When it is the appropriate time, ask your Inner Critic as Inner Evaluator wannabe, “What do you think this work needs instead? What can be done to make it better?”72
This exercise will start to train your Inner Critic to apply the skills that it is particularly good at only when needed and not before, which will help it move to the position of the Inner Evaluator instead. It will take to its new responsibilities like it was made for them, and all will be a lot quieter on the self-critical front as well.
Walking Away From the Hammer
Thankfully, we’ve brought the tendency of High Self-Criticism to light. Now we are better equipped to cease self-attacking, stop rumination in its tracks, get distance from self-critical thoughts, and put a kibosh on self-censoring. We are beginning to break out of our Inner-Critic induced haze and to loosen the dam we have on our ideas. We’ve successfully put down the hammer, and we are finally walking away from it with our heads held high.
However, there are more guises of the Inner Critic we have yet to discover.
Because High Self-Criticism is so focused on our alleged weaknesses, one of its byproducts is feeling like there’s something intrinsically wrong with us, which leads to Deficiency Anxiety. Let’s progress to those times when our Inner Critic tells us we’re not enough and find out what we can do to assert that, in fact, yes we are.
Chapter 5 | “I’m Not
Good Enough”
- Deficiency Anxieties
This chapter examines:
Cognitive Reappraisal
Inventory of Self
Self-Trust
Befriending Yourself
Competence Model of Learning
Information Distillation
Deliberate Practice
Active Listening
Collaboration and Plussing
Remixing Ideas
“When are we enough for ourselves?”
—April White, Waging War
One aspect that I love about doing this work is all of the incredibly talented people I get to meet and become friends with. Through my overseas travels I met my friend Darren, who is a gifted visual designer. For the past two years, Darren has been taking a rigorous professional design degree program. Even before his studies, I was blown away by the visual problem-solving skills that he applied to his design projects and his ability to expertly execute really lovely work. One of his projects on color was so visually stunning and masterfully done that a mutual friend, who is a professional photographer, beseeched Darren to turn the project’s photographs into a poster series. Despite all of the encouragement that he received, Darren continued to doubt his own abilities and did not fully own his creative talents.
At the beginning of summer his final exams were coming up, and Darren was becoming progressively more stressed at the prospect of having to keep the previous two years’ worth of knowledge in his head and then apply it to the practical exam project. He was working all day and studying every free moment during the night, leaving him very close to burnout. Darren’s Inner Critic was stimulating his fear of “not enough.” We scheduled an emergency coaching session to help him shift into a more positive mindset.
When I got on the Skype call with Darren, I encouraged him to recognize that in doing design, he is only being who he has been all along. Therefore, with this exam and all design work, he needs to act from a place of self-trust instead of self-doubt. In terms of making sure the information sticks in his brain, I suggested that he organize the information in a way that he understands it best: visually. Finally, I encouraged him to rest, because it’s when we stop putting information in our heads that our brains are actually able to process, make sense of, and access the information later. At the end of the coaching session, seeing Darren’s anxious shoulders drop and his furrowed brows relax into a look of relief told me that my words had hit home.
Enough is Enough
Fears of not being good enough, not knowing enough, and not coming up with original enough ideas keep us from reveling in our innate creative abilities. See if any of these statements resonate with you.
Are you afflicted with Deficiency Anxiety, the belief that you or your ideas aren’t good enough?
“I’m not creative, smart, clever, and/or hip enough.”
“Whatever I do won’t be good enough.”
“My creativity is, and never will be good enough.”
Do you suffer from Proficiency Anxiety, afraid of not knowing enough and not being good at what you do?
“There are too many holes in my knowledge to make it good enough.”
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to learn what I need to.”
“I can’t come up with ideas fast enough.”
“I can’t keep up with new tech/trends/evolving technology. I’m not learning fast enough.”
“I’m just not good enough at what I do. I don’t have enough expertise.”
Has Originality Anxiety gotten the best of you, seducing you into believing that everything you do must be new, unique, and groundbreaking every time?
“I’m just rehashing old ideas – everything I do is from someone else. Nothing is original enough. All of my ideas have been done before and done better.”
“I can’t come up with new innovative ideas constantly.”
“I fear that I have no original thoughts. I’m just a copycat who takes creative shortcuts.”
Use Your Brainpower For Good
The common element all Deficiency Anxieties share is self-doubt: doubting the value of your ideas, doubting your ability to acquire new information and skills, doubting your ability to come up with anything original, and even doubting your own inherent value. That’s a lot of doubt!
