#24: Your inner critic is not a videogame boss
You've read the inspirational quotes, you've got uplifting affirmations written on post-it notes and stuck to your fridge, you're fully on board with personal growth and empowerment - so why do you still have the inner critic buzzing away inside your head? It must mean you've failed, right?
Well, no, honey. You're completely normal. You've got the inner critic all wrong, that's all. The bad news is that you're stuck with her. The good news is that she's not in charge of what you think and do - you are.
Episode transcript:
Fed up because you still haven’t silenced the inner critic? That’s not how it works.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
I’ve spoken many times on this podcast about the inner critic - that part of you that always has negative things to say about who you are and what you’re doing. It’s that part of you that tells you that you’ll probably never make it, that everyone else is smarter than you are, that people who say complimentary things to you are either being insincere or they’re simply deluded about you, and so on. You know what I’m talking about.
Lots of us hold uncomfortably conflicting attitudes to our inner critic. We know that we’re being mean to ourselves, and that our inner critic expresses a distorted, ridiculously negative view of ourselves, and that really we should ignore her. Yet at the same time, we buy into the things she says to us. Of course she’s being an outrageous bully and she’s exaggerating when she tells us that we’ll never be good enough - but at the same time, we think, maybe she’s right.
This makes us feel bad. You might have seen a coach or a therapist about your inner critic, you might have read articles about her, or listened to talks and interviews, and you’ve got totally on board with the idea that your inner critic is talking nonsense, holding you back, and that you should stop listening to her. But then, even after all that, she’s still in your head and under your skin. You thought you were empowering yourself to defeat her, so why is she still there? And so, now, not only do you have the voice of the inner critic to deal with, but you also feel bad because the fact that the inner critic is still there despite everything you’ve learned proves that you’re nothing but a failure. You tried to grow stronger, believe in yourself, and advocate for yourself, and yet nothing really has changed. Maybe you’re incapable of change. Maybe personal growth just isn’t for people like you. How embarrassing. How depressing.
Here’s the good news. You’re not a failure. Your experience is completely normal. Your problem is simply that you’re thinking about your inner critic in the wrong way. You’re thinking of her as if she’s a video game boss: a powerful enemy who you need to learn to conquer in a huge boss fight that draws on all your strength and skills and pushes you to the very edge of what you’re capable of - and then afterwards, once you’ve defeated her, she’s gone forever, and you level up to a new state of being where you have only positive things to say to yourself and your mental life resembles an Instagram account full of positive affirmations and inspiring, motivational messages. Ugh. Seriously, imperfectionists? This isn’t how managing the inner critic works. It’s not how personal growth works. It’s not how a normal human mind works.
Here’s the thing. Your inner critic is a part of you. She’s the flip side to the investment you have made in doing and being certain things. You’re a smart, ambitious, brave person who cares about doing things well, and about growing as a person, and about achieving things you’ve never achieved before, and about challenging yourself. You’re a person who pushes herself and is constantly looking to expand her comfort zone, and who doesn’t feel truly alive and fulfilled unless she’s testing herself. Right? But the thing is, all this essentially involves doing things without being certain whether you’re going to succeed. They’re two sides of the same coin. You don’t grow as a person by doing things you already know you can do, and that you’ve done many times before. You don’t achieve new things by achieving old things. You don’t challenge yourself without challenging yourself. And because you care about these things, and because you’re not certain that you’ll succeed at them - you worry about not succeeding at them. Your inner critic, especially, worries about you not succeeding at them. She’s bloody terrified of you not succeeding at them. Remember that I sometimes call the inner critic the inner helicopter parent. Because she’s not against you - she’s just trying to protect you. She’s sitting there on the sidelines, anxiously wringing her hands and telling you that maybe you’re not good enough not because she wants to upset you, but because she wants to soften the blow for you if you do end up failing. She thinks that it’s going to be easier for you if she tells you you’re a failure than if someone else does, or if you just discover it for yourself, with all the humiliation and crashing-down-to-earth that that might involve. She’s wrong, of course. What she doesn’t realise is that, by trying to protect you, she’s holding you back.
