Quieting Your Inner Critic

0:00I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, on a botulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

0:31Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. I've been in and out a lot lately for work, press and photo shoots, the usual whirlwind.

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2:09When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand, and on the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture overchangers, creatives, founders, and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers, and seekers here to start conversations because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world.

3:05Here we go. What's one thing that you'd be doing differently in your life or your work if you weren't feeling held back by self-doubt? If you weren't listening to that voice in your head that says, that's not for you. You're not good enough. Who do you think you are? No one will know what you're talking about. That's the voice of your inner critic. And today we're going to be talking about how we quiet it, how we change so that it doesn't hold us back in our lives or our work any longer. I'm Tara Moore, and I'm the author of the book, Playing Big, practical wisdom for women who want to speak up, create, and lead.

3:45And my work is all about helping us share our voices more fully in the world, have the playing big that we each long to have, whether for you that's starting a new business or making a job transition or becoming more visible in your field, or maybe it's speaking up more in your life or reclaiming a creative pursuit that you left behind long ago. We each have a self-defined, unique, playing big. And one of the biggest things that holds us back from going for that is that voice of self-doubt. I'll give you an example. Just this week, a woman in my workshop was sharing about an email she was trying to write.

4:32She's in a job transition and she wanted to reach out to a few people in her field who she really admires, whom she thought could give her a sense of some exciting opportunities or maybe help her find her next thing. She sat down to write that email. And after a few minutes, she found herself deleting and editing and editing again and ruminating over each phrase and hearing a pretty cruel voice in her head that was saying, this sounds stupid. This person won't even remember who you are. Or if they do write back to you and they are willing to have a conversation, And it's going to be obvious that you don't really know what you want to do in this field.

5:13And you're not really ready to talk to them. They're going to see it as a waste of their time. That email never got sent. And the others like it that she wanted to write also never got sent. That's the kind of thing that happens when we're listening to our inner critic. I want to share with you the thoughts, the inner critic thoughts that a group of women shared with me in one of my classes recently when I asked them, what is the inner critic say to you? And I'm taking here from a sampling. Each of these is from a different person in the group. Maybe some of these thoughts will sound familiar to you.

5:54You're too sensitive, toughen up. You're not creative or an innovator. You don't have a vision. You're tolerated, but you're not welcome. You'll never figure this out. You're not prepared enough. nothing you have to say is original or unique you're a wimp you don't follow through on things so why start you don't know what you're talking about you shouldn't take risks you're weak you can't do that it's selfish and self-indulgent you'll regret that you were so foolish and presumptuous as to try this the nerve if you do that everyone will see how incompetent you are and you'll never be able to recover.

6:37Who are you to be enjoying this? Pay attention. You're going to hurt someone with all that showing off. Give other people a chance. They're going to hate you for this. Stop bragging. You're shy and awkward. You can't think strategically. Stay in your lane. You can't be a good mom and a leader all at once. So when we hear that, it can feel really sad, of course. It can feel shocking to know that the brilliant, loving, caring, conscientious individuals, you know, in your life or walking around hearing thoughts like that in their heads, but it may also make you feel a little less alone. And it may be a kind of wake up moment, like, wait, if everyone's hearing that.

7:21And if I know those thoughts probably aren't true for the wonderful people I know, and I work with and I adore in my life, maybe the thoughts that I hear in my head aren't the voice of truth either. The inner critic is definitely not the voice of truth, but to really get that and to know how to not listen to that voice, I think most of us need a kind of inner critic 101 training. And sometimes I laugh when I think back, like in high school, I know I got a little bit of a lesson on how to balance a checkbook. I think I learned how to clean an infected wound. There was an attempt to give us some life skills somewhere along the way, but not the inner life skills.

8:06And I think all of us need that inner critic training. We should probably get it around age 10 before that adolescent vicious inner critic starts to kick in, but we don't get it. And the good news story that I have for you today is I can say after training thousands of people in this work, people in their 80s, people in their 20s, teenagers, people in creative fields and business fields, people in academia, so many walks of life. I can say that a little bit of education and just starting to get some vocabulary to talk about this voice of self-doubt, as well as some practical tools to deal with it, makes a huge, huge difference.