Regular negative self-talk reinforces this self-doubt. As you know, worrying about how we are lacking creates habitual negative thoughts. These thoughts are the product of our Inner Critic reflex: our brains firing electrical signals through well-worn channels of neurons that have fired and wired together through years of repetition.
We have committed to using our brainpower for good now, though. Let’s continue to harness the power of thoughts to make significant changes around our beliefs with this initial tool that you can use immediately to improve thought management.
Think Like a Scientist
“When you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change.”
— Max Planck, Nobel Prize-winning Theoretical Physicist
Constantly feeling inadequate and battling self-doubt puts us on the defensive emotionally – except that it’s with ourselves. In order to turn down the emotional intensity so that you can think more clearly and objectively, we need to diffuse our feelings and create mental breathing space. We can do this using a mental training technique known as cognitive reappraisal. The practice of cognitive reappraisal regulates emotions by reframing thoughts so that they are based in reality. This reframing then alters the intensity of the emotional response to the thought.1 The way it is done is much like mindfulness: one non-judgmentally observes thoughts and then redirects them by recognizing habitual thinking patterns and changing them to a different pattern.2
Using the techniques of cognitive reappraisal will not only help us to begin to lessen the amount and frequency of negative thoughts, but we’ll also be able to better remember emotional situations, and our ability to interact with others in relationships of all kinds will improve as well.3 This can be a great boon to your capacity for creative collaboration, which I will I talk about later.
Creative Dose: Emotion and Thought Inquiry
Purpose: To transform thoughts of inadequacy by examining them
Earlier in the book I mentioned that the Inner Critic uses hyperbolic language to distract you from the work of creating to make you pay attention to it. Keep this in mind: most of what we tell ourselves when we are ruminat
ing – thinking the same negative thoughts over and over again – is patently untrue. To shift our internal narrations to something less debilitating and more constructive, we need to question our thoughts and put them up for rigorous examination.
Step 1: Question and Answer
Turn your self-critical thought about yourself into a question.
Instead of “I’m X.” Ask yourself, “Am I X?” then look at the answer.
For example, let’s say one of your constant thoughts is “I don’t have any good ideas.”
You would change this statement to the question “Do I not have any good ideas?”
Then, you supply answers to the new questions that are
more accurate.
For example, the answer to “Do I not have any good ideas?” is most likely “Yes, I do have some good ideas.”
Here’s a framework for you to use:
Constant thought: .
Statement: I am .
Question: Am I ?
Play with this practice and see how turning these thoughts that you have taken as truth into a question transforms both the meaning and the validity of the original criticisms.
Step 2: Refute
Set a time each day to write a brain dump of your self-critical thoughts and their triggers.
Make three columns.
In the first column, write down the situation that triggered
your self-doubt.
In the second column, write down the self-critical thought triggered by the event.
In the third column, write down a refutation of the critical thought, and make sure it has the following characteristics:
it needs to be neutral or positive, and
it needs to be both based in reality and accurate.
The goal is not to formulate some overly optimistic affirmation, just the positive truth. 4
By writing down the truthful refutations, you will start to see the fallacy of your thoughts, and will start to create new connections in your brain.
Here’s an example:
Trigger
Self-Critical thought
refutation
Being on deadline and having
limited ideas
“My ideas aren’t good enough.”
“The client actually loved the idea I had for the last project.”
Coming out of
a brainstorming meeting
“I’m not as talented as everyone on
my team.”
“One of my
co-workers told me today that she appreciates the ideas I come up with.”
Shift to Ample
“When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”
— Lao Tzu, philosopher, writer and father of Taoism
When we focus on something, everything falls away until only that one thing exists for us, and we see that item clearly to the exclusion of everything else. This can be true when we reach a state of creative flow, but unfortunately is equally true for the times when we are in the throes of negative self-talk and rumination. Fixation on where we feel we are inadequate is due to a mentality of lack, and is the basis of Deficiency Anxiety. Being so intent upon that which we believe we don’t have enough of, whether it be talent, ideas, or creativity, blinds us to that which we have in abundance. Concentrating on our shortcomings bars any thoughts of what we actually are good at from entering our consciousness. To begin to see where our cup runneth over, we need to manage our attention and shift focus.
