What if you really want to believe in your intrinsic brilliance and ability to learn and grow from any situation, but there’s a part of you that just doesn’t buy it? Deep down, you suspect or are afraid or even outright know that you’re flawed in some fundamental way. You’re not smart enough or strong enough or beautiful enough or creative enough or something else enough.
You have proof lined up and ready to lay out that’s as perfect and indisputable as a royal flush. Exhibit A: a damning chain of failures. Exhibit B: criticism received. Exhibit C: side-by-side comparisons with people who are better. Exhibit D: what could and should have been.
When you’re in your flow, these things don’t bother you. You lose all self-consciousness and are completely absorbed in the present moment. But when things aren’t flowing, you start thinking about what’s wrong with you.
There you go again … You’re so lazy/weak/inept … You’re not enough … Even now, you’re letting your thoughts drag you down. What have you done? … If people really knew what you were about, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with you … You’re so lazy/weak/inept … You’re not enough.
It’s one looping soundtrack with the same grinding thoughts remixed and replayed. These thoughts may run through your mind all matter of fact, ho hum, like a pilot reading coordinates to air traffic control. More likely, they come with a cutting tone and barking insistence.
Who is thinking these thoughts? They spill forth with such authority that you’ll swear that they are coming from the seat of your inner wisdom and deepest truth. It’s time we talk about the Inner Critic.
Meet the Inner Critic
This sub-personality develops naturally around age five as we are taking our first big steps towards independence. As any parent can attest, children at that age are sponges, absorbing all manner of lessons, expectations and behaviors from the important people around them: parents, peers, teachers, etc.
The Inner Critic develops to keep us out of trouble by proactively dispensing criticism that we’ve heard before. It tries to get ahead of potential disaster. Its job is to keep us safe—and so far, so good. You’re here.
But the Inner Critic has a child’s understanding of safety. While it mimics the voice of an adult, it lacks the nuance and maturity that adults bring to problems. This can be a detriment to our ability to rebound from failure and hardship. When you need to dust yourself off and get back up, the Inner Critic is liable to shove you deeper into the mud.
The Inner Critic tends to become particularly noisy in times of stress and fraught moments, like when you are preparing to do something new or when things aren’t going your way. It tells you that you had better stop being so inadequate and turn things around. In these moments, you may not even be able to hear encouraging words that remind you that nobody is perfect and no matter what you’ll make it through and learn something.
I’ve worked with hundreds of people, many of whom are considered successful by all external measures: CEOs, entrepreneurs, rising stars. I’ve yet to encounter anyone without an Inner Critic. Even Mr. Rogers, who taught about unconditional loveability to schoolchildren on his show for 25 years, wrote about his struggles with his own Inner Critic after retiring.
An Inner Critic that has run amok is debilitating. The more it goads you into being better, the more it undermines your ability to rebound. To cultivate resilience, you’ll need to learn how to work with and manage your Inner Critic.
Lisa was considered a shining star in the technology industry. By age 30, she’d already started and sold two companies. Being a female leader in tech was unusual, but her success was remarkable. People considered her an extraordinary leader and that was how she thought of herself until her husband left her within a year of the birth of their child.
He had been having an affair with her best friend and Lisa had no idea. She was both devastated by the betrayal and overwhelmed by the demands of leading a company as a single parent. Feelings of despair and difficulty focusing are natural reactions to this kind of relationship trauma. But Lisa’s distress was compounded by her Inner Critic. It berated her for missing what had been going on under her nose. It lectured her on all the ways that she had failed in the relationship.
Over the course of a year, Lisa struggled to power through and bounce back, but found it increasingly hard to complete tasks. By the time Lisa reached out for coaching, she had started to wonder whether all of her past successes were just luck. She felt like an imposter and questioned whether she was fundamentally unlovable given the breakdown in her marriage.
How to Work with Your Inner Critic
First, you have to expect that the Inner Critic is going to show up in times of stress and hardship. It keeps tally of all the moments that you’ve felt shame and psychological pain throughout our lives.
