Making Friends With Your Inner Critic

Meet Your Inner Voice

We all have an inner critic, that voice that seems to talk down to us, to keep us in our place, to ask us who we think we are, that reminds us we’re not anyone special, telling us we’re out of our depth. It can even go as far as telling us that something awful is going to happen. And when this voice becomes the loudest and the meanest it can overpower us and keep us small in a place of self-doubt, spiralling confidence and nose-diving self-belief.?

This article explores how to change the relationship with your inner critical voice, offering up a different way to work with, not against, it, so that you can talk to yourself less critically, more constructively, and treat yourself better. Our inner voice is us, it is how we talk to ourselves, it is a mirror image of the relationship we have with ourselves. How would it be to be a friend to ourselves, instead of a foe, instead of a bully keeping ourselves down? And because it is us then we already have everything we need to change things.

Why

Women in particular are known for having more active, more negative, more destructive inner critical voices. And we are already living and working in a world with gender bias, discrimination, stereotypes, unacceptable pay gaps, the list goes on. Being our own worst enemy is the last thing we need and the first, and closest to home, thing we can do something about. We can work with our fears and doubts as fantastic insight to help us navigate the rest.

Realisation Number 1

I will always remember the moment years ago when I sat in a room, one of a dozen delegates on a course (my coaching training), and I heard about inner critics, voices, gremlins, whatever you call yours, for the first time. My jaw literally did hit my chest. This was a thing! I had believed for many many years that this was just me, that there was something wrong with me, that I was a little bit crazy, and if people knew what went on in my head, I’d be taken away and locked up. Then I realised that was how clever my inner critical voice was, it was so conniving it even had me convinced that hearing myself talk to myself was another thing wrong with me. And so started my mission to read and research as much as I could to understand what was going on and how to stop it.

Realisation Number 2

That was the focus for a few years, stopping it. I tried various things I’d come across: putting it in a box; having an argument with it; telling it where to go; getting an object that represented it and physically squashing it. The problem was the lid always came off, it would just argue back, it would stand firm, and the object wasn’t really it. ‘IT’ was me, my voice, how I spoke to myself. I began to realise that the more I just wanted rid of it and the more I fought combatively as if it were a foe, the more I lost the battle. I was getting nowhere.?

Realisation Number 3

It struck me that I needed to have a different relationship with it, we weren’t getting along, and as long as we would have to live together for life, like a shadow always there, then I needed to establish how I could be friends with it instead. Years of working through this got me to these methods:

1. Accepting it is a part of me - the first step was realising this wasn’t some other ‘thing’ out of my control, it is a part of me, it is me. It is my voice, and it’s there for a purpose. It’s panicked, scared, going out of your comfort zone, that’s all. And it - I - am really not scary. It - I - am just afraid. There is nothing wrong with me, I’m human, we all have this, it’s nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed of. It is normal (whatever ‘normal’ is).

If this could be true for you too, who could your voice be??

1. Recognising when it was piping up - you don’t just fix this inner voice problem and that’s that, it will always be there, and it’s about noticing when it’s louder. It’s establishing your patterns of thinking. Knowing when you are likely to hear the voice whispering in your ear, chitter chattering away, getting louder the more it’s ignored, then shouting “YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO ME!”.

When is your voice most likely to get louder?

1. Sitting down next to it and listening - I remember breathing a big sigh of, at the time, defeat, ok, I give up: “I don’t have any more energy to fight you. What do you want from me”? And in my mind I sat down next to my inner voice, took its hand gently in mine, met its eyes, looked into them for answers and said “talk to me, what is going on for you right now?”. I hadn’t set out to do this, it just happened. I listened to myself. Properly. And I realised I could choose to do the same the next time, and the next time.

What would it be like to stop pushing your voice away and to pull it towards you instead and listen?

1. Understanding its fears and worries - So much of the reading said this inner critical voice was there to protect me, but this didn’t feel like protection it felt like bullying, so I grappled with that concept for a long time, disbelieving it to my core (on hindsight that was my clever voice again telling me “you’d be a fool to believe that’s true”). But in that moment of listening, I heard, I heard the underlying fears and worries triggering my voice to get so frantic and mean. I could see it was indeed trying to protect me from getting it wrong, making a fool of myself, not being ready, you name it. No wonder I was behaving like I was. Try putting an empathic arm around your inner voice's shoulders and telling it, telling yourself, I get how that feels, I know what it’s like, I feel it too.

What’s your voice desperately trying to tell you it’s feeling??

1. Establishing what it was telling me I need - I love the work of Brene Brown and her latest book ‘Atlas of the Heart’ which covers 80 something emotions and feelings and has really helped me in my own work to identify, understand and articulate what I’m experiencing. One of the most useful things has been learning that our emotions and feelings, whether the muddly pickle or the bright sunshiny ones, are amazing clues to what we need. We can use the insight from what we are feeling to realise the solutions.

What are your feelings and emotions telling you about what you need?

Choose To Make Friends

There is no getting away from our inner critical voice, as we cannot get away from who we are. But we can change our relationship with our voice, therefore ourselves. We can be our own friend rather than foe. It may be that you’ve tried all sorts to work on this, how's that going? It may be that working through the above and making friends with your voice could work for you too.

And if you’d like to work through this with someone who gets it, who understands what it’s like, then please book in a call for us to have an initial chat: https://calendly.com/thestarsarealignedcoaching/li