6 Ways to Manage Your Inner Critic

Hint: Your inner critic just wants to help you (but is kind of an ass about it)

I’ve always known (and heard from others) that I’m hard on myself. I have high expectations of what I should achieve, and when I don’t meet that level of quality for myself, I tend to beat myself up. I often end up worrying and ruminating about what others might say, or what others think of me. I’m scared of doing certain things of my life (including publishing this article!) because of all this.

Sound familiar? This is your ‘inner critic’ at work — and it’s having a massive impact on your life without you realising it.

That constant negative inner chatter influences the way you feel about yourself, your confidence, your ability to try new things and deal with stress, your relationships and more. It’s truly a powerful negative influence that is secretly working away in the background, without you even realising it.

Luckily I have had the opportunity to work with both a therapist AND a professional executive coach who both, in different ways, have helped me to develop a pretty damn good strategy to rewire the way I handle my inner critic. Ready to kick yours into touch? Here’s my step-by-step guide to help you finally get some peace from the negative inner chatter.

Step 1: Listen hard and notice your inner critic for what it is

It’s tricky in the beginning to notice the inner critic. So much of that negative chatter will be automatic, unconscious thought that is built into your daily life. It’s like a background din that’s always there; a radio that’s constantly playing, but turned down so low that you barely notice it.

Unconscious thought is often compared to being on ‘autopilot’. With an inner critic at work, you may think that your autopilot is a competent computer, but instead, there’s actually some malevolent chimp in the cockpit.

The chimp, your inner critic, is sneakily pushing all the buttons, running amok and quite frankly, being a bit of an ass. He didn’t go to flight school and he’s under-qualified for the job.

You’re back in the cabin of the plane, eating the complimentary peanuts, wondering why things are bumpy and turbulent on the flight, with a queasy, negative feeling in your stomach — and completely oblivious to what’s going on up front.

It’s time for that to change. Time to stand up from your cabin seat, walk to the front of the plane, pull back the curtain and reveal the sneaky inner critic / malevolent chimp who’s been secretly saying all of these negative things to you all this time.

Enough of the analogies — what does that mean in practical terms?

Well, it means to stop, listen, and try to identify that inner critical voice and what it’s saying to you:

• Every time you feel odd or negative or deflated — maybe after a meeting, or after trying something new, or in a certain situation with a partner, stop and think — “Hang on. Is the inner critic working away here? What is it saying to me?”
• It might be whispering “Well that didn’t go well. You really messed up” or “People probably think you’re stupid for saying that” or “He hates you and is going to tell everyone you’re an awful person”. Huh. Not nice right?
• Putting this inner monologue into words, even down onto paper, will shine that light on it even further — and help you to finally notice it at work rather than it being unconscious.
• I guarantee these words will be catastrophizing in some way, and not at all evidence based. But we’ll get to that later. First step is to notice, identify the inner critic, and finally see it for what it is.

Step 2: Make your inner critic into a character

Right, there you are! Little voice, little nag, with all your toxic negative words…what are you?

One hugely beneficial exercise I undertook was to visualise my inner critic as a character that lives within me. Ok, before you started freaking out and thinking this is a sign of a serious mental illness — it’s not. Chill out. You have lots of different parts of you and this is one of them. And to be able to have dialogue with that part of you, well, it’s easier if you can picture a character.

First of all, think about the qualities of your inner critic:

• What does the voice sound like? If it were speaking out loud, what kind of voice would it be? Reedy, loud, booming, cheeky, female, male, persuasive, dominant, cheeky?
• What does it look like? Is it human? Animal? Inanimate object? Glowing blob of energy?
• What are its other qualities? How does it move and act? Skittering, bouncy, slow paced, lumbering?

This will be different for everyone, so free your mind and see what comes naturally here.

Even if you don’t classify yourself as a creative person (which isn’t helpful btw, as I’ll probably write about in another post) — I would highly recommend drawing or finding a picture to represent your inner critic character. Having something to look at will help to crystallize that in your mind.

