to you and through you. You know that your capacity to be creative will only increase the more you use it.
You realize that you don’t need your Inner Critic to protect your Creative Self. You can choose to learn new ways to bolster your sense of self to protect against external criticisms and judgments.
It’s time to break the deal.
It’s time to take back what is rightfully yours.
It’s time to regain your close relationship with your Creative Self.
It’s time to take back your creative power.
To Reclaim, We Must Rebuild
“I want to reclaim who I am.”
– Elizabeth Edwards, author and attorney
You’re motivated. You’re ready for a change. You’re weary of the overly active inner critical voice that disrupts your focus and prevents your talents from shining. You’re ready to stop letting toxic self-criticism drive your inner self into oblivion, ready to begin doing things differently. You want to be more of who you are and to reach your potential.
You’re ready to return to your Creative Self and reclaim your creativity. But how? How do we start taking back power from our Inner Critic so we can do the creative work we’re capable of? By banishing the Inner Critic.
You may be frustrated because past approaches to trying to deal with your Inner Critic haven’t felt effective. But there’s a reason why they didn’t. Attempting to silence the Inner Critic solely with affirmations and other feel-good pablum doesn’t work. The habitual nature of well-ensconced inner critical thoughts makes them remarkably stubborn and difficult to displace.
To reclaim our creativity, we must rebuild. We must rebuild the mind frame in which we are so accustomed to the Inner Critic’s messages that we have become complacent and feel helpless at the prospect of changing our own minds, believing “this is just the way I am.”
Then we need to rebuild the very structure and circuitry that generates our self-critical thoughts and encourage these parts of our brains to fade in the face of different thoughts coming from newly developed structures and networks. The thinking and emotional circuits of our brains are far more alterable than we think. Profound mental changes can come from training the brain to think, and therefore work, differently.
The Inner Critic uses the tendencies of the brain and the tools of the mind to fulfill its role as protector. To take back our creative power, we will do the same.
Banishing the Inner Critic is all about building a new mind frame. Literally.
Recognize the Power of Thinking Differently
“Think Different.”
— Apple Inc.
Many of us have built up a lifelong habit of being hard on ourselves: beating ourselves up for alleged mistakes or missteps, preemptively judging ourselves, and worse. When confronted with adverse situations or an unloved personal trait, our brains fall into a groove of self-chastisement, a knee-jerk reaction of self-berating. If you’ve had experience with mastering a sport, an instrument, or a language (spoken, written, or programming), then you know that repetition is what makes a skill stick to the point that you no longer have to think to execute it. It becomes a reflex. We can think of the Inner Critic as a mastered reflex: a habitual response strengthened by years of practice.
To take back the reins of power from the Inner Critic of our mind, emotions, and actions, we need to learn to have better control over what we think on a regular basis. The path to banishing our Inner Critic starts by changing our thoughts. I’m sure that this sounds overly simplistic. But when you understand the ever-changing nature of our brains, you’ll see how effective changing our thoughts truly is.
Take Advantage of the Brain’s Plasticity
“The brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.”
— Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
Although we developed our self-critical patterns of thinking when we were young, and as a result, they are well-entrenched, their habitual nature works to our advantage. We can break and replace obsolete thought patterns with new, more supportive ones. Before you dismiss this as empty encouragement toward “the power of positive thinking,” understand that the process works because of neuroscience. Specifically, we’ll leverage the quality of our brains known as neuroplasticity: the ability to create new connections between nerve cells in response to change.
For years, the accepted model was that the nerve structure of the adult brain was fixed and locked in place. But more recent findings show that this stance is completely inaccurate. Instead of settling into a static mass of rigid neurons in adulthood, our brains are highly adaptable and, in fact, undergo continuous change during our lives. We can thank neuroplasticity for our ability to learn new facts, develop new skills, and adapt to new conditions.1
What we think about most gets the most space in our brains. Thought circuits and neuronal networks are constantly being created and dismantled. Mental focus and concentration push various regions of the brain to expand, while low activity in other areas signals their disuse. The more activity that a brain function, thought process, or skill gets, the more neural real estate it is allotted. Alternately, certain brain cells mark unused circuits and eventually prune them away for the expansion of those pathways crackling with activity.2
In a very real and concrete way, the thoughts that comprise our everyday thinking sculpt and mold our brains.3
What you think about is determined by what you pay attention to. The information that our brains and minds take in and make use of depends on how new and interesting it is, how strong a signal it has, or how much attention we give it. It’s attention that decides what our senses take in. Without attention, experiences don’t register in the mind and may not even be stored in memory. Brain imaging shows that when we pay attention to something, not only are the neurons involved activated, but neural activity in other areas is suppressed as a result.4 Such activation and suppression effectively strengthens one network of neurons over another. In fact, attention is so central to neuroplasticity that in her book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, author Sharon Begley suggests that training your attention can be considered “the gateway to plasticity.”5
The problem is that when the Inner Critic makes an appearance, the resulting self-critical thoughts steal our attention and thus our brainpower away from what’s in front of us. Our focus shifts away from what is happening in the present to our fear-tinged memories of previous disappointments or our anxieties of a negative future.
