Some days my inner critic is a supportive friend.
Ooh, but on other days, that little voice in my head is a vicious troll intent on derailing me.
After a long stint in corporate America, I returned to my childhood dream of writing. Recently I read several of my early blog posts and was absolutely horrified by what I’d written.
When I began my blog, I knew I had much to learn about writing, and those old posts were dreadful evidence of how little I knew.
While rereading them a second time (why do we torture ourselves like that??), my inner critic accelerated to warp speed, chastising me for every dangling participle, adverb, and run-on sentence.
Inner critics are pesky that way. At least mine is.
Inner critics are black belts in trash-talking us. They specialize in shame, fear, negativity, and inadequacy.
Inner critics have a knack for identifying our vulnerabilities. They know the weakness we only admit to ourselves in the longest and darkest of nights. They have the audacity to use that knowledge to beat us over the head when we fall short. I told you you weren’t smart enough to be a writer…
Often times, the inner critic takes the voice of an authority figure in our lives. While browsing my early posts, I heard my dad and Mr. Prouty (a demanding but beloved high school English teacher) expressing their disappointment.
Mercifully soon their disapproving voices were edged out by Mary’s, my writing coach.
“Of course those early writing attempts were bad,” she murmured. “Don’t focus on the mistakes from back then. Instead, look at how far you’ve come and how much you’ve learned.”
*ah, big sigh of relief* That’s a good way to look at it.
Inner critics can be helpful that way, too, if we let them.
Most of us are quick to give other people the benefit of the doubt. However, we’re usually pretty darn slow in doing the same for ourselves. As the old slogan goes, we deserve a break, too.
Kristin Neff, professor and author, offers a way to give ourselves that break. She suggests ditching the super-sized portion of self-criticism we serve ourselves and replacing it with a healthy portion of self-compassion.
She says self-compassion is “a courageous mental attitude that stands up to harm, including the discomfort that we unwittingly inflict on ourselves through self-criticism, self-isolation, and self-rumination when things go wrong.”
Take that, inner critic!
The power of self-compassion
To practice self-compassion, Dr. Neff advises doing three things:
- Being kind to ourselves
- Recognizing our own humanity just as we would that of anyone else, and
- Being mindful about excessively beating ourselves up—getting caught in that nasty cycle of “not enoughs.”
She warns us this is tough stuff to do:
The problem is that it’s hard to unlearn habits of a lifetime. ~Kristin Neff
No kidding.
The upside is that there’s a great payoff to be had from all that unlearning: her research shows being self-compassionate helps us:
- Stop taking things so seriously and so personally,
- Feel less self-conscious, and
- Do less social comparison in which we invariably come up short.
Moving from self-criticism to self-compassion means mindfully shifting perspectives: moving from not allowing ourselves to feel belittled by the inner critic to, with some help from our inner coach, giving ourselves permission to be inspired and perform our best.
Sometimes that perspective-shifting process takes a lot of edits. Time, too. And that’s OK. We just have to keep reminding ourselves of that!
How do you work with your inner critic?
Image credit before quote added: morgueFile | A version of this content first appeared on Lead Change Group
