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
Chapter
Name
Question
True
False
3
Judgment Dread
I enjoy sharing my ideas to get feedback.
I obsess about any criticism I get, replaying it in my head.
I constantly judge how I’m creative.
4
High Self-Criticism
I’m rarely satisfied with my own work.
When I see that somebody else has a better idea, I drop mine.
My work always looks better to me after I’ve been away from it for a while.
5
Deficiency Anxiety
I don’t feel that I’ve accomplished enough in my career.
I have a lot of creative talent, even if I don’t always show it.
I’m nothing like the other creative people I know.
5
Proficiency Anxiety
I keep all of my technical skills sharp and keep abreast of trends.
I’m slow at coming up with new ideas
Collaboration is for people who don’t know enough to do it all themselves.
5
Originality Anxiety
Banish Your Inner Critic Page 7