Silencing Your Inner Critic
3 Practical Dos and A Don’t for Shutting Down That Destructive Voice
We all have an inner critic of varying degrees and sizes. While at times that inner voice can act as a reality check, in general it tends to pull us down, sow doubt in our capabilities and knock our confidence.
Your inner critic is great at picking solitary and usually arbitrary criteria to make you feel back. It uses this narrow criteria to compare yourself to others and frame yourself as a failure. It acts as if this one area it selects is the only thing important in your life, and ignores all the other things you’ve achieved. The end result is low energy, poor confidence, lost motivation and a downward spiral that can be difficult to snap out of.
Here are some ways to approach your inner critic.
We start with active things you can start doing.
- Change the Frame: Any idiot can choose a frame to make someone look like a failure, and often the frame is meaningless. If the inner critic is being overly critical about your love life then remind yourself of your friendships. If its being critical about work think about the hobbies that you excel in. Its your headspace and mindset and you have the power to change the frame, and create a more empowering response.
- Gratitude & Accomplishment Journal/Log: In moments of despair we can struggle to sing our own praises. As part of my own daily journaling I have a gratitude log where I take a moment to remind myself for what I’m grateful for and I’ve a daily to do list (I also have a monthly and quarterly to do list too). But having this resource to reflect on snaps me back to reality, and helps me focus on everything that I have done, what’s going well and that in reality I (generally) have my shit together.
- Hear out the inspector: I can’t remember who, but someone once described the inner critic as an inspector. Maybe it is a genuine voice that is meaningfully sounding an alarm bell, or maybe its a grumpy old man caught in a cycle of negativity. Ultimately you have the final say on how valuable the voice is. But listen to what it says, is there a way to turn it into something constructive, to create a different path forward? Can you learn from the inspector? Or maybe its…