Banish Your Inner Critic

by Denise Jacobs

  When you realize that part of the Inner Critic’s modus operandi is to create an alternate version of reality using distorted thinking, you have a choice of which reality you will decide to live in. Much like in The Matrix, after you take the red pill and start seeing how strongly cognitive biases have colored your thinking, you’ll never be able to go back to your old perceptions of what is real and what isn’t. Like Neo, you’ll see that you actually have a choice of which reality to believe is real. Let’s look at how you can choose the red pill of living your life according to what is factually true and then infusing it with optimism, rather than taking the blue pill of continuing to see life through cognitive biases that generate negativity.

  Recognize Cognitive Distortions

  “Reality? Your ‘reality,’ sir, is lies and balderdash, and I’m delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.”

  —Baron Munchausen, a character in the movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

  The mind is very clever. So clever, in fact, that it can convince itself that things are true even when they are not.

  Our brains interpret and assign meaning to situations all of the time without us even realizing it. But the interpretation is frequently done with limited information and scant facts. So our fear-conditioned negatively-biased imaginative brains fill in our gaps in knowledge, and more often than not skew our thinking and push us to negatively misinterpret situations. This form of thinking is known as cognitive distortion.

  Cognitive distortions are a lens through which we perceive reality to be different than it actually is. We start to see the self and the world through what I think of as “Inner Critic-colored glasses.” where cognitive distortions are the frames, one lens is negativity bias, and the other lens is confirmation bias, which we’ll learn about soon.

  Despite cognitive distortions being largely inaccurate, they are a regular part of our thinking, and are so automatic that they’re virtually unnoticeable without concentrated effort to detect them. When you do identify the cognitive distortions, you can see within them other people’s criticisms at their source. Our Inner Critic, true to form as our dedicated protector, takes critical comments as base material and sculpts them into truisms.

  The problem with cognitive distortions is that this thinking is seductive. We can’t tell that we are seeing reality through a warped lens. We are convinced that our perception of this reality is accurate and true and are completely oblivious to the fact that we’ve actually put a personal spin on things.

  Everyone experiences cognitive distortions to some extent. The problem occurs when we believe this warped version is the sole option for what’s real.

  With an increased awareness of cognitive distortions, you’ll start to see that multiple versions of reality exist – it all depends on which you are allowing to influence and color your thoughts. You’ll also see that you have the power to choose which version of reality you pay attention to.

  Know Your Cognitive Distortions

  Although some sources list ten cognitive distortions, others list up to fifty. This list includes those that are most relevant to the Inner Critic.

  While reading, play close attention to see whether any of these altered versions of thinking sound familiar to you. How many have stuck with you, become internalized, and become highly influential in of how you see yourself and the world?

  Mental Filter (also called selective abstraction or tunnel vision) / Magnification and Minimization (also called the binocular trick). You find ample evidence to support negative beliefs, but filter out any positive counterexamples. You put all of your focus on the one negative thing that went wrong in a situation, and filter out everything else that went right by overlooking it. Or you exaggerate the importance of the negative events, situations, actions, or qualities, and you minimize the significance of the positive ones.

  Example: “They hated my workshop! 35 of the 40 attendees gave me 5 stars, but 2 people gave me only 2 stars.”

  Overgeneralization. You make a broad, sweeping negative conclusion from a single isolated occurrence and then apply it to all instances of its kind, making a truism from it.

  Example: “They rejected my talk proposal. I’ll never be a speaker!”

  Jumping to Conclusions. You negatively interpret the meaning of a situation without any actual evidence or facts to support your conclusion.

  Example: When your boss gives you a less than perfect performance evaluation, you think, “I’m never going to get promoted; my boss probably plans to fire me.”

  Mind Reading. You determine that the thoughts of others toward you are unfavorable despite lacking sufficient evidence, considering other more likely possibilities, or even checking it out.

  Example: “He’s thinking that I don’t know the first thing about this project.”

  Fortune Telling or Catastrophizing. You predict that circumstances will turn out poorly, and then are convinced that your prediction is fact despite lacking supportive evidence. You only see the worst possible outcome of a situation and expect the worst-case scenario to happen without considering other more likely outcomes.

  Example: “You didn’t call me when you got home – I thought you had gotten into an accident and were hurt!”

  Emotional Reasoning. You turn feelings into facts and assume that the way you feel emotionally is a reflection of reality, and ignore evidence to the contrary. In other words, you believe that because you feel it, it must be true.

  Example: “I feel frightened right now. That must mean I’m in real physical danger.”

  All or Nothing Thinking (also called black and white, polarized, or dichotomous thinking). You look at situations in black and white categories instead of along a continuum. You think in absolutes and frequently use terms such as always, never, every, and forever.