8:56Can really change the amount of impact that voice has in our lives. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to talk about four things. One, we're going to define what this inner critic voice is. Why do we have it? Where does it come from? So we really understand it. It doesn't need to be a mystery to us. Number two, we're going to talk about why the answer to this problem is not about developing confidence. I know it's not what we've been told. We've been told the problem is self-doubt. logically, obviously the answer would be confidence, but it turns out my experience, that's not at all the case.

9:40And we'll talk about why that is and what the answer really is instead. We'll also talk about the most common mistakes that people make and how they deal with their self-doubt, how they respond to it. And then last, we'll talk about really practical ways, what to do when those self-doubting or self-critical thoughts are arising. What can you do in the moment to quiet it, to move past it so that it doesn't hold you back, so that it doesn't mean that the business doesn't get started for another year or the emails don't get sent or the idea doesn't get shared so that it doesn't direct our actions.

10:23So that is what we'll be up to today. So what is the inner critic? What is this voice? So I'll tell you when I first started my coaching practice and I was sitting across from these brilliant clients who had so many wonderful ideas and more clearly so hard workers and had so much to bring. And yet I was hearing this really vicious voice of self-doubt. Who do you, I think I am. I can't do that. I don't think I could ever lead or succeed in the way that I would actually love to. When I was hearing all of that, I thought, gosh, what happened to them in their early childhoods or lives that led to this crisis of confidence?

11:07I thought the answer must be in our individual stories, maybe in our early childhood experience. I had grown up with, in a family where the idea was like, your psychology is determined by your early childhood and anything that went wrong, we should look back into our early childhood experience and find the cause. So with those first coaching clients, I really went looking there, like what were, what was the early childhood messages they got about themselves? But there was a problem. Some of those clients had had wonderfully positive parents who gave them so much encouragement and support and praise.

11:47Some of them had had very critical parents. Some of them had done really well in school and sort of had a lot of good evidence to feel confident in their abilities. And some of them had really struggled in school. So the experiences were quite different. And yet as adults and particularly as adult professional women, they were all ending up with an inner critic voice that sounded so similar. And so became clear to me, we had to look somewhere else than their childhood experience for the cause. The second thing I noticed with those clients is that that inner critic would come up most strongly when they were considering some kind of stretch or risk or stepping forward in their work or in their lives.

12:40And that usually when it came up, there was something about the step they were taking or considering taking that felt scary, that felt vulnerable to them. And so over time, after hearing so many close up case studies and examples and working with people to see what really made a difference, the definition of the inner critic that I came to is this. The inner critic, that voice of self-doubt is a strategy that your safety instinct is using to keep you in your comfort zone. So the inner critic is a strategy that your safety instinct uses to keep you in your comfort zone. And let's unpack that a little bit.

13:29So our safety instinct is a very old part of our human physiology, part of us that is rooted in our reptilian brain, the oldest part of the human brain from an evolutionary perspective. And it's the responsibility of that safety instinct to make sure that we stay safe and therefore survive. So the safety instinct is always scanning the environment for a danger or a threat. And it has one goal, which is to make sure that we avoid the dangers or overcome the threats. And it will really do whatever it needs to do to make sure that happens. One of the problems in our modern lives is that that safety instinct, which was really designed to help protect us from physical threats like predators or poisons, that same safety instinct fires, goes off in the face of an emotional threat.

14:32It doesn't know how to distinguish. So when we encounter a fear of rejection or embarrassment or a situation that might bring a sense of failure or standing out from the crowd or a risk of that, the safety instinct says, oh, nope, we got to avoid that at all costs. And the safety instinct is like, it's a little like if you've ever worked in a corporate environment or an organization where there were separate departments that should talk to each other and be coordinated, but they're not. They're way too separate and siloed. In the self, it can be a little like that, where the safety instinct is only focused on the metric of, did I survive?

15:13Did I stay safe? And the safety instinct is not coordinating with or talking to the part of you that wants to be fulfilled and grow and change in your life. And so when something happens, like you want to speak up in a meeting or you want to go reach out to someone you think would be a fabulous new friend, but it feels a little vulnerable to show that you're interested in being their friend, or you want to start a new organization that is going to put you in a leadership role and feel scary because you don't know if you can do it. The safety instinct says absolutely not. And it has no connection or responsibility to the part of you that wants fulfillment and self-expression and joy and impact in your life.

