I want to tell you about my personal experience with my inner critic and inner mentor, and how I deal with them.
I have been travelling for work a little and taking the intermittent loss of WiFi as a space to tuck into some of the gems on my kindle, the most recent being Playing Big by Tara Mohr.
It’s a juicy one if you haven’t read it, I paused reading the below:
“Learning how to listen to your inner mentor instead of your inner critic is the first major movement toward playing bigger. Playing big doesn’t come from working more, pushing harder, or finding confidence. It comes from listening to the most powerful and secure part of you, not the voice of self-doubt.”
– Mohr, Tara. Playing Big
This gave me a moment of pause because the past few weeks I’ve been acutely aware of both voices in almost everything I do. The internal conversation of what I should and should not do can almost seem deafening. I am capable of working more, find myself to be very confident and am no stranger to pushing harder but sometimes the shift is as simple as saying “No Jaz, you can do this, follow your intuition and honour the idea” or “No Jaz, I understand your fears but we’ve researched them into action points now so get cracking!”. You see, I can’t afford to let my inner critic keep running her mouth because she genuinely will and there I will be trapped under my duvet bingeing Netflix trying to drown her out.
My experience of anxiety and depression only makes her worse, which is why I need to keep her in check and respond. I have to keep Self-Doubt Jaz in her little box, where the fear get’s minimised to little watch-outs and I keep moving forward towards the things inner mentor knows I’m fully capable of.
This week, I want you to try it, have a conversation, open a dialogue and build a little box for your inner critic to live comfortably in, a box that stops her transforming into some kind of power ranger of perfectionism, procrastination, guilt, fear or anxiety.
If you need help starting those conversations and finding your way out of that feeling of being trapped with your inner critic, I suggest signing up for the Imposter Syndrome 5 day challenge. It will bring a heavy dose of self-reflection and progress into the way you talk about yourself, and your career, and usher in real change
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