Summary

The article discusses personal strategies for cutting through distractions, focusing on core values, and managing the inner critic to achieve long-term goals and balance in life.

Abstract

The author shares insights on the journey of filtering out noise to concentrate on what truly matters by reflecting on personal values, particularly through daily morning pages. The article emphasizes the importance of aligning daily activities with long-term aspirations and suggests tools like the Values Card Sort activity to help identify and prioritize one's values. It also addresses the challenge of balancing conflicting areas in life by focusing on value-related aspects and making informed decisions based on those values. Furthermore, the author explores methods for dealing with the inner critic, advocating for a personalized approach rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, and suggests developing a humorous relationship with one's inner critic as a coping mechanism.

Opinions

The author believes in the power of regular reflection on values to ensure daily actions align with long-term goals.
The Values Card Sort activity is highly recommended as a method to discern one's core values without the pressure of generating them from scratch.
The article suggests that accepting the inevitability of letting go of certain life areas is easier after identifying core values and vision.
The author posits that there are multiple ways to manage the inner critic, including reframing or accepting it, and that the effectiveness of these methods can vary greatly from person to person.
The author shares a personal anecdote about how positive affirmations did not work for silencing their inner critic, emphasizing the importance of finding a method that resonates with the individual.
The author advocates for a humorous approach to coexisting with the inner critic, likening it to dealing with judgmental relatives, and emphasizes that this method has been effective for them.
The author encourages readers to explore different methods to manage their inner critic and reassures them that they are not alone in their struggles.

The Journey of Cutting Through Noise and Getting To What’s Important

Digging down and focussing values while managing your inner critic

Monday: How can I cut through the noise and get to what’s important?

Somehow, I tweeted this exact thought on Saturday:

Or, maybe primed by reading these prompts on Monday and having these thoughts percolate, I returned to this?

The universe works in interesting and intriguing ways!

For me, I’ve returned to reflecting on my values on a set schedule, especially through my daily morning pages. It helps me check in on whether the way that I’ve planned out my day really align with those values, and whether I’m making time in my day to really move forward what I want to accomplish on the long term.

To me, to filter out all the noise and focus on the signal is less a journey of finding the “right” answer, but finding a system that helps me regularly check in and adjust to whether what I’m doing is fitting with both what I need now and what I need in the long-term.

It looks like hunkering down and finally doing the Values Card Sort activity and learning what was most important to me. It’s honestly such a fun activity where you get a series of cards with “values” written on them, and you sort them into whether they’re important to you or not.

It’s honestly so cool because you don’t have to generate your own set of values, which can often be hard. Imagine someone sitting you down and saying, what do you care about? If you have the answer right away, splendid. But if you don’t, it could be like pulling teeth to try and come up with stuff.

This way, it feels more like taking a multiple choice test than a short-answer one. The answers/options are already all there and you get to focus on categorizing whether values fit you or don’t fit you.

From that list of distilled values, you can then craft your short-term goals (e.g., daily goals) or long-term goals (e.g., monthly or yearly goals).

This process really helped me with getting through the pandemic, because the restrictions put such a sudden stop to all of my research. As someone who relies on inviting humans to come in and share their thoughts and do tasks as part of her research, it required a lot of flexibility to get through it all.

And sometimes, in that flexibility and creativity, you can lose yourself. It can feel like you’re just constantly changing and have nothing to anchor you.

So for me, instead of getting lost in all the “noise”, I hunkered down and re-completed this set of values just to see where I was at for this season of my life.

That’s how I found what was important. The “signal”.

Wednesday: How can I balance conflicting areas in my life?

This question follows so naturally from the previous one! I think once you’ve distilled down to your core values and your core vision of what you might want something to look like, it’s much easier to accept letting go of certain areas of life that you might have been clinging to before.

Rather than “doing more”, which often created these conflicting areas because there are only a certain number of waking hours per day, I learned to hone in on what I valued in each of these areas, which could easily help me structure the decision-making options:

I could keep only the value-related aspects of the conflicting areas
I could keep the area that fit the value more and let go of the other area

In both scenarios, instead of being the person paralyzed by fear for letting go of something because I was scared it would be the one thing that could have been useful or necessary, it was much easier to believe that there are numerous other possibilities and that I took the best step I could at any given moment.

Friday: How can I silence my inner critic?

I think there’s two camps on the topic of how to “silence” your inner critic:

to reframe your inner critic into something “more pleasant”
to accept your inner critic

I don’t think there’s a right answer, but rather that it entirely depends on you. It’s hard not getting the easy one-stop solution to managing your inner critic, but acknowledging that the coin could flip either way also takes away a lot of shame for people for which that “one-stop solution” didn’t work.

For the longest time I was shamed because the first suggestion, of reframing your inner critic and flooding your inner monologue with positive affirmations, didn’t work for me.

For people where this piece of advice did work for them, they just kept saying that I wasn’t trying hard enough, which is why their miracle cure didn’t work. It felt horrible, to be honest, because not only was dealing with my inner critic, it seemed like I failed at dealing with my inner critic, and damn, did my inner critic criticize me for that.

I genuinely think the “reframe” tip works for a lot of people but I’m also so glad I stopped trying to fit myself into that box. It was freeing. I’m so glad I pressed on and continued to experiment with other methods until I found the method that worked for me.

For me, what worked was having a more friendly and almost comical relationship with my inner critic.

Do you have an annoying, judgmental relative? My inner critic is kind of like that. In fact, my inner critic was probably an amalgamation of all of those relatives.

Those actual relatives could not be convinced to be any nicer, and neither could my inner critic, no matter what I told myself.

While I no longer engage with those relatives as a personal boundary because they cannot be convinced to be any nicer, the problem was that the inner critic voice they left in my head was there for good.

I couldn’t cut that criticism out by a simple reframe, and it makes sense. Maybe in twenty, thirty years, I could over time undo some of this intense programming, but unlike some others, a few mantras here and there were not enough.

And for that interim twenty, thirty years, I’m learning to co-exist with this inner critic in humour.

And if this is you, I want you to know, you’re not alone. I kept this inside for a long time because of how loudly people were speaking about how one method or another should “definitely” heal something, and that alone had been damaging.

Maybe for you, neither of these methods work; maybe it’s not a coin toss between two options but a dice roll between six, and I’ve only unearthed two in my journey. That’s valid too. And I hope you’re able to land on the roll that genuinely works for you.

Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) wants to once again thank 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊. for these amazing prompts!

set of prompts from 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊. in Know Thyself, Heal Thyself
hop down this rabbit hole? what period cramps feel like
read this piece from Rebecca Stevens A.? my heart, my all