To think differently, attention is key. In his book, The Inner Game of Work, W. Timothy Gallwey eloquently describes how the combination of attention and focus is a natural barrier to the Inner Critic. He says, “...when we are giving full attention, self-interference is neutralized. In the fullness of focus, there is no room for [the Inner Critic’s] fears or doubts.”6 Our internal equilibrium is a direct result of our ability to maintain focus on thoughts that nourish and sustain our positive sense of self. When our Inner Critic reflex kicks in and distracts us from what we’re doing, redirecting our focus by thinking different thoughts is what “distracts” us back to our purpose.
Rehabilitate Your Thoughts
“When we direct our thoughts properly, we can control our emotions.”
— W. Clement Stone, author, businessman and philanthropist
Our brains’ plastic nature extends to emotions as well. For the purposes of silencing the Inner Critic, this is the mother lode of neuroplasticity. By altering connections between the thinking brain and the emotional brain, research shows that thoughts have the power to transform our emotions, behavior, and mind frames.7 In fact, the findings from various studies of employing new ways to look at, deal with, and generate thoughts to treat imbalanced mental states caused by distorted thinking have been the stuff that shifts paradigms.
These studies employed mental training based on cognitive therapy, mindfulness training, or a combination of both, which are all forms of meta-cognitive learning. Meta-cognitive learning is the deceptively simple yet powerful practice of learning from observing one’s mind and thoughts. What they found is this:
What and how a person thinks about things can mean the difference between staying depressed or returning to a more positive mind frame with reduced incidence of relapse.8
What and how a person thinks about things can mean the difference between feeling at the mercy of obsessive-compulsive disorder or feeling in control of it.9
Using a meta-cognitive approach to apply new methods to deal with self-critical thoughts helps people reverse deep feelings of anxiety, shame, and the tendency to self-attack.10 Therapies based on meta-cognitive learning target the thinking brain, but they are also highly effective at rebalancing distressed mental states.
Further results from these studies indicate that with the proper structure, our aspiration to banish the Inner Critic is more than attainable – it’s likely. Consciously thinking about our thoughts in a different way not only alters the very circuits those thoughts run on,11 but also reshapes how we process information,12 and creates a long-term impact on our thinking patterns and brain pathways.13
Our minds are so much more powerful than we realize. In our quest to quiet the inner voice of heightened self-criticism, our thoughts can heal.
Through observing our mind and thoughts, we can learn to identify distressing emotional responses and unhelpful thinking about the self and the world. By using a framework for reappraising thoughts that previously have been emotional hooks or triggers, we can relate differently to negative thoughts, feelings, and memories.14 As we begin to challenge inaccurate thinking and modify beliefs, we can transform unwanted moods and behavior patterns for the better. Our brains can learn how to function differently, and we can break our Inner Critic “reflex.”
Build A Whole New Mind Frame
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
— William James, psychologist and philosopher
If you feel like your vociferous Inner Critic has continuously thoroughly thrown you off balance mentally and emotionally, that’s because it has. The brain is very good at building a neural structure from negative experiences,15 which means that the Inner Critic gets stronger from the repetition of toxic thoughts. This weakens our mental foundation. By repeating the Inner Critic’s mistaken beliefs, we’re inadvertently training our minds to grow ever more self-critical. If we’re not open to changing our thoughts, we will continue to harm ourselves with this habitual hurtful thinking.
Fortunately, we’ve just discovered unequivocally that the brain can change. From your own experience, you know that when you’ve built skills to a level of mastery, but then you discontinue their use, those skills deteriorate. For example, you took piano lessons for seven years as a child, but it’s been so many years that you can no longer read music. It’s been ages since you’ve played tennis, so you’ve lost your power serve. The Spanish that you spoke so well during your year in Buenos Aires twenty-five years ago has become embarrassingly rusty. When skills lie fallow, they become more difficult to employ with ease.
The fact that the Inner Critic is a result of habitual thinking like a skill or a reflex works to our advantage. We have the power to transform it and take away the source of its strength: the continuation of self-critical thoughts. It’s not the average daily thoughts that have the power to encourage robust mental health, however. It’s thinking differently by challenging unhelpful habitual thought-patterns and replacing them with new and improved ones that restore the mind to balance. And the exciting part is that this is not hopeful speculation or supposition; this is proven by science. The effects of intentional, mindful effort on brain function, errant neurochemistry, and even the very structure of the brain itself can be observed through neuroimaging.16
With the knowledge of neuroplasticity and our capacity to positively affect and transform the emotional brain, in terms of diminishing the strength of the Inner Critic and its hold on our thoughts and emotions, the field of what’s possible just opened up exponentially in front of us. In Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, Begley puts it beautifully: “We are not stuck with the brain we were born with but have the capacity to willfully direct which functions will flower and which will wither, which moral capacities emerge and which do not, which emotions flourish and which ones are stilled.”17 This, my friend, is a whole new ballgame. The opportunity to completely transform our Inner Critic dynamic is within our reach if we choose to pursue it.
But guess what? You already have chosen. By reading this book, you have already started upon the journey back to your Creative Self through banishing your Inner Critic.
The choice to focus upon different thoughts is at the very core of this process. For the noxious thoughts that the Inner Critic produces, a mind that questions, challenges, and chooses new thoughts to focus on is the antidote. By thinking new thoughts, the mind can make its own medicine. By intentionally changing our thoughts, we practice “top-down plasticity”18 which literally changes our brains.
Through thinking new thoughts, the mind can make its own medicine. To begin healing the affliction of an overactive Inner Critic that bars us from our creative selves, our minds are not only going to produce medicine, but also rebuild our creative health, one new thought at a time. With time and practice, our new mind frame will turn the Inner Critic’s once insistent roar down to the level of a whisper.
