Have you ever told yourself you are not young enough? Old enough? That you don’t know enough? That you can’t do it?
Or maybe you tell yourself that you may have become successful, but that is just luck. That if people really knew you then they would realize you are not as clever as you think. That you have fooled them.
You are not alone with this. We all have within us an inner critic.
We collect beliefs about ourselves when we are younger and we internalize them and later in life the beliefs become buried. But the inner critic remains ever present.
Often it is running a full time commentary of what we should have/would have/could have done better, or been better.
Just take a moment to think about how your life would be without that inner critic? How much easier would it be to live with yourself? How much further could you rise now?
Identifying your inner critic and your soul voice
I like to relate the inner critic to a really mean best friend. Someone who means well, though is extremely critical and harsh.
Your inner critic wants to keep you ‘safe’, for you to stay as the small you. We as humans would rather stay in what is uncomfortable and familiar, than what is comfortable and unfamiliar.
That is why people stay in jobs they don’t like or relationships they are not happy in. They are familiar.
To reach your full potentential you need to stretch your limit line, to step into the unfamiliar. And to stay there long enough until it becomes comfortable.
What we also have within us is our soul voice. It can also be called our inner wisdom/higher self.
Most of the time this voice is not as present, not as heard. We haven’t listened to it and given it space as the inner critic has been so present.
Though it is there. This is the voice that has clarity, compassion and inner strength. That can guide you on the right path and knows that you have infinite potential.
One thing you can do is to name the inner critic. This helps to externalise and disassociate from the voice that is disempowering you. It also helps you to realize those thoughts are not you. They are beliefs that you have picked up over the course of your life and most of the time they are simply not true and don’t even belong to you.
Give yourself a moment to think of a name for your inner critic.
Exercise
One practical exercise I can give you to do is if you think about having 2 CDs that you can play inside your mind. One is full of tracks you have probably listened to many times, such as “I am not enough” “why didn’t you do ..” “What if ..”
And the other CD is full of empowering sentences from your soul voice. “I am enough” “Next time it will be better” “I can do it”
What you can do is to everytime you hear your inner critic you can conciously press STOP on the inner critic and PLAY on the sentence that empowers you.
Start to understand that you have a CHOICE of what to tell yourself. Often because we are so used to one way of thinking it doesn’t feel like a choice.
But start to do this exercise and see what you notice comes up.
Radical change comes from taking one step at a time. Are you ready for the first step?