  Example: “If I’m not a complete success, I’m a total failure.”

  Should Statements (also called imperatives). You use shoulds and should nots as your main source of motivation, holding yourself to a precise and strict list of acceptable behavior. You mentally chastise yourself if you don’t conform, because you’ve overestimated how dire the repercussions would be if you don’t. Other terms used are must and ought.

  Example: “By now, I should be a more successful designer than I am.”

  Disqualifying/Diminishing the Positive. You discount or ignore positive experiences, situations, attributes, and qualities, and recognize and emphasize only the negative.

  Example: “I earned more money than I ever have last year, but I had to pay so much in taxes. I’m still not successful.”

  Personalization. You assume responsibility for negative events and circumstances that are outside of your control, blaming yourself unnecessarily for situations without considering more plausible explanations for the root causes. Or you believe that others are behaving negatively because of you.

  Example: “If I hadn’t let you go rollerblading, you wouldn’t have broken your leg.”

  Labeling and Mislabeling. You generalize and make labels of negative characterizations of yourself and others based on perceived shortcomings and a limited set of behaviors, without considering facts indicating otherwise. And then you set yourself up to embody the label. This is an extreme form of overgeneralization.

  Example: “I’m a loser.”

  Anything sound familiar? It should. Cognitive distortions are like the mouthpiece of the Inner Critic, a primary vehicle through which the Inner Critic communicates some of the core messages. Cognitive distortions poison the way in which we relate to ourselves, how and what we communicate with our selves, further solidifying our mistaken beliefs.

  With this understanding, we can choose to see situations and ourselves as they truly are, without seeing everything through the thoughts and perceptions created by our Inner Critic-colored glasses. Let’s remove these cognitively distorted spectacles and crush them underf
oot by becoming more aware of the nature of our thoughts and beliefs and then challenging them.

  Creative Dose: Surprise Journal

  Purpose: To challenge instilled self-critical beliefs about life in general and your creativity in particular

  The Inner Critic tends to be a bit of a know-it-all, of the “been there, done that; know exactly what’s going to happen” bent. One thing to do to begin to dismantle the authority of the Inner Critic and the distorted thinking it proffers is to start keeping a record of instances when it was flat-out wrong. What better way to do that than to notice every time your expectations of being judged are disproven and you’re taken by surprise?

  To challenge the cognitive distortions used by Inner Critic through the element of surprise, start keeping a Surprise Journal11 to help you notice and note times when your cognitive distortions were shown to be exactly that: inaccurate thinking, and myths you created from it.

  Step 1: Note

  During the course of a week, strive to note at least fifteen instances in which you experienced surprise about thoughts that you had believed to be patently true. Notice also any moments when you experienced confusion or your negative expectations were not met and when an outcome was more positive than you had anticipated.

  You can use this structure to capture your instances of where your beliefs were challenged:

  Previous belief:

  My surprise!

  Step 2: Inquire

  For each moment of surprise, ask yourself these questions:

  Why was this instance surprising?

  What does why and how I was surprised tell me about myself?

  You can use this structure to capture your surprises and insights

  from them:

  Surprise:

  Why surprised?

  My insight:

  Step 3: Relate

  Take the same process and apply it to your creativity.

  Note when your creativity surprised you, for example, an idea that came out of nowhere, how you ended up solving a problem or troubleshooting, or a new skill you picked up and started to apply. Ask yourself the same questions as in the Inquire section.

  You can use this structure to capture your surprises and insights about your creativity:

  Creative instance:

  Why surprised?

  My insight:

  What did you learn about your creativity and your creative process? Did the process help you see the kinds of cognitive distortions that have been clouding your self-perceptions and challenge your assumptions about your creativity?

  Seek Positive Confirmation

  “The problem with worry is that we attract the very thing we are trying to avoid. We live a self-fulfilling prophecy. Life keeps its agreement with us through our beliefs, because whatever we think about, we bring about. Life is like a mirror. It reflects back whatever image we present to it.”

  — Dr. Robert Anthony, author

  A college friend of mine, Phillip, had a habit of being incredibly sensitive to people judging and second-guessing him. And you know what? It happened all of the time. Despite his success with putting himself through school, managing a disability, and working with limited resources, when he tried to get support for his endeavors, people still seemed to question his abilities. I couldn’t understand for the life of me why he had to fight the battles that he did, because I could clearly see all of his talents and abilities, his hard work ethic, and his ability to effortlessly generate business ideas. After a point, he began to expect that people would judge him and discount his capabilities. Phillip’s expectations of being judged went on to color his perception of himself. This self-perception influenced his behavior and demeanor and consequently set the stage for how he interacted with people – and how they responded to him. He saw the potential for rejection in the form of judgment and criticism everywhere, and he found it. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  When we are afraid of being judged, almost everything said to us seems like a condemnation of some sort. We’re constantly on the lookout for a comment, a facial expression, a tone of voice that proves to us just what we suspected: that this person or those people are judging us. With the Inner Critic in the driver’s seat, we find these dreaded negative assessments all too easily due to another inclination of the brain: confirmation bias.