How will we do this? We’ll rewire our brains from the inside out through administering a Creative Dose.
Give Yourself a Creative Dose
“It is not enough that you have a refined sense why and when you become anxious: you must then do something.”
— Eric Maisel, Mastering Creative Anxiety
From this point forward, the habit of letting your Inner Critic disrupt your confidence and block you from the fullness of your creative capacities is over.
Through practicing certain kinds of mental training, our mind is capable of healing itself. Thus, much in the same way that medicine helps the body heal, the exercises in this book are named “Creative Doses.” The Creative Doses help us to create the medicine that is the antidote to the messages of the Inner Critic: new thoughts. Their purpose is to place you in a more clear-thinking and realistic mindset, helping you see the distorted attitudes of your Inner Critic more clearly and stop identifying with them. The exercises are designed to help refortify your sense of self – your Creative Self in particular. And much like medicine, the underlying concepts, practices, and tools of the Creative Doses have a cumulative effect: the more you use and apply them, the more effective they will become. We will also see ourselves and the path we need to take to get back to our creative power more clearly.
You may be thinking, “Think new thoughts?! If it were that easy, I would have done it already!” I hear you. Here’s the thing: most of us have not had all of the information or structure we needed to do that. Random, unfocused efforts produce random, unpredictable results. You may have been doing the equivalent of trying to throw darts while lacking both an actual dart and a bull’s-eye.
With the Creative Doses, however, we will embark upon a process of deliberate change based on the meeting point of neuroscience and psychology. Following in the footsteps of the studies using metacognitive learning, our process focuses on increasing awareness of our thoughts and emotions and shifting our attention to those that are more positive and supportive. Over time, this practice will effectively build new circuits of self-confidence, giving the well-worn self-critical thinking paths less activity and helping them to fade from disuse.
Despite sounding aggressive, this process of banishing the Inner Critic is actually a kinder, gentler approach. Force is not what’s needed. The Inner Critic has strong-arm tactics of manipulation through strong negative emotions down to a science. Fighting the Inner Critic doesn’t work, nor does criticizing or judging it. Resisting the Inner Critic doesn’t work either – I’m sure you’re familiar with the adage, “what you resist, persists.” No, if any of those tactics worked well, they would have worked by now. What will work is to institute the kind of thinking that is the polar opposite of how the Inner Critic operates. To start creating profound and meaningful change, we are going to become aware of the Inner Critic’s thoughts and the feelings that accompany those thoughts. We will look at them impartially, practice self-kindness, show ourselves compassion, and then choose to think and feel something different.
The absolute very first step is to not beat yourself up for having inner critical thoughts. There’s nothing wrong with you for having an Inner Critic! It’s part of the human condition. Remember, the Inner Critic is a mental protection response that we all have. None of us asked for those situations in which some scathing criticism came out of nowhere. None of us consciously opted to take on the opinions, fears, and mistaken beliefs of the people we looked up to. If you had learned differently, then naturally, you would do differently. Seriously, don’t beat yourself up. There’s no need to be self-critical about being self-critical. And besides, those days are about to become a thing of the past.
The next step is to acknowledge that you may be nervous about this process. The idea of changing this way of thinking that you’ve had for so long may make you apprehensive. You may be thinking, “Aren’t the self-critical messages what keep me motivated and able to achieve? Doesn’t the modified behavior that self-critical thoughts encourage prevent the threat of future criticism from coming to me?” Here’s the thing: The longer we listen to the messages, the more we forget who we are and the importance of what we have given up. The more we forget our home, and the farther we wander from our best friend and source of personal power. We lose touch with just how creative we truly are.
I will say this many times throughout this book: we’re not our inner critical thoughts. We are so, so much more. Inner critical thoughts hold us back from the prospect of fully realizing our greatness, our ability to feed our souls and contribute to the greater good.
Through the Creative Doses, we’ll cultivate a talent for noticing when inner critical thoughts appear or when our behavior is indicative of self-judgment, criticism, or doubt. We’ll become gifted in our new capacity to recognize and then soothe feelings of distress when they appear. The ability to choose one thought over another will become our superpower. We will become experts at giving ourselves the very thing that the Inner Critic been trying to create for us all of this time – a sense of safety and reassurance – through applying two powerful tools.
Allow me to introduce you to the practices that are the bedrock of this process and that are at the heart of our journey of transformation: mindfulness and self-compassion. Let’s learn what makes these two approaches so incredibly effective in our efforts to banish the Inner Critic, and then practice them with our first Creative Doses.
Become Full of Mind
“The gift of mindfulness, then, is that by accepting the present moment you are better able to shape your future moments with wisdom and clarity.”
— Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind
Let’s be real: having a full-blown Inner Critic episode can be pretty awful. You feel vulnerable and unsure of yourself. (Even if it’s just under the surface, it’s still there.) Despite feeling as though a giant hole is about to suck you down to one of the nine levels of the Inferno, outwardly you not only need to appear as if nothing is wrong, but you’re also somehow still supposed to produce. Yikes!
