When you are so highly self-critical that you commit ideacide, you’ve let your Inner Critic stand over our shoulder and assume the role of a manager or director you can never impress. Your Inner Critic is far too high on the organizational chart of You Incorporated.
Let’s demote the Inner Critic from director/manager of your creative life to a position lower on the org chart, and reassign it to a support role that is more commensurate with the level of responsibility and importance that we want it to have.
How do you reorg your Inner Critic? Let’s look at some ways to do this so you can move to a place of criticism-free creating.
Question and Challenge
“Self-criticism, when it isn’t useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis.”
— Adam Phillips, “Against Self-Criticism” essay
The Inner Critic has been operating in the background and under the radar in the form of High Self-Criticism for years now. Hoping to protect us from others’ criticism, it’s been surreptitiously blindsiding us by throwing wrenches in the works of our equilibrium when we least expect it. Our High Self-Criticism paints a patina over everything we do, and causes us to not see ourselves or our creative capacities clearly. We forget our creative core and begin to doubt, second-guess, or overlook our skills and talents. The worst part is that we don’t even know that we are doing it.
Some indications are obvious, like causing us to criticize everything we do or shooting down every idea we come up with from the get-go. But others are more subtle. Don’t believe me? Check to see whether any of the following sound familiar:
You suddenly lose interest when you were previously highly engaged.
You’re working on something, and all of a sudden you start questioning yourself.
Out of nowhere, you feel your energy decreasing and maybe even start to feel inordinately sleepy.
You’re making great progress but then suddenly become stuck and unable to problem-solve your way past your block.
You “know,” “are sure that,” or “are certain that” something won’t work, won’t be accepted, or will be criticized.
Any of these scenarios are a pretty sure sign that the Inner Critic, in the form of High Self-Criticism, was kicking in.56 We all have fallen prey to these crafty ploys at some point.
High Self-Criticism also convinces the Inner Critic that it is fully aware of our capacities – it tknows the extent of our limits, is intimate with our weaknesses, and is conversant with our strengths. But this is categorically untrue. Despite the fact that it often feels otherwise, the Inner Critic voices stories about the things we fear, not the truth about who we are. Our self-internalized criticisms came from people who could not see the extent of our magnificence, could not see the depth of our brilliance, and did not have the capacity to understand that we are only limited by our perceptions of what is possible for us. Are you going to let someone else’s limited vision of you determine the parameters of your being?
The Inner Critic has become far too comfortable in its position as saboteur. By this point it probably doesn’t believe that we will
a) recognize its handiwork, and b) shine a light on it and make it answer for its actions. Instead of allowing the “authoritative” Inner Critic to rely on the beliefs, values, and motivations of the people from whom our younger selves took our cues and criticisms, the Inner Critic needs a firm talking-to and update on exactly what our true beliefs, values, and motivations are now. We need to stand up and challenge our Inner Critic’s authority to show it the vast expanse of the potential that we hold and are meant to realize.
We can follow the lead of writer and jazz singer Katy Bourne, who wrote an open letter to her Inner Critic with very clear instructions on how she wished to be treated moving forward. She writes, “...I just don’t hang with people who talk to me like you do. You’re going to have to figure out a different way to be with me, Mademoiselle Critic. I’m tired of your shrill banter. I don’t want you to poke me in the ribs anymore. If you try to kill my buzz again, I’ll swat your hand.”133
Sometimes, the best thing we can do with our Inner Critic is to use a little “tough love” like Katy. Let’s look some ways we can start taking back our power by standing up to the Inner Critic.
Creative Dose: Get Up, Stand Up
Purpose: To take back control by standing up to your Inner Critic
Even though we’re all about compassion, sometimes we just have to stand up for ourselves. If your Inner Critic just won’t quiet down when you are in the middle of trying to create something – or even worse, it tries to covertly sabotage your efforts – then it is time to get tough and defend your right to creative flow.
Here are three options for showing the Inner Critic who’s boss and setting the tone for how the relationship will work best for you.
Option 1: Acknowledge and Thank
When you recognize a self-critical thought, you can acknowledge your Inner Critic for its efforts. However, while being appreciative of its efforts, you must also stay firm in showing it its place and being clear how you would like to work together moving forward.
Your inner dialogue could go something like this:
“I appreciate all of the work you do to try to keep me safe, and I thank you. However, you are not needed right now.”
Option 2: Establish the Tone
Your Inner Critic has grown accustomed to you taking its litany of self-criticisms without a peep. But actually talking back and setting the tone will totally catch it off guard and give it pause.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that the essence of your self-corrections that have turned into high criticisms has merit and could be useful for you.
To get a more inspiring and positive version to use for motivation, ask your Inner Critic to rephrase.
You could think or say something like this: “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t appreciate your tone of voice. Can you say it again, but in a way that makes me want to do it?”
