Banish Your Inner Critic
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When you feel that you need to make sure you’re okay and you do good work and positively affect people’s lives to boot, check your kudos file.
Bonus Action: Spread the love by contributing to someone else’s kudos file!
Whenever you feel moved, send an unsolicited email (or even better, an actual card) of thanks and gratitude to family, friends, colleagues, clients, and consultants to let them know how much you appreciate them and their work.14 Not only will the other person feel fantastic, but you will feel pretty fabulous as well.
Stop Awfulizing
“Never give a negative thought an inch or it will take a mile.”
— Matshona Dhliwayo, author
The Inner Critic practically makes an art form out of spinning wild tales of potential doom in alternate futures. Through the habit of imagining worst-case scenarios in our heads, then replaying them, and then amplifying them, we take negativity bias to an extreme form known as “awfulizing.” If the prospect of putting your creative ideas “out there” makes you a little apprehensive, that’s normal and understandable. However, if you find yourself spending energy getting worked up about what would have happened if, for example, your boss hadn’t liked your ideas (naturally, it means that you would have been fired, then would have lost your apartment because you couldn’t pay the rent, and then you would become homeless), then you know you have stepped into awfulizing territory.
Unfortunately, there are consequences to creating stories of what would have happened – you shouldn’t dismiss them as a product of your imagination running wild. Merely thinking about events as terrible actually hampers one’s ability to cope with real-life situations.15 In the long run, the tendency to awfulize hurts us far more than it helps.
We can choose to stop the madness. Instead of getting caught up in awfulized versions of a dystopic future, we can be mindful of that they are only stories spun by our Inner Critic. We can then encourage our wonderfully imaginative minds to produce new stories that put us in a more realistic, yet positive mindframe.
Creative Dose: “And then...”
Purpose: To practice realistic optimism to counter awfulizing
To counter negativity bias in the form of awfulizing, Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project, encourages practicing realistic optimism instead.16 With realistic optimism, for any given situation you imagine and tell the most hopeful story possible. This is not the time for fantasy, however. Rather, you base your optimistic projection on the facts without either embellishing them or minimizing them.
Think of something that you are afraid of regarding your work or your creativity being judged or criticized that is making you anxious and may even be paralyzing you from any forward movement. Maybe you’re giving your first talk at a conference, you have an art opening, or you are writing an article for a prestigious website.
First, on a piece of paper or in a journal, write down and answer the question:
What am I afraid will happen?
Next, write down a response to this question:
What could happen?
However, instead of going into a place where your anxious thoughts push you to awfulize the situation, actively apply realistic optimism. Tell yourself the story of what could possibly happen using “and then...” to devise an alternative that is positive instead of the feared outcome. Build upon this new realistically optimistic story by making each of your “and then...” additions more positive until you feel better and your fear diminishes.
Use this framework:
and then _______________________________________________________ ,
and then _______________________________________________________ ,
and then _______________________________________________________ ...
For example, maybe you’re afraid of opening up an Etsy store for the letterpress greeting cards that you’ve been making in your spare time. You’re afraid that no one will buy them, your creative efforts won’t be recognized and appreciated, and it will be a wasted effort. However, what could happen is that because you submitted them as a new product, the cards could be featured on a popular design website. And then the increased visibility could drive more traffic to your store. And then that increased visibility could garner interviews on design podcasts for you. And then... And then...
You get the idea.
This is also a great exercise to do with a partner! Ping pong “and then’s” back and forth to see what optimistic futures you can envision together.
Regardless of the situation, you’re going to be thinking something about it. A tendency to awfulize sends your thoughts into a downward spiral into negativity. However, applying the same thinking mechanism, you can deliberately point your thoughts and the stories you create in the opposite direction, up into positivity.
Practice Radical Ratification
“Critics are not the enemy – the battle is in our own head.”
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
The way to stop living in fear of being judged and criticized is to start practicing radical ratification, which is all about deeply validating ourselves. Instead of proactively judging ourselves in order to beat others to it, we are going to accept who we are regardless of what other people think. Instead of seeking approval from others, we will approve of and support ourselves. People learn how to treat us from us. It’s time to for us to shore up our levels of self-respect so that we are less vulnerable to others’ capricious views of us.
So often, the true problem with criticism is not that it happens at all or what the people say, but in how we deal with it. We put up our mental hand and block it, we tense up for the anticipated blow of the critical words and don’t hear them, or we take criticisms to heart and absorb their toxicity into both our emotional and physical bodies, causing stress and illness. We alter our lives and shut doors to the future that our souls desire.