The Inner Critic encourages something that Kristin Neff, the author of the book Self Compassion calls “over-identification,” which is “being so carried away by our personal drama that we can’t clearly see what is occurring in the present moment.”19 In the midst of over-identifying, it’s nearly impossible to realize that your self-critical thoughts are not an accurate reflection of reality. We’re so used to being caught up in our ingrained self-critical stories the Inner Critic is telling us that we can’t see they are just that: stories.
But without a tool to use or practice to put into place, gaining perspective is easier said than done. We need an approach that acts as a counterbalance, a methodology that will get us out of our internally focused self-critical thought loop, providing the mental distance to not only see the situation and ourselves clearly, but also perspective so that we can make better choices about where to direct our attention and place our focus. And in particular, we need a way to respond more evenly to the times our Inner Critic rears up and self-critical thoughts paralyze us, leaving us feeling vulnerable and defensive. Enter mindfulness.
What is mindfulness? It’s the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, while not being overly reactive to or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. It’s a form of meta-awareness: being aware of being aware. Imagine standing outside of your own mind, observing your thoughts and feeling as if they were happening to someone else. You’re fully aware but impartial, and therefore not caught up in the story that your mind (or Inner Critic) is spinning about the situation. This is being mindful.
In terms of disrupting our inner critical thoughts, mindfulness is an ideal tool. When we are mindful, we clearly see and accept what is happening in the present moment without reacting with judgment, reflection, or internal commentary.20 Mindfulness gives us the opportunity to respond rather than just react, and we can move to a place of more balanced and clear thinking. From this place of more balanced and clear thinking, we can acknowledge self-critical thoughts objectively. What’s more, regularly practicing mindfulness positively transforms the emotional mind by establishing emotional balance21 and raising our baseline level of happiness.22
Because mindfulness is about attention and focus, it plays well with neuroplasticity. Being mindfully aware of the Inner Critic helps us focus our attention on other thoughts. Then intentionally redirecting attention and focus will decrease the activity of our self-critical thought circuits, so they will eventually be pruned away, eventually altering our brain circuitry for the better. To start banishing the Inner Critic, mindfulness fits our needs perfectly.
Typically, when we want to change something, we think that it involves force and effort. Your inclination may be to try to alter your behavior by actively working to “change” your self-critical thoughts: to tell yourself, “Stop thinking that way!” and then reprimand yourself when you think those thoughts again anyway. Sound familiar? Thankfully, mindfulness is the opposite of that.
The best thing about starting to practice mindfulness is that it’s not about making yourself do something. It is more about acceptance and shifting focus. In a lot of ways, it’s about giving yourself permission to just sit and look at things without having to think about, process, analyze, react, or respond to them. Doesn’t that sound like a refreshing change? It’s like giving your brain a vacation!
In using mindfulness to see the Inner Critic’s messages as an outcome of it trying to protect you, you can begin to be more impartial. Even more importantly, you begin to instill the practice of not reacting to self-critical thoughts by instead realizing that these thoughts are merely a habitual reaction to a stimulus. Ultimately, you don’t have to believe what your Inner Critic is spouting, which gives its messages less weight and validity.
Here’s the best part: mindfulness is something we all naturally already possess! However, it’s more readily available when we practice it on a daily basis, and gets stronger by exercising it regularly. As it is one of the core practices of our work, let’s start building our “mindfulness muscles” right now.
Creative Dose: Mindful Thought Acceptance
Purpose: To learn to accept thoughts instead of reacting to them
Instead of believing everything that passes through your mind, practice observing your thoughts instead. Here are three methods for
using mindfulness to become more impartial and less reactive to the thinking reflex that is the Inner Critic.
Part 1: Mindful Thought Disbelief
Thoughts, emotions, and perceptions aren’t necessarily reality. Choosing to believe thoughts is what gives them power, even though it frequently doesn’t feel that way. Remember thoughts aren’t facts. There’s a fantastic bumper sticker that reads, “Don’t believe everything you think.”
Rather than trying to force yourself to think positively, do this:
Accept that your mind will produce negative thoughts, which you don’t have to believe.
When you’ve done that, your mental follow-up to inner critical thoughts could be “Thoughts are not facts” or “I can watch this thought without having to respond to it.”23
By creating the extra buffer of the awareness of choice, we maintain better control of where we focus our mental energies, and therefore, what we think and consequently, believe.
Part 2: Acknowledge and Observe
Instead of trying to ignore, fight, suppress, or otherwise control your thoughts and feelings, use mindfulness and look at them as if you were looking at the thoughts and feelings of another person outside
of yourself.
Ask yourself these questions:
Would you react the same way to your own thoughts and feelings?
Would you judge those thoughts or feelings or be more objective about them?
Acknowledge your thoughts and feelings, but instead of getting wrapped up in them, look upon them with calm interest.
And then, with the same level of detachment, watch as they pass on and others take their place.
Part 3: The Inner Critic is a Brain Event
Research shows that when patients viewed disordered thinking as “events of the mind” rather than as truth, a different region of the brain fired up, which reduced the risk of relapse.24 We will do the same with inner critical thoughts: we will think of them as “brain events” rather than the truth about ourselves or a situation.
This impartiality avoids igniting the circuitry associated with self-critical thoughts. It allows us to see situations and ourselves within them more clearly, providing much-needed perspective and insight. By thinking differently about our inner critical thoughts, and seeing them less as the truth about us and more of a habitual protective reflex of the mind, we can then begin to dismiss these thoughts as products of an over-active network or as circuitry that is misfiring, and again, we choose not to respond or react to them.
