12 Jun Should you completely silence that inner critic? Maybe not!
via Inc.com by Wanda Thibodeaux
If you were to make a list of essential things to do to be successful, you’d probably put silencing your inner critic on it. You might even put it near the top as a high priority. But before you tell your inner critic to can it one more time, show it some kindness and give it a break. It actually has a positive psychological function most people miss.
Keeping you in check
From the psychological standpoint, fear is probably one of the most effective emotions when it comes to stopping ourselves from behaving in ways that might not be safe or beneficial. But shame is powerful for this purpose, too. Like fear, it can keep you from veering too far from social norms, helping you internalize and anticipate current rules from authority figures. And getting you to feel shame is the inner critic’s specialty. Its main evolutionary purpose isn’t to suck the life out of you and make the world seem blacker than tar. It’s simply to help you conform and, subsequently, have a better chance at survival.
As a somewhat exaggerated everyday example, if your inner critic calls you a dork and you feel embarrassed when you lose your keys, you’ll probably come up with some kind of method to keep track of them. And if you don’t have to worry about your keys anymore, you can get to work, which lets you pay rent, buy groceries and take care of yourself.
So what’s the problem?
As Mark Coleman writes in his book excerpt on InnerSelf, the inner critic is both simplistic and inflexible. Its assessment of what’s good or bad, right or wrong, doesn’t always take many the ambiguities and subtleties of life into account. I compare it to an overactive immune system and allergies. It sees threats where there aren’t any and speaks up when it’s not appropriate.
And what’s worse, as we listen to our inner critic, we build stronger and stronger pathwaysto its voice in our brains. It becomes easier and easier to trigger it, with one harsh self-judgment activating an entire sequence of mental self-lashing. And at that point, the inner critic isn’t a protector anymore, because the number of negative messages we’re receiving and accepting about ourselves so drastically outweighs the positive insights we might get from others.
Tipping the teeter-totter back the other way
Understanding that the inner critic has a purpose but can get way out of hand, your goal isn’t to silence it completely. Rather, it’s to be more conscious of its function and to deliberately balance it with logic. For example, you can ask yourself…
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