Option 3: Get Hard-boiled
If asking your Inner Critic nicely to change its tone doesn’t work, you can always face the Inner Critic with your aggressive, tough-as-nails side. Turn the tables on the Inner Critic and catch it off guard with defiance, using this exercise adapted from “5 Immediate and Easy Ways to Silence Your Inner Critic,” by Lynn Newman.57
When you’ve had enough of your Inner Critic’s incessant self-critical bullying, challenge the messages by coming back with these rebuttals:
“So what? I don’t care that you think that – that doesn’t make it true.”
“Who cares? Your judgments don’t matter to me.”
“Big freakin’ deal! So, you think I’m (insert insult here)? WHATEVER.”
“Why not? So, you’re telling me that I shouldn’t try something new because you say I can’t do it or don’t deserve it. Thanks for your input. Despite what you say, I’m doing it anyway and will learn what I need to from the process.”
Certainly, being compassionate is ideal, but sometimes enough is enough. You can show the Inner Critic that you are the boss of you.
Tune In to Tune Out
“Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer.”
— W. H. Auden, poet
In the past, the Inner Critic may have seemed like a huge, intimidating presence in your mind, with your stringent self-criticisms appearing as if they are the sole truths about you. However, now that we’ve started becoming more aware of the mistaken beliefs that underlie our strongest self-criticisms and are regaining the power that we’ve given up by believing them, we start to see through the Inner Critic’s thin veneer and perceive its lack of substance and dimension. In his essay “Against Self-Criticism,” psychologist Adam Phillips eloquently and accurately describes the Inner
Critic: “...the self-critical part of ourselves... has some striking deficiencies: it is remarkably narrow-minded; it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary; and it is, like all propagandists, relentlessly repetitive.”58
When we are being overly self-critical and falling prey to the Inner Critic’s worst messages, it often feels like the Inner Critic takes over our entire awareness. Like being at a party stuck listening to the most self-absorbed, tiresome guest in the room, giving too much attention to the Inner Critic in the form of High Self-Criticism is a misappropriation of your valuable mental resources and time.
To get a handle on our thoughts and emotions and to take back the power of our time and attention, we need a way to put high self-criticism into perspective. Again, managing our attention and making use of a built-in tendency of our brains comes to the rescue.
Speaking of parties, you know how when you’re at a party and you’re so absorbed in a conversation with someone that you really only hear what that person is saying and none of the other conversations around you – but if you wanted, you could tune into the other conversations around you? Humans have the impressive ability to be able to focus on one voice amid countless others, regardless of the environment. This phenomenon is referred to as “selective hearing,” also known as “the cocktail party effect.”59
One of the aspects of the cocktail party effect that we’ll make use of is this: while our brains are outstanding at honing in on the one conversation that we’re engaged in, we absorb little to nothing of the ones that we decide to ignore.60 Perfect! We’ve already heard enough of what the Inner Critic has to say and know the list of self-criticisms by heart. Once you’ve learned what the Inner Critic is ultimately trying to protect you from, there’s precious little to be gleaned from continuing to listen to its self-critical diatribe.
Using the power of attention and focus and choosing where to place them, combined with a commitment to mindfulness, we’ll practice the internal equivalent of the cocktail party effect. The same mechanism is at work here, except instead of tuning in to someone’s voice externally, we will choose which of our thoughts we listen to. By shifting to other more relevant “conversations” in our heads, we’ll begin to break our habit of generating so much self-criticism. The circuit and the broadcast will grow weaker – and the Inner Critic will lose its audience.
Creative Dose: Turn Down Da Noise, Turn Down Da Funk
Purpose: To choose other thoughts over the self-critical voice of the Inner Critic
Here are three ways to shift your focus to other messages that have been getting drowned out by the strident droning of the Inner Critic.
Option 1: Tune Out
The Inner Critic can be a lot like a parrot on your shoulder, sitting there chirping away, droning on about all of the reasons why your work is allegedly no good. Here’s how you can use the cocktail party effect to your advantage.
Imagine that, just as if you were at a party wrapped up in a conversation with someone fascinating, the annoying voice of your Inner Critic starts to fade into the background. It’s still there, and if you decide you want to tune back in to it, you can whenever you want.
But instead of listening to your dull Inner Critic, who tells the same stories all of the time, you’re attending to the far more interesting perspective of your Creative Self.
Option 2: Tune In
Imagine that your brain is like a radio. You’re currently on WHSC– the high self-criticism channel, nothing but self-criticism all day and all night, and advertisement-free to boot. But good lord, what a boring station! All it plays is oldies in the form of criticisms you’ve internalized from what people have said to you in your deep past. Isn’t there something else you could listen to?
Imagine turning the dial, pressing buttons, or swiping left to find and pick up a new station, for instance, one that broadcasts accurate messages about who you are as a person and about your abilities.
There is even a station that broadcasts messages of comfort and kindness as well.