When your Inner Critic comes up, instead of getting wrapped up in the thoughts of self-judgment, self-criticism or self-doubt, you can think this to yourself:
“Oh, my brain is doing that Inner Critic thing again.”
“My Inner Critic circuit is running again.”
Then shift your attention back to what you are doing.
This simple practice will prevent you from activating the emotions that were the typical response to these thoughts. By doing this, you can divert the whole thought cascade that used to happen would be diverted.
By thinking differently about the thoughts that previously caused you no end of angst and consternation, you will effectively suppress activity in the part of your brain that regularly generates those self-critical thoughts.
Awaken Your Compassionate Self
“Self-compassion can melt away your Inner Critic.”
— Sandra Bienkowski, writer
In place of self-criticism, we need to actively begin to practice the opposite: self-compassion. Self-compassion is taking our natural capacity for sympathetic concern for others and turning it toward ourselves; particularly during moments of feeling inadequate, disappointed, and suffering. Self-compassion is realizing that self-criticism is the enemy and then acting to reverse its deleterious effects. Research has shown self-compassion to be “a key antidote” to toxic self-criticism.25 In fact, it is probably the most powerful tool in our toolbox to reverse a tendency to self-criticize.
If you’ve been in the practice of regularly using harsh self-talk as a motivator, you may be concerned that amping up your levels of self-kindness and compassion will make you lose your “edge,” leaving you a lazy and unmotivated slacker. Despite our ability to spend a weekend (or several) binge-watching Netflix, humans aren’t inclined to idleness. In fact, our natural tendency is to be engaged and to work. In her book, Reality is Broken, author Jane McGonigal says that humans prefer challenge to boredom and that “we prefer productivity to dissipation.”26 Ironically, self-criticism can actually hold us back from reaching our goals;27 instead, reassuring ourselves through self-kindness and self-compassion motivates us to attain them.
Self-compassion is a critical element in our ability to properly care for ourselves emotionally. Writer Sandra Bienkowski puts it this way: “Living without self-compassion is like driving a car you never take in for regular maintenance. Eventually your car won’t work right and it breaks down.”28 As a tool and practice for maintaining our emotional equilibrium, it has an impressive list of benefits. When we’re feeling inadequate, self-compassion helps us to feel more secure and accepted by activating our innate care-giving system and encouraging the release of oxytocin.29 It decreases insecurity, self-consciousness, and the tendency to compare ourselves with others, and increases confidence through building our belief that we are worthy and capable.30 It lessens depression and anxiety,31 and as a result, gives you back energy formerly spent being down on yourself. It can foster emotional resilience and mental toughness and shore up inner strength and courage. Self–compassion helps to increases levels of calm and even joy.
Still not sold? Self-compassion also strongly correlates with achieving mastery in your field and optimal performance.32 Additional benefits of building up your level of self-compassion are that you will have higher standards for yourself, work harder through enhanced motivation, and take more responsibility for your actions, and you will have more “grit.”
But here’s the coup de grace: practicing self-compassion helps us to unblock and express creativity, which enables us to access higher levels of creative thinking and creative originality.33 Self-compassion enables us to nurture our creativity instead of stifle it.
Yes to all of this! This dizzying array of the benefits of self-compassion is precisely what we need when our Inner Critic has worn us down.
Self-compassion has two parts: the first is making a conscious effort to stop self-judgment. The second is to actively comfort ourselves, the same as we would a friend in need. To see how the mechanism of self-compassion works, do this: Think about how you would feel toward and treat a dear friend – especially if your friend came to you seeking support during a difficult time in life. What feelings would you extend toward your friend? What would you tell your friend? What kind of language would you use to comfort your friend? Envision this whole scenario playing out in your head. Now take note of and mentally record those feelings and messages. This is your self-compassion template: how you will now treat and talk to yourself in place of self-criticism. You will now treat yourself with the same kindness and care with which you would treat a friend.
How do we put self-compassion into practice? In practicing the positive self-to-self relating of self-compassion, our goals are to become sensitive to our distress, understand the roots of our distress, have empathy for ourselves, and finally view ourselves and our situations without judgment.34 It’s self-compassion that we will use to develop empathy for the distress we’ve experienced due to the Inner Critic.
The Inner Critic is a purveyor of emotionally damaging messages. Having an overzealous Inner Critic doesn’t feel good – in fact, it hurts. You and I know that there’s nothing enjoyable about being in the throes of an Inner Critic episode. The first step in beginning to break the Inner Critic reflex through self-compassion is to acknowledge how hurtful it has been all of these years. The constant barrage of negative self-talk and self-criticism wears away at our sense of self and confidence. The original core directive of the Inner Critic was to protect, but the true consequence of its limiting messages is the slow and steady disintegration of our being.
The second step is to upgrade our self-talk. The primary way to put self-compassion into action and start being kinder to ourselves is through changing our self-talk from being critical to being supportive. The trick is to use sympathetic rather than chastising language when we talk to ourselves. Then we reframe our inner dialogue so that we express empathy for ourselves and our circumstances. Through this two-step approach we can begin to silence the Inner Critic.
Self-compassion and mindfulness make a great team: mindfulness is actually one of the keys to self-compassion. Mindfulness gives us the space to treat ourselves with kindness. When we improve our mindfulness skills, we automatically improve our ability to be self-compassionate.