Our lives have the potential to be so much grander, so much more vivid, fulfilling, and satisfying than the fears of threat, limitation, and lack that others project upon us.
Instead of judging ourselves, we need to trust in our abilities, embrace our uniqueness, and fully accept who we are and how we are creative.
Instead of letting external criticism fortify our internal fears, we need to reframe criticism and see it as a tool for growth and building self-trust. Not only there are gems to be had from the content of criticism, but the input can be a way for us to bolster our sense of what we know is right in our gut.
Contrary to what anyone may believe, it’s never too late to get the support, approval, and permission that we’ve always wanted but never received enough. It’s just that now, we will let it bubble up from an internal source instead of searching for it outside of ourselves the world over.
Let’s look how we can shake off the mental shackles that we have weighed ourselves down with and get to a place where we’re trusting in our capabilities and are more emotionally resilient. When we change our relationship with judgment and criticism, we can start to let our greatness out into the world.
Stop Hiding in Plain Sight
“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
— Brené Brown, author, scholar and public speaker
Remember my story of playing basketball and my desperate attempt to hide in plain sight? It’s very hard to miss a 6-foot tall woman, and in many places in the world, it’s even harder to miss a 6-foot tall African-American woman! I couldn’t hide if I wanted to. It was only when I embraced my height and my athletic build that I started coming into my own as a teenager. In my adult life, making a conscious choice to be seen for who I am transformed my body, helping me let go of the last 50 of the 100 pounds I wanted to release, enabled me to create a new life in a new city on the other side of the country from where I had lived for almost 18 years, and further motivated me to pursue my dream of be
coming an author and a speaker.
If you wrestle with the fear of standing out or of being too unique or avant-garde for fear of being judged, here’s my recommendation: dig down and find the courage to embrace it. Own it. Flaunt it even.
And then, revel in the opportunities that open up when you stop working so hard to fit your round peg of a self into a square hole.
Creative Dose: Your Uniqueness Advantage
Purpose: To discover how being unique is an asset
Meryl Streep, award-winning actress, beautifully states how powerful accepting your uniqueness is. She says, “...everyone thinks there is a perfect way to be...but your difference, your thing that is unique to you, is the most valuable thing you have. The weird thing about you is the thing that makes people remember you....Whatever is weird about you maybe is your strength.”17
Here are three steps to begin capitalizing on your uniqueness and making what’s different about you work for you.
Step 1: Make a Vow
In his book, Mastering Creative Anxiety, Eric Maisel asserts that we must master the anxiety of individuality, and he provides a vow that you must make to yourself: “I must be myself. That will provoke anxiety, and I will deal with it.”18
Promise yourself that you will start to release the expectations of others and begin to unearth and reveal the real you. Promise yourself that you will strive to be no one other than yourself. If you’re still unclear as to who exactly that is, promise that you’ll fully commit yourself to a journey of discovery.
As a matter of fact, sit down right now and make this vow yourself. Seriously. Here’s a structure for you to use:
As of this day ____________ of the year ____________, I hereby vow to
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
If you want to get really official with it, you can print out a proclamation of commitment to self1 and use that instead.
Congratulations! You’ve made a wonderful commitment to yourself and your creative future.
Step 2: Reframe It
Use these questions to reframe uniqueness:
How does being unique work to your advantage? List all of the ways that being unique helps, not hurts, you.
Being unique helps me by
_______________________________________________________
How does being exactly who you are make things easier for you?
List all of the things that would improve in your life if you stopped trying to suppress who you are.
In being who I am, my life would be better because
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
Remember: your uniqueness is your strength. Your experiences, perspectives, and knowledge are something that no other single person on earth has. Your work is to take the uniqueness that is you and put it to good use in your life and in the world.
Accept Who You Are
“Stop expecting others to show you love, acceptance, commitment, and respect when you don’t even show that to yourself.”
—Steve Maraboli, author
A few months ago, I tuned in to the language that I used to describe my own creativity and I was shocked: I realized that I had been judging myself my entire life for the way in which I am creative. (And no, the irony of the fact that I travel around encouraging people to embrace and express their creativity is not lost on me.) I’ll tell you what happened.