15:59Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

16:30Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

17:00Okay, so how is the safety instinct going to keep you entirely in the comfort zone? Well, if it just says, hi, I'm your safety instinct, I think we should stay on the couch watching Netflix and having our potato chips forever because that will feel safe and cozy and nothing is likely to attack us while we're on that couch. If it said that, that transparently, you would be like, well, no, I kind of want a bigger range of life experiences than that. So your safety instinct puts on a disguise. And instead of being that transparent, it says, that's risky. They're going to laugh at you. You're not qualified for that.

17:40Who do you think you are? And those kinds of thoughts are mean and devastating enough that they do cause us to retreat back into our comfort zone. So the safety instinct gets what it wants. That is the universal kind of level of what inner critic is. It's our safety instinct using the disguise, the thoughts, the costume of these thoughts of self-doubt to get us to retreat back in our comfort zone. the specific things that are scary to us that spark our safety instinct might vary based on who you are and your identity so if you're a woman things that have you holding power being visible our safety instinct knows that's dangerous there may be things that particularly in your cultural group, in your country, in your religious community, have been, you've learned are unlovable or come at great risk of saying, of expressing, and that will affect where and how your inner critic speaks up.

18:52Okay. So if that's what the inner critic is, right? If it's an expression of that safety instinct, a strategy, a tool that the safety instinct is using to get us to again and again, retreat back into that comfort zone, then here's the thing that is not going anywhere. We cannot surgically remove the safety instinct. We cannot make it be quiet for the rest of our lives. It's going to do what it's going to do. And so our work is not about getting rid of self-doubt, but about becoming wise in how we respond to that voice. You know, I have not met a woman or a man who doesn't, or a person of any gender who does not have a voice of self-doubt.

19:52And I often think that I will meet that person. I still sometimes get confused about that because I'll be asking, you know, can you come in and give this workshop to a group of partners at law firms? And I'll think they're, my own inner critic will start talking and think they're way past self-doubt. They're not going to need this. Or can you go present to executive leadership of, of a finance company? Well, they're, they're surely past self-doubt. And I will tell you everywhere I go, I find this very strong self-doubting and self-critical voice. There was a study that was done by KPMG that looked at women in corporate roles in America, and they asked these women, how confident do you feel?

20:40And they found that entry-level women, women in what were considered entry-level corporate jobs, about 45 % of them said that they felt confident at work. Then they asked women at the top of that corporate ladder, women in executive roles who had succeeded in this highly competitive up or out environment, women who were holding significant leadership positions, people we'd think, right, would have good evidence that would help them feel confident and had lots of reason to feel confident. And they found that the levels of confidence were almost the same as they were for entry-level women. There was just about a 10 % difference, which is to say for the vast majority, for 90 % of individuals, that confidence level isn't likely to change despite any success or moving up the ladder.

21:37And that resonates anecdotally with my experience for sure, that when I talk to people who are very successful in their field, the only thing that's changed is what they feel self-doubt about, not how much they feel. So maybe before they felt self-doubt, just even managing a team at all, that might've changed after 30 years, but now they feel the same vicious self-critical voice when they are asked to join a corporate board, let's say. so we cannot afford to wait on confidence and that is one of the biggest messages I hope you walk away with today if you are thinking just wait because when I get a little more experience I will be confident enough to do x you're most likely wrong and I don't want you to wait for that elusive confidence to go for your your dream your longing what you want to create the truth is when we're creating what we really want to, when we're actually sharing our voices and gifts in the world, that is going to feel very vulnerable and the voice of self-doubt is going to come up.

22:45So we need to know how to deal with it. Okay. So let's talk about some of the common mistakes and how people typically deal with self-doubt and what tends to get us into trouble. So sometimes what we do is assume that if we're hearing a lot of self-doubt, that means we're on the wrong track. Like there's an idea floating out there when you're on your right path in your life, it'll feel right. That I think is a big mistaken assumption. Yeah. When we're on our right path, if you are, you know, meant to do music and it's your calling and you're doing music, there will certainly be times when you have that feeling of rightness and flow.