  Confirmation bias is the tendency of the brain to seek out evidence to confirm deeply held beliefs or hypotheses while dismissing or ignoring any evidence that doesn’t support them. Under the influence of confirmation bias, ambiguous information is interpreted to support the held belief or hypothesis, situations are remembered selectively (particularly emotionally charged situations), and mistaken beliefs are acted upon as though they are true. It’s important to bear in mind that confirmation bias is nonpartisan: such bias can apply to either the negative or the positive. The problem is that we usually use it to confirm our fears instead of our hopes.

  We see what we expect to see. When it comes to having Judgment Dread, not only do we look for evidence that people are judging us, but then the confirmation of our fears about how we’re not okay negatively impacts how we see ourselves. When we don’t feel seen and supported, and thus feel rejected, we end up internalizing people’s judgments and strong criticisms as a truth about us. In his book The Inner Game of Work, author Tim Galwey provides a spot-on description of this phenomenon: “...if I identify with a concept such as ‘I am not good enough,’ I will probably start looking at my feelings and behaviors through the lens of that concept. I will also interpret how others view me through that same lens. And I will no doubt be able to find ample ‘evidence’ to support my basic negative self-image. The negative concept is now fortified and will be used to find more supportive evidence.” 12 Just like in Phillip’s case above, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Negative confirmation bias is one of the many tools the Inner Critic uses to ensure that we will modify our behavior to avoid any potential future hurt. But avoiding hurt is rarely what comes of it. This version of cognitive bias warps our perceptions of the world around us into one different from what actually is, enticing our brains into an un-fun house of mirrors that reflect our amplified fears back to us. When Judgment Dread is at the helm of your consciousness, then so much of what you see and think will be from a self-judging standpoint. Who needs other people to be judgmental and critical when we can do it ourselves with such venom? Not only do we judge ourselves, but we also begin to inhibit behavior and hold ourselves back. We confirm people’s unfavorable judgments by stifling our potential. We completely miss kudos. We dismiss or deflect compliments. Praise barely registers with us. And support is overlooked. We live within the confines of a limited and distorted truth, mistakenly believing that in this cage of our own making we’ll be safe. We lose a sense of how vast and wide the field of potentiality is for us, and what is truly possible.

  Thankfully, confirmation bias doesn’t only work for creating a negative self-fulfilling prophecy; it can also work for the positive as well. What a relief! You can use your powers of focus to activate the process of shifting your brain to a different place by searching for confirmations of positive thoughts and beliefs. Instead of looking for judgment and finding it, you can gently encourage your brain to look for appreciation and respect. Rather than living in a place of constant preparation for being pummeled by harsh criticism, you can shift your focus to seek confirmation of kudos and praise. Rather than walking around in a perpetual state of feeling that no one believes in you, you can be on the hunt for support. And because of the nature of cognitive bias, you will start to find all of these.

  Take confirmation and use it as a force for good, to seek out positivity rather than negativity. Doing so will shift your perception away from life as a series of one judgment after another.

  Through this shift, you’ll transform your perceptions of yourself as well. />
  Creative Dose: Swipe File of Support

  Purpose: To have evidence that you are appreciated to counter a fear of being criticized

  In advertising, there is a practice of keeping something called a “swipe file.” Advertising professionals “swipe” examples of great marketing copy or advertising slogans and put them into a file to call upon for ideas and inspiration later.

  For those moments when your sense of being liked and appreciated by others is flagging and your fear of being judged or even rejected starts to take over, or even if you just need a little boost of encouragement, you should have your own swipe file of kudos and compliments you’ve received for your work, creative or otherwise.13 The goal is to keep all of these items to remind yourself that people appreciate the work that you’re doing. But even more than that, I believe that a “kudos file” can also help placate the part of our brain that is on constant alert for the prospect of being rejected from the group. It can help us settle into the knowledge that we are supported and cared for, and therefore, that we are safe.

  So, taking a cue from advertisers, I encourage you to start keeping a swipe file of love.

  Gather up every positive physical note, thank-you letter, or other kinds of praise into a folder that you keep handy. For digital items, you should save emails and favorite Tweets, and take screenshots of comments and responses from the various social media platforms. Aggregate all of these and save them into a folder aptly named “Kudos File” – or whatever name rings true for you. Continue to save everything and anything that indicates people’s expression of how talented and wonderful you are.