Inner Critic

Filed in archive Personal Development on May 14, 2008

What is your inner critic telling you?

© danagraves

Recently I was doing a speech and I asked the audience how many of them were their own worst critics and almost every person raised their hands.

What you need to ask yourself if you're being positive or negative with the criticism. Are you beating yourself up with your Little Voice telling yourself you screwed up, you failed, etc? Or are you positively critiquing your work?

For many years I would beat myself up over everything and was very negative toward myself. Over time I realized how destructive I was being and worked on only listening to a more positive inner voice. Like all habits, it will take time for you to tune out the negative and start listening to the truly constructive.

For example:

"I sucked at that speech, those people probably sat there and laughed at how bad I did. I will never get another speaking engagement after this one"

Obviously the little voice is being pretty negative and offering nothing of value. Now compare that to this:

"OK you had a good intro, you could have made your transitions a little better, you had good organization but you needed a better close".

Now this is clearly constructive criticism that can help you improve your performance.

So stop listening to negative criticism whether it be internal or from external sources.

Rich from the New Foot Smell Blog also has some comments on this subject.