Get Your Inner Critic to Stand Down with Mindfulness

Getting familiar with your inner voice, mainly when that voice is an inner critic – is one of the great benefits of mindfulness practice. This often puts you face-to-face with limiting beliefs, reactivity, and emotional challenges that can seem hard to engage. And to be fair. It is hard. That's why getting some help with this is a good idea?when you get fed up with the experience.

We all have the experience of this inner voice, and most of us accept it as just a part of who we are. We don’t often really examine the kinds of messages or content, or feelings that voice imparts to us. Taking some time to take inventory of what your inner voice is voicing can tell you a lot about what’s important to you in helpful ways, and often surprising,

Exploring the inner voice in mindfulness

One way to think about this is to consider your inner voice is not really you but only a process that happens courtesy of your brain. Sort of like a constant companion but in some cases, this companion isn’t all that friendly. Some people, for example, have a pretty harsh inner critic that is constantly reminding them of the need to be quiet or putting them down in some way, like an angry parent “you aren’t smart enough to talk in this meeting!” or “don’t speak up! People will see that you’re not so smart!.” Not such a great friend to have along for your private conversations every day.

Others have an inner voice that is constantly comparing themselves to others, wondering how you measure up along some value that matters to you. (Are you clever enough, funny enough, good-looking enough, powerful enough, funny enough.....) If the answer is yes, then everything is great; if not, the world is wrong, and you need to amp it up. (BTW, this is likely a version of an attachment wound, which is an excellent subject for another time).

You can take a mindfulness approach to listen in on what your inner voice is saying by periodically asking yourself how does this feel? For example, does it make you feel good, bad, or neutral, and why? This process of paying attention, somewhat objectively, to your inner voice can help change the dialogue from criticism (“you’re going to a mistake”) to simply noticing that voice is saying that to you and then choosing to act or not act based on more reasonable grounds, rather than in silent reactivity to your own inner dialogue.

This process of mindfulness helps you notice when your inner voice is giving helpful or unhelpful feedback. When you become more aware of the content and tone, positive or negative, for example, that your inner voice provides regularly it becomes easier to listen with an open mind rather than simply reacting in habitual ways without awareness.

As a starting practice, I'd like you to please take note of when your inner voice speaks up loudest. Where are you at the time? What’s going on around you? What kind of conversation is happening?

For example, I worked with a client who had a strong inner voice come up in team meetings. Her inner voice would assure her that she was not as capable as others in the room, so had no place to speak up about issues she knew about very well. Helping her become aware that this voice is not really “her” but just thought, a voice that came up in this situation, allowed her to press through her reluctance and speak up more.

When is a foe a friend?

When working with this voice, avoid the tendency to make the voice wrong or bad. Efforts to banish or mute this voice will fail or, worse, end badly. Instead, he most effective approach is to accept (as gracefully as you can) that this voice is a part of your world. No different than say, a broken toe or being nearsighted. It's just a fact of your world and being angry with it dosen't help.

This is notion of acceptance, which does not mean that you must surrender to this state of affairs. But you don't fix a flat tire on your car by being angry about it.

But there's real magic on the next part, and that is - if you look deeper, you can begin to see how this voice is actually trying to help you.

That may not make sense at first glance, but look closer. How can an inner voice that says, “you’re not smart enough to speak up here,” help you? There’s much shame in that message, right? That is so, but let’s say the voice was right for the moment. Couldn’t that lead to being embarrassed in the eyes of the group? Wouldn't that be potentially even more shaming to have everyone see you say something they thought was not very well-informed?

The mindful approach is to notice the voice and recognize that it’s actually trying to help you, albeit in a way that isn’t that helpful. “Okay, so this inner critic wants me not to speak up here because I might say something stupid. I’m very familiar with this voice, and it feels really scary, and I want to shrink. But I know this voice very well, and it’s not me. It’s just a habit I learned somewhere, trying to keep me from being embarrassed in front of everyone. So thanks for the advice and voice, but you’re services are no longer required here. I know what I’m talking about, and they need to hear this.”

Where does a bad habit like this come from, and why does it have so much power over us? In most cases, inner voice messages that limit us in some way are those we adopted from a moment in our past when we were unexpectedly shamed. For example, if an older brother or sister constantly said you weren’t big enough to talk with them or do things you wanted to do with them, and when you tried, you were perhaps humiliated in some way. Or a parent that said you were not smart or good enough to do something you were trying or wanted to do.

Learned in this way, the message “you’re not enough” gets wired into your nervous system to feelings of shame and humiliation. So later in life, when you’re in a room with “powerful” others, and you start to want to contribute, here comes your body and brain providing a “sense memory” that this is a dangerous situation, and you need to be careful. It shows up as you feeling small and tenuous—the opposite of authoritative. When you start to speak up, you hear the voice, “you aren’t smart enough for this!” and with the accompanying somatic experience.

Another example would be if you grew up in a household where there wasn’t enough to go around. You may have learned that to get what you needed, you needed to act fast. Get in early, and get out quickly at the dinner table. This is an actual example of a dynamic with one client I had who was seen as overbearing and intrusive in meetings. His feeling was that he would not get his needs met if he weren't aggressive. From that child’s point of view, that was an effective way of dealing with his circumstances. (I’m not saying it was healthy, but it was effective from the point of view of a child with limited resources dealing with the situation as best they can.) The same voice, however, in a team meeting, was out of place and came across that way. When seen mindfully, this learned behavior that came into being for a good reason years later is now just bad habits. This helps them seem foreboding and more manageable. It’s not “who you are.” It’s just how you’ve learned to manage.?In truth, it’s simply your brain doing what brains do, helping us cope. Sometimes it is hard to update the program.

How Mindfulness Coaching Can Help

The good news is that a mindfulness practice, combined with some coaching, can help you rewire these patterns and make rapid progress. The more mindfulness practice you build up, whether through meditation or just taking some moments to observe your?mind and body activity in daily life, the easier it will become for you to notice when that inner voice speaks loudest. You’ll start recognizing when habitual reactions want to happen, then hit pause, take a breath, and perhaps respond differently – better.

Here’s an assignment I might provide a client related to this.

1. Start a mindfulness practice (meditation or other, depending on the client)
2. Journal the kinds of messages the inner voice is telling you. Is it male/Female? Critical/Supportive? Soft/Loud? When does it show up? What does it want? How do you feel?
3. Practice noticing and naming at the moment – the voice, the feeling. Then breathe like you do in mindfulness meditation and create some spaciousness. Does that change things? GO SLOW HERE. Slower than you think.?This is an excellent practice in a coaching session where I would direct you strongly to the somatic, in-the-body experience of this, as that when you go, “Oh, I get it,” and where the real power lies. When you?understand the experience this way, it transitions from an idea to an experience.
4. Be kind to yourself through the process. This is hard but essential work.

You increase your ability to live and act in your “embodied authority.” And that is a much happier place to live than under the thumb of some inner critique or trying to twist yourself into some version of what society wants.

You have nothing to lose but your inner bully and a great deal to gain.

Wanna try??Reach out for a complimentary session to see if there’s a good fit.