We have a neurobiological bias to give greater weight to negative experiences than positive ones. This is because our hunter-gatherer ancestors regularly faced life and death dangers from predators and competitors. It was critical that they quickly recognized negative situations so they could avoid getting eaten or beaten. It’s not that positive experiences weren’t important. It’s just that if you are living on the edge of survival and you don’t avoid the negative, you won’t be around to enjoy the positive. The primitive “caveman” part of your brain still carries this negative bias.
The Inner Critic gives voice to this primitive part of the brain that is on guard for negative experiences. When it does show up, your challenge is to recognize it for what it is—a trigger-happy defense system that’s well-meaning, but not very mature. The problem isn’t that it shows up, it’s that its tactics to get your attention creates an echo chamber where the self-judging, shaming, belittling and fault-finding are too deafening to allow you to see yourselves, your opportunities or the problem clearly.
When the Inner Critic tells you that you are inadequate, you believe it. Why wouldn’t you? It’s a voice that you’ve been carrying around almost your entire lives. It sounds like you. You take it to be the ultimate authority of truth, but you would do well to imagine it as a kid with a bullhorn. This view is more accurate and enables you to open up to other perspectives that can help you pick yourself back up and take positive steps.
Trying to ignore the Inner Critic, fight it or drown it out with positive mantras is an exercise in futility. This part of your brain is as ancient, strong and fierce as a dragon. The more you resist it, the more virulent it will become and the harder it will be for you to regain your footing.
Applying Mindful Awareness to the Inner Critic
Mindful awareness is a calm and accepting quality of attention that allows you to step back and see what is going on. It lets you take a thousand foot view and look down. By creating some space between yourself and your thoughts, feelings and emotions, you temporarily free yourselves from their blinding and occasionally overwhelming nature.
Instead of engaging with the Inner Critic, it is better to step back and apply mindful awareness. Just take a breath, acknowledge its presence and inquire into what it really wants to tell you. What is it afraid or concerned about? You may discover other feelings, thoughts, images and inner voices competing for your attention. The idea is to witness what is present, not to judge or make it wrong. When you open your awareness and give the various parts of yourself the caring attention they need, they have a way of settling your uneasiness and helping you dust yourself off.
It’s important to understand that your Inner Critic has a positive intent. This may seem counter-intuitive given the way it attacks you, but its aim is to protect you from pain. It employs criticism from the misguided belief that if you could be thinner, stronger, smarter, more perfect, you won’t be rejected or hurt. In an effort to help you belong, “fit in” and avoid being rejected, it corrects whatever it deems weak, imperfect and unlovable about yourself. It believes its harsh and negative attacks will improve your life.
Inquiring into your Inner Critic can be a source of deep healing if you can do so with compassionate curiosity. Doing so will reveal the expectations that you’ve absorbed from others and organized your life around. Inevitably, some of these rules for living are outdated or misaligned with your own deepest desires. You may also uncover feelings that frightened you as a child, but that you can release now that you are an adult.
The Inner Critic may say, “You’re weak; you don’t deserve to be in this job.”
Applying mindful inquiry, you might ask what was first happening when you came to believe that you were weak. Who was judging you? What was that experience like for you? How might your Inner Critic be trying to protect you from repeating that experience?
You may become aware that you are afraid of being weak because as a child you saw a parent lose a series of jobs due to addiction. You swore to yourself that you would never need to be dependent on anyone. You may realize that for you, not being weak means sacrificing yourself and being strong for everyone else.
You may become aware of both a sadness and an anger when at the age of seven, your parent told you that you were the man of the house. You may realize that your self-sacrificing makes you feel alone. You may realize that the Inner Critic wants to keep you safe, but what you want isn’t to be strong or weak, but to be connected.
Resilience demands that you distinguish your own beliefs from those that have been foisted upon you. If you can distinguish them, you can begin to play by your own rules. The more you stand in awareness, the more you can free yourself of the expectations of everyone else—your parents, teachers, peers, society. You are free to live life on your own terms. You shift from attempting to match some external model of success to one that is more authentically your own.