This is mine:

Ok, so she’s not really Regina George from Mean Girls, but when I try an characterise my inner critic, she really does manifest herself to me as a bitchy, teenage girl. She’s snooty and loves looking down her nose at me. She loves to criticise my work, drum up conspiracy theories about what people are saying about me behind my back, and persuade me to stay in line, according to her regime.

Seeing my inner critic as an immature, toxic teenager helps me to take away her power. I mean, she’s 15, for God’s sake. I’m a grown woman. It helps me to empathise and kind of feel sorry for her — but again, we’ll get to that in step 6.

What does your inner critic look and sound like?

Step 3: Ask for evidence

So we have a character, your inner critic, who is spouting all sorts of horrible stuff to you. Time to have a little chat and to challenge it.

You can do this either in your head, or create 3 columns on a page.

• Write down all the things your inner critic says to you regularly on one side of the page (from step 1) — i.e “You can’t do this” “They think you’re stupid” “I’m not good enough”
• Then next to it, write down the evidence for these things being true. And I mean, actual facts. What was said, done, or seen with your eyes & ears?
• In the third column, write down what a more realistic situation might be.

So for example (a real-life one here):

Inner critic says: Everyone on that meeting thinks you’re an idiot after that presentation.

Evidence for this being true: None. No one has said anything. No one even looked like they found my presentation bad from their expression on Zoom. All neutral.

More realistic truth: There is no evidence for the fact that everyone thinks I’m stupid. Most likely they thought it was ok. Even if it wasn’t ok they know that I’m not stupid from my other work. Actually, Olivia said afterwards it went well. Even if everyone did think I’m an idiot, am I really? No. They would be wrong and that would be unfair.

It’s basically the equivalent of giving yourself a good old-fashioned talking to. I highly recommend it. Now, I like to just challenge my inner critic with a simple “Really? REALLY?” whenever I identify what she is saying to me. It takes practice but it’s kind of fun once you get into it. Give it a try!

Step 4: Turn down the radio

Now you know your inner critic has a tendency to, well, LIE (or at least come up with conspiracy theories with very little to no evidence), it’s probably time you stop giving any credence to what they say. That would be like taking everything Donald Trump says as pure fact. I don’t even think die-hard Trump fans do that. Do you really want to do that to yourself? I didn’t think so.

My mantra is now: “I hear you, but I’m not going to listen to you”.

This takes practice and time, and sometimes a visualisation can work well too. My coach recommended visualising “turning down the radio” — picturing your inner voice chattering away on the radio, then reaching over to simply turn down the volume.

Step 5: Discover what your inner critic really wants for you

So we’ve identified the inner critic exists, given it a face, listened to what it’s saying and figured out that it’s mostly chatting BS — the next step might be to ask, “Why the hell are you doing this to me, you little (insert curse word of choice here)!”

Turns out, your inner critic might be trying to get your attention about something else. I discovered (and you may too) that my inner critic just wants to protect me. She’s scared — scared of getting hurt, scared of others taking me down the wrong path, scared of being laughed at.

She’s wrong to try and combat those feelings and protect me by saying nasty things that scare me into not trying anything new — but those feelings are real and valid. However, it doesn’t mean you have to give those feelings any power. Feeling scared is normal, but it’s not fact.

With that knowledge, it will help to identify blind spots. Maybe it can help you address those fears — why are you feeling scared? IS there actually anything about the situation which is dangerous? If so — how can you tackle them? It’s highly likely that there isn’t really anything to be worried about, but sometimes worth checking just in case.

Step 6: Try empathising with your inner critic

Once I realised that my inner critic was probably just acting out because it was scared, I kind of felt sorry for that part of me. It makes it easier to use ‘tender discipline’ and gently tell the inner critic “Shhh, it’s alright” to calm it rather than shouting at it loudly to “STFU” (which might not help).

Being kind and compassionate to yourself — all parts of yourself — is a really good idea for building inner confidence and self worth, so once you’ve gone through the above steps and started to interact with your inner critic in a healthier way, you might find yourself feeling some more tender feelings towards the bitchy teenager living within you. And that can only help, in my eyes.

Thanks for reading — I’d love to hear about your inner critic too, so please drop me a note in the comments!