When it comes to banishing the Inner Critic, the combination of mindfulness and self-compassion pack a one-two punch as far as quieting self-critical thoughts, which is why the two are the foundation of our process. Mindfulness increases awareness, enabling us to begin to dismiss the thoughts that thwart our creativity. Then through self-compassion, we can replace these hurtful thoughts with supportive ones.
Self-compassion paves the way to self-acceptance. Ironically, it is in fully accepting ourselves as we are that we open the space for change in our lives. We will transform the dynamic of the Inner Critic by replacing the threat of toxic self-criticism through generating feelings of warmth and compassion. Instead of continuing the habit of beating ourselves up, we will comfort ourselves instead, reassuring ourselves in the face of profound self-doubt. Finally, instead of discounting our creativity and thereby blocking it, we will start to respect and nurture our powerful creative selves and create the space to let for our creativity to flow.
When you start building up your compassion muscles, you’ll see that they’ve always been there at the ready to direct concern not only toward others, but also toward yourself.
Creative Dose: Self-Esteem vs. Self-Indulgence vs. Self-Compassion
Purpose: To better understand how self-compassion is different
What are the differences between self-esteem, self-indulgence, and self-compassion?
Self-Esteem is about feeling good about yourself in relationship to others. In the face of pain, self-esteem would have you feel better because you convince yourself that you are still doing better than other people. Negative outcomes of high self-esteem are ignoring or denying stress, pains, and disappointments, and putting others down.
Self-Indulgence is about catering to your whims without true regard for your well-being. In the face of pain and discomfort, self-indulgence would have you distract yourself away from your discomfort or numb it without acknowledging it.
Self-Compassion is about feeling good about yourself and caring for your well-being. In the face of pain, self-compassion has you give yourself empathy, nurturing, and kindness. While self-pity says, “feel sorry forme,” self-compassion remembers that everyone suffers, offering comfort in response to suffering.35
Creative Dose: The Voice of Support
Purpose: To begin to cultivate compassion for yourself
After years of being hard on yourself, you can attest to the fact that with criticism, instead of gaining a sense of comfort and safety, deep down inside, you end up feeling just the opposite.
When we feel kindness, understanding, acceptance, and support from others, it activates our soothing innate caregiving response, and our systems are infused with oxytocin, the hormone of bonding. As a result, our feelings of trust, calm, connectedness, and safety also increase.
Not only that, but when we feel accepted by others, our ability to generate warmth and compassion for ourselves increases as well. Practicing self-compassion eases the sense of threat produced by the Inner Critic and helps create a feeling of being protected.36 It follows that if we feel a sense of acceptance by others, then we can better generate compassion for ourselves.
I think of this as “compassion by association.” We’re going to use a technique called a compassionate reframe37 to trigger this mechanism of using the feeling of compassion to proffer self-compassion. This exercise is adapted from the “Perfect Nurturer” approach developed by Deborah Lee.38
Part 1: Use the Self-Compassion Template
When you feel yourself starting to think inner critical thoughts, take a moment to close your eyes.
Become aware of your Inner Critic’s thoughts.
Then shift attention to your breathing to get grounded in your body and in the present moment.
Then using the self-compassion template described earlier, focus on putting yourself in a kind and empathetic mind frame.
Part 2: The Embodiment of Warm Support
Close your eyes again. Think of a person who will be your creativity cheerleader. It could be anyone: a supportive family member, a religious or historical figure, or even a beloved fictional character.
From this point on, this person will represent your ultimate ideal of caring, support, and encouragement. This person radiates the qualities of strength, wisdom, and acceptance without judgment. Imagine that this person wants the absolute best for you and does not wish to see any hurt or harm come to you.
To fully envision this person who is the embodiment of warm support, employ all of your senses to firmly embed the image and feel of this person in your head.
What does this person look like?
How is this person dressed?
What does his or her voice sound like?
How do you feel when this person gives you kind messages of support?
Is your support person accompanied by a pleasant smell like baking bread, freshly cut grass, orange blossoms, or the sea?
Focus on your cheerleader having an attitude of caring for you and extending feelings of warmth towards you. It may help to recollect feelings of warmth you’ve experienced from others in the past and then draw upon that sensation.
When you are in the midst of mentally beating yourself up for some perceived misstep, invoke your Creativity Cheerleader. Ask yourself, “What would my cheerleader say to me right now?”
Imagine your cheerleader telling you exactly what you need to hear in that moment.
What does your Creativity Cheerleader say to you?
How do his or her words and actions make you feel?
Hold the feeling of being supported in your mind to have it anchor itself in your being.
Part 3: Your Future Creatively Confident Self
In addition to (or instead of) your warm support coming from someone else, you can have it come from yourself. But it’s not the you from the present – it’s the you from the future who is completely confident about owning her or his creativity.
That’s right: your future creatively confident self can be your Creativity Cheerleader to coach you through your Inner Critic angst.
If you need help, think about what you needed to hear when you were in the throes of an Inner Critic attack in the past.
What kind of advice and guidance would you have wanted to hear back then?
Knowing what you know now, what would you tell your past self?
Now in the present, your badass creative self has come from the future to show you some love and give you some support.
What kind of wise advice and guidance does your future self offer?
How does your future self encourage you to be kind to yourself?
No matter who you choose as your creativity cheerleader, to start to build and exercise your self-compassion muscles, keep this voice of guidance and support in mind as you dive into this process.
