Editor’s note: I’m the editor who finds personal development articles for Medium Members, and I like to put each of those articles in the context of the overall topic.
Chantal, who is one of the great up and coming executive coaches, hits on two themes that matter a great deal to me and which a lot of the articles here are going to hit on.
The first is what I’d call a clash of two mindsets. One mindset is hubris and the other is competence. This is a slightly gendered clash, according to HBR’s Why do so many incompetent men become leaders?
But you could flip that framing around and say “How can we help the most competent people become the most successful?” It pains me that this isn’t what happens naturally.
In that context, Chantal’s piece on quieting your inner critic is about removing a roadblock from people like you and me who worship competence. The pure-hubris crowd needs the opposite — they need an inner critic telling them to be quiet.
The second theme is about the power of developing an awareness of our emotional lives. This is one of the strategies in Chantal’s piece.
And it’s a theme that comes up almost everywhere. Daniel Kahneman’s famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow goes deep into this and reminds us that the majority of our decisions come from an emotional mode of thought rather than a rational mode. We wish we were rational creatures, but we’re not.
