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.
Chapter 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.
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