Shh! Stop that, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Oh hey, guys! Sorry about that. That was just my inner critic. You know, that
nagging voice inside all our heads…yes everyone has an inner critic…telling us we’re not
good enough, we’re not this enough and that enough. Yada yada yada.
Yeah, my inner voice was trying to tell me that our YouTube channel is taking forever
to grow. But you know what, I’m not listening to it.
In this lesson, I’m giving you strategies to help quiet the inner critic inside your
head, so grab a warm beverage and let’s get into it!
What’s up Explearners. Mary Daphne here of explearning.co where we believe social
skills are the key to the Good Life. What’s the Good Life? It’s where you call the shots,
you have a crew you can count on, and you’re on a mission you care about.
Before we jump in, I wanted to let you know about a great free resource we’ve created
for the Explearning community. It’s a comprehensive small talk guide. If you find yourself grasping
at thin air when you’re in unfamiliar social situations, then our small talk guide is for
you! Click the link in the description box below to get the downloadable delivered straight
to your inbox. Alright back to negative self-talk. I don’t
think it needs much more introducing. We are all familiar with it and know it holds us
back. It drains our brainpower and discourages us from doing things outside our comfort zones.
Not cool. I think it’s fair to say we’d all love
to give that self-critic a kick in the rumpus. Let’s look at some strategies to do just
that. (1) Answer Back
You heard me, talk back to that voice and tell it why it’s a bunch of baloney! What
will help is to name the critic. Eric Baker, from Barking Up the Wrong Tree, calls this
“naming the brain”. In fact, he named his inner critic Lefty. And in his book A
Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters, Dr. Steven Hayes says: “If your mind has
a name, then it is different from ‘you’. When you listen to someone else, you can choose
to agree with what they say or not, and if you don’t want to cause conflict, it’s
best not to try to argue the person into agreement with you. That is the posture you want to
take with your internal voice.” So now’s the time to name your brain and
tell it why what it’s saying is patently false. Don’t do this in a bellicose way.
Be kind but assertive. Thank it for taking the time to look out for you but tell it you
have the situation under control. Dr. Hayes says that we should be sincere and show gratitude.
He says not to speak to our mind facetiously or be dismissive because it’ll continue
trying to problem-solve. To remedy that, we have to be frank and politely stand our ground.
(2) A String of Sounds Realize that whatever mean or hateful thing
the inner critic tells you, it’s really just a string of sounds, or phonemes. A phoneme
is the smallest unit of sound. In English, we have 44 phonemes, meaning 44 unique sounds.
So if you repeat the word or phrase a bunch of times, say 50 or 100 times, the words stop
making sense. They become almost nonsensical because you’ve reduced them to phonemes.
That’s what’s going on with your inner critic. It’s just a string of sounds with
no real meaning. (3) Get Moving
Research shows that body movement can lower anxiety and increase the secretion of our
happy hormones. Movement is really anything that gets you
moving. And it really comes down to preference. Ever heard the phrase: “the best kind of
exercise is the exercise you do”? Right. So it’s super important to choose a form
of movement that you’ll actually do and adhere to. This could be light movement like
a low intensity steady state or something like tai chi or gentle yoga. But it could
also be movement where you’re exerting yourself. It could be dancing with music, bench pressing,
doing the elliptical, rowing on the erg machine, whatever gets you out of a stationary status
quo. Kelly McGonigal, who has an amazing TedTalk
about the upside of stress, has a book called The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us
Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage. On a podcast interview, she talked about the
science behind “hope molecules” which are chemicals that our muscles release into
our bloodstreams during exercise in order to help protect our brain from stress.
So the hope molecule literally changes our brain. As Kelly McGonigal puts it: "You can
think of exercise as an intravenous dose of hope."