You have a choice of where to put your listener support. Which station will you tune in to?
Option 3: Inner Critic Shrinky Dinks
When I was a growing up, there was a wacky toy called Shrinky Dinks. It was special plastic that you could either draw on yourself or use preprinted designs, put in the oven, and with heat shrink them down into smaller plastic pieces that you could turn into pendants and other things. (Yes, that’s a form of creativity: someone thought of that idea, pitched it to an exec at a company, they marketed it, and people bought it. Wild, isn’t it?!)
Close your eyes. Imagine your Inner Critic in as much grandiose detail as possible, passionately recounting all of the ways in which you are falling short, slacking, and being a disappointment.
Then imagine your Inner Critic slowly but surely shrinking. You could even imagine putting it in an oven or a really hot room like a sauna, or melting like the water-soaked Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz.
It is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, and its voice is getting smaller and more difficult to hear — until it is so small that it can fit in the palm of your hand.
What is your Inner Critic like now? Is is as scary as before?
Can you even hear what it’s saying to you without bending down to listen really closely?
Can’t hear that self-critical voice anymore? Great! Now you can go and get into your creative groove.
Reassign Duty
“Change is the end result of all true learning.”
— Leo Buscaglia, author
Much of what people think of as the Inner Critic is precisely what we are dealing with in this book: the voice of self-criticizing, self-doubt, and self-berating. However, there is another part of our psyche I think of more as “the Inner Editor,” or even more accurately as, “the Inner Evaluator.” This part of ourselves is the expert at what we do, who genuinely knows the pearls of our work that grow from our preliminary “SFD” (Sh*tty First Draft) product.
Personally, I trust my Inner Evaluator. She has a seasoned eye and is all about discernment. She’s the part of my brain that takes in everything that I read and makes note of the prose that I find compelling and that I do not, and uses that information to keep me on track with my writing. She’s the one who loves earrings as much as I do, and guides me toward making the earrings that she and I both would love to see more of in the world. She is a foodie, a lover of indie films, adores good neo soul music, and has a weakness for soft fabric. She is the one who helps me uphold my standards of quality. And I appreciate her for it.
This Inner Evaluator is in stark contrast to the mean Inner Critic, who browbeats me for not doing everything “perfectly,” who drives me to exhaustion, and who wakes me up in the middle of the night in anxiety about something that I could wait to fix until the next day – all in the name of supposedly keeping me safe from potential future threat. That one is my Inner Critic. She’s the one who needs another job.
We can put the position of the Inner Critic as the hypervigilant protector of your mental well-being to good use. It wants to be useful and do its job and fulfill its duty. What most people don’t know is that the Inner Critic is actually trainable. What we need to do is to give it other jobs that it is better suited for.
Creative Dose: The Inner Critic As An Intern
Purpose: To assign your Inner Critic another job to give yourself mental space
Just because the Inner Critic is desperate to distract you with thoughts of potential future doom doesn’t mean you have to shift your focus from what you’re working on and listen to it.
As the Inner Critic tries to be useful by protecting you, you can enlist its help by telling it that protecting you actually doesn’t mean blocking ideas by distracting you with your fears. You can tell it that being useful means being cooperative and giving you the space you need to initially let as many of your ideas
out as possible so you have more to choose from and can pick out the best later.
Part 1: Ask for space
Usually, when you need someone to give you some space, the easiest and most effective way to get it is to ask for it. In the sage words of the old adage: “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
Because the Inner Critic is clearly very eager to help, tell it that the best way to do so is for it to be quiet to help ideas flow more freely. Thank your Inner Critic in advance for its assistance, and return to what you were working on.
Part 2: Plus Ten
Put the practice of mindfulness into place. Gently yet respectfully tell your self-critical thoughts to come back later. When you are in the midst of working on something and your Inner Critic pops up and starts to steer you off track, task it with giving you unfettered space to create.
Tell it, “I’ll be with you in a moment – just give me ten more minutes.”
Much in the way you would deal with a spunky intern for whom you haven’t had time to organize any work, or an annoying coworker looming over the edge of your cubicle when you are trying to focus, every time your Inner Critic returns, tell it the same. The practice of pushing it away should make it quiet down enough for you to continue creating.
Part 3: The Inner Evaluator Internship
If your Inner Critic is particularly enthusiastic when it comes to upholding its duties by making you super self-critical, then trick it and then retrain it. Because the Inner Critic is masterful at critiquing and editing, strike a deal: tell it you are going to give it a promotion to assist your Inner Evaluator so that it can help you with quality control.
Tell it you don’t have anything for it to do right now, but it should come back to help you and your Inner Evaluator at a later stage of the process when you are ready for feedback, vetting ideas, critiquing and editing.71 Tell it that it will get promoted if it gets good at being quiet when you are ideating, and then weighing in when you need help seeing which ideas are the strongest.
Banish Your Inner Critic Page 17