One of my crafty outlets is making handmade herbal soap from scratch. When I first started making it back in 1998, I got tired of having people ask me what was in it, so I created labels for the different scents. Then I designed a logo. Then I refined the packaging to look really polished so I could sell it. This behavior is not unusual for me – in fact, it is my modus operandi.
If I make something, you can best be sure that I will also develop the branding for it and design some sort of packaging. However, when talking to a friend about a recent soapmaking endeavor I did to make unique thank-you gifts for clients, I heard myself saying “Yeah, I’m just going to make some soap this weekend, and then I need to find the right gift boxes for it. I’m just ridiculous that way...” Whoa, wait. I’m “ridiculous” for my desire to make a beautiful, polished, finished product? But then I noticed that I used the same kind of language when talking about the earrings that I make. And when I used to make handmade stationery sets about 15 years ago, I used the same kind of disparaging and dismissive language. The judgment that pervaded my tone when talking about my creations to others was both surprising and saddening.
I truly love the things I make. I find them absolutely lovely, which is one of the reasons I make them. But my own Inner Critic had taken on the role of judging myself before anyone else could. I judged myself because crafts are somehow considered not “real” art as fine arts are. I judged myself because “I take things too far” by making them polished and professional. And get this: despite my line of work, I even judged myself for having the desire to want to make things with my hands rather than always creating more cerebral output like writing or visual design. In that moment of calling my creative expression “ridiculous,” I saw how I had never fully accepted who I am: a person who loves creating products.
And as soon as I realized this, it was like a light went on for me, and something in my brain clicked into place. YA-USSSS! I create products! I started to see how everything I did already was a reflection of my product-making mind: my keynotes, my workshops with their branded printed workbooks and email follow-up series, my desire to make card sets to stimulate creativity, and the multitude of other ideas I have. I’m happy to say that this realization has set the stage for how I intend to structure my business from this point forward.
Look at how you are judging yourself: who you are, what you naturally love to do, and your interests, penchants, and passions. Are you keeping moments of pure creative enjoyment at bay? Are you blocking your creativity because it doesn’t fit with how you feel it “should” be to be legitimate? Are you holding yourself back from achieving greatness by judging yourself? Are you limiting your options because you believe that you should be some way other than how and who you are?
By accepting yourself and your creativity as it is and where it is (instead of judging it and saying it’s not moving fast enough, your ideas are not original, and such), you give it the opportunity to grow and develop. Creativity is like a plant, it needs the proper environment to grow and flourish. Being in a place of judging your creativity is like wanting to grow a tall tree, but instead constantly snipping away at the young plant and making it a bonsai. If you continue to do so, your creativity will never grow to be what it could be. Instead it will remain tightly constrained and controlled, in a completely different form than it would be in its natural state.
One of the most important components of diffusing self-judgment before it spirals out of control is to notice where you are right now. Accept who you are now, and see what gifts you have. The more you focus on appreciating yourself, the less attention you’ll be able to devote to harshly judging yourself or the prospect of being judged by others.
Creative Dose: Embrace Your Shake
Purpose: To accept and work with who you are and the talents you have
There is an incredibly inspiring TED talk by the artist Phil Hansen.20 Phil is a fine artist who was obsessed with pointillism. He would spend hours making artwork from conglomerations of small points of color to create full tableaus. Doing such work requires an immense amount of precision and thus physical control. However, Phil started to notice that he was developing a shake in his hands, which was problematic to his ch
osen art medium. Over time, his shake became more and more pronounced until he couldn’t hold a writing instrument still at all. Devastated and thinking his art career over, he lapsed into a deep depression and relinquished his art. He decided to visit a neurologist to see if there was any hope of a cure. His doctor had grave news: Phil had permanent nerve damage and he wouldn’t be able to continue doing the art he loved. But then hi doctor said something that changed everything for him: “Why don’t you embrace the shake?” Phil immediately rushed home to take advantage of making art with his shaky hand. This epiphany led to an exploration of different forms of his artistic expression and an explosion of his creativity. The video is well worth the watch!
Now that you’ve made a vow to commit to yourself and are getting in touch with how your uniqueness works for you, the next step is to be like Phil, and to embrace your “shake,” whatever that may be.
Step 1: Identify
Think of qualities within you that you have dismissed, disparaged, or felt were somehow a weakness.
How are these qualities, inclinations, and skills actually strengths?
What would your career, business, and life be like if you fully accepted them?
Step 2: Leverage
Start to envision how you will leverage these new-found strengths.
How will you make these strengths work for you?
What are some ways can you play within them?