And those hope molecules zap the inner critic and make room for more positive, encouraging
thoughts. (4) Turn to Nature
Another way to take your mind off your mind is through nature therapy. The best part is
that you can self-administer it and it’s 100% free! Just get your tush out the door
and surrounded by trees. It’s been proven that even brief exposure
to nature has therapeutic properties. Our mood is measurably enhanced when we see leaves,
and smell the forest, and hear birds chirping. Now, if you don’t live in or close to nature,
then try to get some green plants and place them around your living space. You could also
save photos of nature and make them your desktop background and look at them ever so often.
Perhaps even close your eyes, play a nature soundtrack, and meditate for 3 minutes, imagining
you are walking down a forest path. In fact, there are some neat YouTube videos that allow
you to do just that! (5) Create Something
One surprising way to silence that inner critic is to create something. Sounds counter-intuitive
because usually the inner critic is telling you not to do that. But that’s probably
a sign that you in fact SHOULD be doing it. You see, when you’re using your brain to
create something, it doesn’t have time to ruminate and complain. It’s also great for
getting you in the flow state, which is a concept put forth by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
in 1975 to illustrate a state of being fully focused and in the zone. You have undivided
concentration… which in our age of social media and notifications, is hard to come by.
Creating something could look like making music, painting, writing, cooking, doing some
graphic design… these are just a few examples. The more passionate and engaged you are with
the activity, the less likely it is for the inner critic to intrude upon your thoughts.
(6) Rebel Against Your Inner Critic Now it’s time to tap that inner rebel, the
one that might have gotten you into a bit of trouble when you were a kid.
Sounds kind of fun, I know. With this exercise, you’ll see just how
much your mind can trick you and how you won’t let defeatist talk get to you. The goal here
is to create a situation where you contradict your inner voice.
Here’s an example. First, skip around your house. Do this a few
times. Skip. Just skip. After you’ve done this a few times, continue to skip while telling
yourself: “I cannot skip around the room!” Sounds weird right?
But what’s going on here is that you are proving that your inner voice isn’t the
boss of you. It’s telling you to stop, yet here you are, continuing to skip as you please!
That inner voice has no authority over your actions.
Go ahead and try this out with other contradicting things. Brush your hair and then mumble “I
cannot brush my hair.” Easy peasy. And the next time your inner critic says “you
cannot get that job” go and get that job! Rebel against those thoughts, contract those
words, and trounce the inner critic. ----
Alright, there you have it. Six proven strategies to squash that inner critic.
Let’s quickly recap: (1) Thank your inner critic for their concern
and let it know you have the situation under control.
(2) Reduce the inner critic to a meaningless string of sounds. Those sounds can’t hurt
you and they don’t shape your reality or future.
(3) Move your body to jolt it out of a trance of inner criticism. Anything that gets your
heart rate up will do the trick (4) Get into nature and let its natural healing
properties sooth your noisy mind. (5) Create something to trigger the flow state,
which will leave no room for the inner critic. (6) Prove that your inner critic has no authority
by doing something your mind says you can’t. Now as you’ve probably realized, these strategies
don’t change our thoughts. Instead, they change our relationships to our thoughts.
And that’s the goal here. The inner critic will pop up every now and again, but once
we understand that these thoughts are not reality, and that they can’t actually prevent
you from doing what you seek to do, we gain the power to overcome them and stay the course.
So whatever your inner voice said you’re not good enough to do or be, prove it wrong.
Because those are just thoughts. Figments of your imagination that wield no real power.
Also recognize that quieting your inner critic comes with practice. It may not be easy at
the start. But the more attuned we become to our negative
self-talk, the more capable we become at silencing it.
So now that I've shared our thoughts, I would love to hear about your experiences with your
own inner critic. What has it prevented you from doing? What strategies can you think
of to quiet the negative self-talk? Share that with me and the Explearning community
in the comments below. And, if you loved this lesson, please be sure
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are always available on our blog at explearning.co/blog. With that, have an awesome week, Explearners.
Thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you next time for your next Explearning
lesson. Happy Explearning ⚡