Glean Your Inner Critic Afflictions
“GUlL: I’m afflicted.
ROS: I see.
GUlL: Glean what afflicts me.”
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Now that we are more familiar with the practices that provide a common thread throughout the work that we are doing, we’re well-equipped to set out on the road to change and empowerment.
Our first order of business is to understand the workings of the Inner Critic. It’s been doing its job for so long that you may be numb to its presence. But it’s there, trust me.
These exercises are designed to help you get a better handle on how your Inner Critic shows up in your life and affects you, and some new ways to start dealing with it.
Ready? Let’s do this.
Recognize Your Inner Critical Voice
“It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.”
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
The Inner Critic is so strongly convinced of its position that it uses incendiary language to make its point. In fact, this is one of the easiest ways to detect the Inner Critic. Whenever you think in absolutes or hyperbole like, “I’ll never get better at this” or “I’m always behind schedule” you can be sure that you’re witnessing the Inner Critic’s handiwork.
One key practice of meditation is acknowledging thoughts that come up and then ignoring them to focus your attention elsewhere. When you create distance between you and your self-critical thoughts, you’ll begin to notice that they are often temporary. One will bubble up into your consciousness, then be replaced by another one, and so on. The only way a thought sticks is when you pay attention to it.
Here’s the great thing about employing a more mindful approach to your Inner Critic: you start seeing its comments as just thoughts. You stop seeing whatever your Inner Critic presents as immediate calls to action, accurate, or even true. You’ll find that some thoughts are worth paying attention to and some are not. Guess which the ones the Inner Critic generates are? It’s a whole new world.
Until you build your awareness of your habitual inner critical thoughts, however, it may help to poke a stick at them to bring them out into the open.
Creative Dose: The Critical Voices in Your Head
Purpose: To start to unearth your inner critical thoughts
You know you have an active Inner Critic, but you’ve gotten so used to its diatribes that it barely registers with you anymore, right? To bring your inner critical voice back into your consciousness, we’re going to use Mad Libs to imitate your Inner Critic.
Fill in the following sentences with the first words that come to you. Write as many variations of each sentence as you can before moving on to the next one. Or you can run through the list multiple times, answering each question differently.
I can’t because .
I’m not enough.
I’m afraid that I’m because I .
I never because I always .
I’m afraid that I’ll because I .
I can’t because I’m not as
as others.
If I then people will .
I shouldn’t because I haven’t .
I because my ideas .
I’m too .
Did you discover some thoughts and beliefs that you didn’t know were there? Nice work! Now you are better equipped to start the process
of refuting or dismissing them. You may want to do these Mad Libs every couple of months to see if you can bring to light any new mistaken beliefs that have been lying just beneath the surface of your conscious mind.
Here’s a bonus question for you:
My biggest fear around my creativity is
__________________________________________________
__________________________________________________
__________________________________________________
Spend time on this question. Is it patently true? Is it circumstantially true? Make a commitment to start challenging this fear.
Remember, we’re now using mindfulness to observe our thoughts, so don’t believe everything you think.
Give It A Name
As you are well aware, trying not to think about something never works. The term for this phenomenon is “thought stopping.”39 It’s ineffective because it forces you to pay attention to the very thought that you’re trying so desperately to avoid. Similarly, attempting to act like your Inner Critic doesn’t exist and isn’t wreaking havoc in your consciousness when you are having an “episode” is like denying that you’re trying to walk with a broken leg. It’s painful and unnecessary. Being in denial about something doesn’t change the facts. Most of the time, the most helpful thing to do is to call a spade a spade, because then you can take positive action.
If you’ve never read the young adult science fiction classic A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L’Engle, I highly recommend it. In the book, the main character Meg finds that she has a subtle, yet potent superpower: she is able to Name things, and that doing so gives them identity, shape, and substance. I encourage you to channel this power toward recognizing when your Inner Critic makes an appearance, and then putting a name to it.
Make an effort to keep in mind that there’s your Inner Critic, and then there’s You. You are so much bigger and grander than your Inner Critic. The fact that you can even recognize that there are different parts of yourself at play speaks to the part of your consciousness that is a higher-level observer, who impartially views all that you do, say, and think. Profound, but true.
On a psychological level, this practice creates mental distance between You and the self-critical thoughts. Thinking about your thoughts differently keeps those Inner Critic circuits from firing, which is the key to begin changing them.
Applying the practice of naming your Inner Critic will accomplish several things. First, it increases your awareness of what feels like a threat to the self and your automatic response to it. Second, naming it creates the needed mental distance between you and your inner critical voice. Third, it opens up the space to extend compassion to the part of your psyche that feels attacked and needs comforting.
Creative Dose: Identify It and Name It
Purpose: To become more conscious of the Inner Critic’s presence
The sensations may start slowly, creeping over your awareness. You start feeling anxious, your head gets that familiar sense of pressure, and you start making snarky remarks to yourself about your behavior or global disparaging comments about who you are as a person. It’s happened so many times before, but now you see it clearly: you’re having an Inner Critic attack.
Part 1: Call It
When you realize you are beginning to feel an impending Inner
Critic attack, the best thing you can do stop it is to name it. That’s right, name it.
Say something like the following out loud (if you’re around people, you can think it in your head):
“My Inner Critic is rearing its head.”
“I’m having an Inner Critic attack right now.”