There’s a well-known parable of us all having two wolves within us who constantly fight each other for the upper hand. One wolf is the positive: kindness, benevolence, acceptance, truth, compassion, and generosity. The other wolf is the negative: self-doubt, inferiority, envy, sorrow, despair, self-pity, resentment, greed, superiority, and ego. Which one will ultimately win the fight? The one we feed.
Let’s feed the wolf of positivity to start reversing the feelings of lack and inadequacy that are the roots of Deficiency Anxiety.
You Are Enough
“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.”
— Dr. Maya Angelou, author and poet
What would happen if you stopped doubting yourself and tuned in to the fact that you’ve got this? That everything you’ve seen, experienced, learned, thought and accomplished has come together to create a unique, singular, and extremely capable you?
When I had my great insight into doing creative work that I shared in the preface, one of the best things that came from it is that my self-doubt was replaced with deep conviction and knowing. This sense of self-trust pervaded all of my actions, and enabled me to channel all the energy that formerly had been devoted to self-doubt and negative self-talk to getting my ideas out into the world. Did it last forever? No. But for the several months that I was in that space, I felt on fire with creative inspiration, and I was so engaged with researching, compiling, and developing new talks on creativity that self-doubt was unable to enter the picture.
Let’s shift focus away from self-doubt by homing in on how great and capable you truly are.
Creative Dose: Take Inventory
Purpose: To shift focus to what you have in abundance and discover hidden pockets of your creativity
Rather than spending time and energy worrying about how you’re not smart or talented enough, interesting enough, or expert enough, make time to internally validate yourself and all that you have done instead.5 Break out your journal and settle in – we’re going to do some great remembering with this exercise.
Part 1: Your Successes
First, become aware of and inventory your own successes. You are going to make three lists:
Talents and Abilities
Skills
Accomplishments/Achievements
Your talents can range from something like being able to easily recognize patterns to having a good memory for music. Your skills can range from being able to sharpen a knife to being able to build a log cabin. Your achievements can be big, like being the first in your family to get a university degree, to small, like how you save spiders from drowning before you take a shower.
Don’t censor, downplay, or dismiss anything; put as much on these lists as you can remember and in as much detail as you can.
The goal is to capture as much as possible of what makes you you, so that you can get back in touch with what sets you apart from everyone else on the planet.
Part 2: Your Intrinsic Qualities
Now that you are more in touch with your accomplishments, bear in mind that being enough isn’t about what you do outwardly, it’s about who you are as a person internally. For this exercise, we’ll shift the focus from outward abilities and achievements to the human qualities that are your essence.
Think of and list your intrinsic qualities. Here are a few words to help you get started:
Able • Ambitious • Analytical • Astute • Attentive • Aware • Balanced • Brilliant • Cautious • Certain • Charitable • Confident • Considerate • Consistent • Courageous • Conscientious • Courteous • Decisive • Disciplined • Driven • Efficient • Erudite • Faithful • Flexible • Focused • Graceful • Grateful • Industrious • Innovative • Modest • Nurturing • Outgoing • Perceptive • Persevering • Poised • Practical • Professional • Punctual • Resourceful • Respectful • Responsible
There are several great lists online that you can use for further ideas.
Write down on your list all of the qualities that you associate with yourself . You can even enlist the help of close friends for any words that they feel describe your essence,
and add those words to your list if they resonate with you.
Part 3: Your Esteemed Self
Act as if the person that you described in part 2 is a completely new person outside of yourself that you’ve never met before. Imagine talking to this person and how the interaction would go.
In what regard would you hold this person, and how would you treat this person?
Would you be impressed?
Would you have a lot of respect for this person?
How would you talk to this person, and what would you say to someone with your lists of accomplishments and qualities ?
How different is how you treat this “new” person from how you treat yourself now?
Return to this practice whenever you find yourself focusing on where you believe you’re lacking and discounting who you are.
Part 4: Where’s Your Creativity?
It bears repeating: when you are focused on how you aren’t creative, you won’t be able to see where you have been creative in the past, and where you are inherently creative overall. So let’s look at your tableau of past accomplishments and play the creativity version of the Where’s Waldo? game.
Review the lists you created in parts 1 and 2. Look at the items and ask yourself these questions:
In which instances did you exercise creativity?
How exactly were you creative at those times?
What qualities inform and enhance your creativity?
Remember that being creative is NOT limited to art, music, or writing – think of when you brought something new into the world or you felt the thrill of the creative spark running through you.
Banish Your Inner Critic Page 18