How To Conquer Your Inner Critic

In its most docile form, having a rampant inner critic will leave you with your creative confidence knocked about and slowly eroded. In its extreme though, left completely unchecked it will lead to full-blown creative block. That is complete creative inactivity.

Having been here personally I can tell you this is not a great place to be.

For YEARS I battled with my inner critic. At different points in my life, it has taken hold of me for longer than I care to admit. It's been a long and winding journey and in all honesty, it's one that I'm still on. It is a daily task and one that cannot be neglected. But, after ten years as a working artist, I think I may have just figured out exactly how to keep it at bay.

So in order to fully flesh out how we do that we are going to answer three questions today...

1. Exactly who or what is the inner critic?
2. How does the inner critic affect your daily creative life?
3. How do you tell your inner critic to be shut up?

1. Who is the inner critic?

Put simply, the inner critic is our negative inner monologue working hard to prevent the creative part of ourselves (also known as the inner artist) from creating. If the inner artist is the part of ourselves that is joyful, playful creative energy the inner critic is toxic, critical energy channelled internally and aimed at our self and inner artist. The inner critic is sneaky and malicious and will work overtime to prevent our inner artist from getting out. This is what leads most to being creatively blocked.

If you sit with it long enough and listen really hard you'll see that the inner critic is the manifestation of all the hurt and criticism we have faced in the past. It's the hurt we faced when we attempted to be creative and were met with overt or subtle criticism. This voice could be the internalised voice of a specific person or an amalgamation of a few.

Common examples of what the inner critic sounds like may include:

“Nothing you do is good enough.”

“You don’t have any good ideas”

“You are not creative”.

“You are not original”.

“You have nothing original to say”.

“Who do you think you are?”

“What do you know?

Other examples may be:

"You will go broke".

"You will abandon your family/spouse/children".

"You will neglect your responsibilities".

"Your work/school/studies will suffer".

Sheesh… that’s intense. It goes without saying that the inner critic is often extreme and incredibly melodramatic and…. Just a bit ridiculous.

So with that in mind let's consider…

2. How does the inner critic affect your daily creative life?

Should we find ourselves creatively blocked as a result of a rampant inner critic, it often looks like this: You feel uninspired and afraid to create. You are terrified of the blank page and frustrated that you can’t just act on your ideas. You know you want to create but you have that nasty inner critic telling you every reason why you can’t or shouldn’t create.

When I find myself in this place I am a tightly wound up anxious, fearful and perfectionistic mess. I feel unsettled, depressed and deeply deeply unsatisfied with myself and life. And quite frankly I'm not a happy individual to be around. When I am not creating my head is a very loud and noisy place and my mental health goes right down the gurgler. I become so afraid of making mistakes, then find myself putting off creating out of fear and anxiety, which only makes things spiral even more.

This may look a little different for you in its specific details, but I'm betting that it's not too far off from this. So now that we know what the inner critic looks like, let's answer the question… 

3. How do you tell your inner critic to shut up?

Because the inner critic is based in shame and fear, the approach I have found that works best is talking back to your inner critic with a lovely cocktail of reason, logic, compassion and sass! Fear and shame just can't survive when we come at them with this approach. Let me explain…

 As an example your inner critic might say:

"Who do you think you are? You can't paint".

A reasonable and compassionate retaliation to your inner critic's accusation might be,

"I don't know how to paint now, but if I don't start I will never learn. I am willing to be a beginner."

See how this response works? It challenges the ridiculousness and "extreme" speak of the inner critic with a nice dose of self-compassion and reason. Of course, you don't know how to paint! You're a beginner and you're willing to be a beginner at something for a while.

Learning to speak this way can be hard at first, so a quick tip if you're struggling with this, is to imagine you're answering a friend who has just expressed the same negative belief. How would you challenge their negative remarks? We can often extend more kindness and reasonableness to a friend than we can to ourselves. So be the friend you need right now!

Alternatively, if the soft and compassionate approach doesn’t work for you, your inner critic may need a slightly firmer response. Sometimes we need to meet our inner critic with equal force.

 So going back to our example, your inner critic says,

"Who do you think you are? You can't paint".

You might respond (with the sassiest and firmest attitude you can muster),

"Be quiet. Your input is not useful at this time. Go away".

Sometimes simply telling our inner critic to be quiet or go away is the most effective way to short-circuit the whole sabotage process.

Ok so you've just told your inner critic to be quiet. Now what? 

 If you do this several times over and exhaust the list of criticisms from your inner critic you should find that your head feels .... quiet. 

NOW is the time to get busy. You've conquered your inner critic, not forever but certainly for the time being, and it's time to get busy doing the creative stuff while your inner critic has been put away in silence. And I mean it… do not dawdle.

So to sum up, your inner critic is the nasty negative inner monologue that tells you all the reasons why you shouldn’t create, leaving them unchecked can lead to a serious case of creative block and the way we stop that from happening is learning to talk back to them in a firm, pragmatic and logical way.

If you liked what you learned today and you're keen to dig deeper I've got just the thing for you! I've developed a free PDF workbook that will help you, in detail and in writing, quiet and conquer your inner critic in ten minutes or less.

Takeaways

+ The inner critic stifles creativity with negative self-talk and self-doubt.

+ It causes creative block, leaving us uninspired and afraid to create.

+ You can counter the inner critic by responding with reason, compassion, and sass.

+ Quieting the inner critic allows us to get busy creating.

What's Next?

1. Download your free PDF workbook below.
2. Unlock access to this and other free resources by joining "The Creativity Cafe". Sign up below.
3. Watch my free creative block masterclass here. 
4. Get on the waitlist for my upcoming sketchbook workshop here.

Unlock access to this workbook by joining "The Creativity Cafe"

This workbook will help you through a series of exercises learn exactly how to tell your inner critic to shut up!

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