23:28But the inner critic speaking up can also mean that you're doing something that feels vulnerable to you. You're actually very much on your right path. And that's why it feels so scary. And that's why there's so much self-doubt there. So mistake number one, we don't want to think that if we're hearing self-doubt, it means we're not on our right path. Mistake number two is thinking that that voice of self-doubt is in some way our best ally. This is a common one for a lot of us because we look back and we think, well, it's that voice that was telling me I'm never good enough and I'm not prepared enough.

24:07That's the voice that helped me stay up all night making the term paper better. That's the voice that helps me be the most prepared in the room. That's the voice that makes sure my work is excellent. And so we can feel like, hey, the inner critic is really an ally for me and I'm not sure I want tools to stop listening to it. That's what helps fuel my good performance. Well, I want to ask you to consider a few things about that. The first one is what's your quality of life like if that is your motivator? If that kind of self-critical thoughts, those mean thoughts to yourself, if feeling like you're not enough is what's motivating you at work, how does work feel day to day?

24:52And might there be a more enjoyable way to be motivated? Two, I want you to consider your health because if those are the kinds of thoughts that are motivating you, you have stress hormones flowing through your body a lot of the time. And that really takes a toll on your physical health. We are meant to have short bursts, flashes of those stress hormones to help us deal with stressful things, but not to lean on them ongoingly as a way of getting our work done. And then third, and maybe for me, this is where what my heart is closest to is that I know, especially for women and any of us from identities that have been marginalized or underrepresented in positions of power, when we are being run by the inner critic in our work, we end up, yep, we dot those I's really perfectly because we're scared not to.

25:53We cross those T's really well. We proofread everything. We are looking to avoid mistakes. We may be super prepared, even over-prepared, but the inner critic will never motivate us to share our real point of you in a meeting or make time to take that senior leader to lunch who we really want to get to know better and whom we want to be aware of our work. In other words, the inner critic can motivate us to be a really good worker bee, but it's never going to motivate us to be a game changer. And so even if you can look back in your life and say, Hey, I see how the inner critic motivated some of my great performance.

26:38Looking forward, is that really going to get you where you want to go? Or do you need a different set of options that are more about really sharing your voice and your unique gifts more in your work? Lastly, the last mistake that many of us make with the inner critic is we argue back with that voice. And some of us even think, okay, now I'm getting empowered. Now I'm getting smart about that voice. I know when it says I'm not smart enough, I'm going to find a way to say I am smart enough, kind of like that affirmations kind of principle. And what I'll say about this is if you find that works for you in moments here and there, use it when it works, sure.

27:23But for most of us, it really isn't very effective. And let me tell you a quick story to explain why. When I first started coaching people around the inner critic, I thought, yeah, we just need to basically argue back with these thoughts and disprove them. So I had a client who really wanted to start a business. She was in her 50s and was very excited about taking this unique entrepreneurial path and bringing something into the world that she felt super passionate about in the arena of visual art. and she kept hearing this thought. I'm too old. I'm too old. If it was going to happen, it would have happened already.

28:06Nobody wants to work with someone my age, like a bunch of thoughts related to her age. So I thought, oh, we obviously we just need to disprove this limiting belief. And so she had some homework from our coaching session to go find 10 awesome women entrepreneurs who started their businesses after they were 50. And she came back the next week and And she said, Tara, it was amazing. I found them. Oh my God, they're everywhere. Once I started looking for them, I saw them everywhere. And wow, this really can happen. But great, okay, we solved the problem. But the next week she came back and she said, oh, new problem, I'm totally unqualified.

28:47Well, I thought now we have to disprove that thought. So we went over her qualifications and we really rigorously looked at, did she need more? And we looked at other examples And we just proved that pretty well too. Well, the next week she came back and she said, you know, my motivation, my interest in this just kind of deflated. It just popped. I don't know. I think, I think it really wouldn't be the right fit for me anyway. So what I came to see from that experience and others is that actually our inner critic is like, it's like a popcorn machine popping off different objections. And it doesn't really matter what they are.

29:26The inner critic doesn't care. It doesn't pay too much attention to the specifics because again, the point isn't truth. The point is just to say anything that will keep us in our comfort zone. And so you can spend a lot of time disproving one of your inner critics thoughts, and it'll just come back with a new one. You know, those people in your life that if you're arguing with them, like if you get sucked into the argument, you've already lost. You didn't want to be in the argument to begin with, and you don't like the way they argue. And you know, those arguments never go anywhere. The inner critic is like that.