“Oh look: my Inner Critic is here.” (*waves*)
Anything that helps you realize that the overwrought internal protector is attempting to take over your thinking is useful.
Respond to noticing the appearance of your Inner Critic dispassionately, as if you are remarking upon the grass being green or the sky being blue. The goal is to begin disconnecting from emotions while noticing that inner critical thoughts are coming up.
Part 2: Give Your Inner Critic a Name
Have fun with it: give your Inner Critic an actual name and
a personality.
Give your Inner Critic a name, and when it shows up, you can be like, “Hey Bart.”
Continue having fun with this and give your Inner Critic a personality and affect as well. For example, you can imagine your Inner Critic talking with a silly voice and being overly dramatic about everything.
When you’ve made your Inner Critic less of a prominent presence in your mind, return your attention to the task at hand.
Part 3: Give Your Inner Critic a Back story
If we’re going to personalize the Inner Critic, we might as well go for it, right?
Your Inner Critic came from somewhere, aren’t you curious to know from where and why?
Envision in your mind’s eye who your Inner Critic is and what it’s all about.
Then sit down and write it out your Inner Critic’s origin story. You can use this framework to get started:
Hello, I’m your Inner Critic and my name is _______________________.
I was born in ____________________________, because __________________________________________________...
Keep adding to the story until you feel complete with it.
What did you discover about your Inner Critic that you didn’t
know before?
Learn the Guises of the Inner Critic
The rest of this book is devoted to exploring the different forms of how the Inner Critic shows up with regard to creativity. What you’ll discover is that the Inner Critic is a shape-shifter, assuming various guises to most effectively push you to avoid future threats to the self.
At keynotes and in workshops, I often lead an exercise I call an indoor “snowball fight.” In this exercise, audience members write down the answer the question “What is your biggest fear around creativity?” on a blank piece of paper and then throw their balled-up paper at each other. These “snowballs” have become the best unlikely research tool. After gathering and compiling the responses over several months, I noticed similarities, trends, and frequently verbatim responses. It is from this information that I’ve determined the forms of the Inner Critic that affect creative people the most.
Some of the forms of the Inner Critic I’ve identified are common psychology terms. For those that aren’t, I’ve created monikers for them.
Creative Dose: The Many Faces of The Inner Critic
Purpose: To recognize the various guises of the Inner Critic
Read through this list of the various forms of the Inner Critic and put a check by each one that strikes a chord with you.
Judgment Dread: You have a paralyzing fear of having your ideas and work be judged and criticized by others. You hold yourself and your ideas back and are loathe to put yourself out there creatively. You feel crushed by feedback and criticism. For fear of being judged, you lack self-trust.
High Self-Criticism: Little or nothing that you do creatively is right, good, or acceptable. You are overly critical of your ideas and frequent dismiss them. You’re rarely pleased with your work and consequently discount your efforts.
Deficiency Anxiety: You feel that you are somehow intrinsically lacking or inadequate at your core, and that you, your ideas, and your creations aren’t good enough.
Proficiency Anxiety: You’re afraid of not knowing enough, not being good at what you do, or not being able to keep up with acquiring new knowledge and skills.
Originality Anxiety: You believe everything you create must be new, unique, and cutting-edge, and if it is not, that it doesn’t have any merit or value.
Comparison Syndrome: You feel inadequate and therefore can’t see your unique brilliance. You experience despair from envy of others’ success, feeling like a failure in comparison.
Creativity Denial: You’re in full-on denial about having any creativity or being creative at all. By holding on to this belief, you make it true, blocking the generation of creative ideas. This behavior starts a self-perpetuating cycle in which you are less able to come up with original ideas. It’s a self-imposed state of creativity paralysis.
Overwhelm Obstruction: You are so focused on the stuff you feel you “have” to do that you don’t have the bandwidth to divert to creative thinking. Being creatively inspired seems like a pipe dream and something for other people. Doing anything creative is yet another thing to do on the long list of things that are already on your plate.
Creativity Misgivings: You sometimes think of yourself as creative, but you don’t trust your creativity at all – you see your creativity as fleeting, unreliable, and capricious. You live in perpetual fear that your creativity will dry up and that your capacity to come up with any more ideas will disappear.
Know Thy Inner Critic
The previous exercises have helped us build awareness as to when our Inner Critic shows up. Now you can more clearly identify your inner critical thoughts when they come up and call out your Inner Critic when it tries to take over your thinking (and you may have even given it a name). You’re starting to calmly observe inner critical thoughts instead of reacting to them, and you’ve become more familiar with the various forms of the Inner Critic.
Now it’s time to go deep.
For our minds to start making the medicine of new thoughts, we need to know exactly what we’re treating.
To start banishing your Inner Critic in earnest, you need to go beyond merely knowing about the different forms of the Inner Critic – you need to know which form plagues you the most.
Creative Dose: Identify Your Inner Critic Achilles’ Heel
Purpose: To determine which aspects of the Inner Critic are most relevant to you
Like the Greek mythological hero Achilles, we all have a particular area where our Inner Critic is the most vocal, doing its best to trigger fear and inhibit our behavior to keep us safe. I think of this as our Inner Critic Achilles’ heel.
To see which versions of the Inner Critic are most relevant to you, complete the Inner Critic Achilles’ Heel Questionnaire. Which of the phrases closely describe thoughts you’ve had or have regularly?
Inner Critic Achilles’ Heel Questionnaire