Now, you can’t stop her trying to protect you, but you can stop her from holding you back. Let’s take a breath, and address both parts of that claim. First: you can’t stop your inner critic from trying to protect you. I mean, you sort of can, in a way, or rather in two ways: you can stop trying to move outside your comfort zone, or you can stop caring about whether or not you achieve the things that you’re trying to achieve. If you stop trying to move outside your comfort zone - by not pushing yourself to try new things, not trying to grow - then you’re probably not going to be worried about failure. You’re doing things you already know you can do, and doing them is not going to make you anxious and your inner critic is not going to be worried about protecting you - although, of course, since you’re the sort of person who does like to push herself beyond her comfort zone, this strategy is likely to make you feel frustrated and dissatisfied. Alternatively, you can continue to strive to do the sorts of things that challenge you and help you grow, but you can stop caring about whether or not you succeed at them. If you don’t care about failing, then again, your inner critic is not going to worry about protecting you. But then, this approach doesn’t really make sense. If you don’t care about whether you succeed or fail at something, why would you even bother to try it? What’s in it for you? Success wouldn’t be rewarding, after all. Seems like a rather pointless way to use your energy. Trying to stop your inner critic from doing and saying her thing, then, isn’t a promising strategy.
What about the second part of that claim I made: if you can’t stop your inner critic from trying to protect you, how can you stop her from holding you back? Well. First, you need to accept that she’s going to be there - your constant, neurotic, catastrophising, pessimistic, negative companion. As long as you’re trying to grow as a person, and doing things you care about doing well, you can’t get rid of her. What you can do, however, is decide what sort of role she’s going to play in your life. Is she in the driving seat, always in charge of where you’re headed? Or is she a passenger in a car that you’re driving, whose chatter about which way you should turn and how fast you should go and when you should change gear and what radio station you should listen to is all a bit annoying but something you’re free to ignore? Is she the only voice whose opinion about your capabilities, achievements, and ambitions you listen to? Or is she just one perspective among many that you listen to? Do you take her criticisms at face value, unquestioningly assuming they are a direct line to reality, or do you view her as critically as she views you, and recognise her as a biased voice whose opinions you should take with a pinch of salt? Giving some thought to these questions, and trying on new ways of relating to your inner critic, are potentially useful ways to introduce a bit of distance between what she says and what you think.
There’s an analogy here with politics. Whether or not a country’s leader gets to be a dictator depends largely on what sort of political machinery they operate in. If they’re the leader of a country that has few political checks and balances on the decisions they make, then what they say goes. They want to kill the poor? No problem. It’s a straight road between what they want and what they get. But if they’re the leader of a country that has a robust system of approvals through which the leader’s wishes must filter before they get implemented, then - if the system works as it should - the leader’s vision isn’t going to become reality. At least, not without the edges knocked off it. What you end up with, in such a system, is a situation where the leader is free to express whatever wild ideas they like, but it’s all just hot air, because there’s no way for them to make it a reality unless it gets rubber stamped by a load of other people. Their ideas may influence reality, but then so do lots of competing ideas, so that what you end up with is something reasonable and balanced.
Your inner critic is a bit like that. She has some crazy ideas, but you get to decide whether they make their way into your reality. If she tells you that you’ll never make it, and you give up as a result, then you’ve allowed your inner critic to be a dictator. But that’s not the way it has to be. You’re in charge here. You can implement whatever internal political bureaucracy you like. Your inner critic says you’ll never make it? Ok, well, maybe you can run that claim through the system. Has she given you any evidence for her claim, and does the evidence actually support the claim? Does she have any vested interests she needs to declare? (Spoiler: yes she does, always.) What does the Leader of the Opposition have to say on the matter - that’s your inner mentor? (You do realise you have an inner mentor, right? And that, if she’s less influential than your inner critic, that’s only because you haven’t been listening to her - which is something you can change right now.) Imagine yourself - if you can, just for a few moments - hitting pause on your emotions here, and running a dispassionate comparison of different perspectives. Because, tempting as it is to dwell on the negatives, that’s not the route to getting an accurate picture. It’s just like when you read product reviews for something you’re thinking of buying. You don’t just read the negative ones, right? You read a wide selection, and use it to form a balanced picture.
So, when I say that your inner critic is not a video game boss, that news is both reassuring and depressing. It’s reassuring because it means that you’re not a failure if you can’t defeat and silence her. And it’s depressing because it means that you’re stuck with her. But there’s something else, too. Not only is she not a video game boss, she’s not a boss at all. She’s just a voice. She’s your own, in-house, one-star Amazon reviewer, who grouches away but is ultimately powerless to affect anything without your cooperation. The boss is you. You’re the one who makes the decisions, who decides whether or not to act on the opinions of your inner critic, your inner mentor, and other, perhaps external, points of view. Now, get back in the driving seat, and get on with your life.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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