Overcoming Your Inner Critic For Good
You know the feeling: dreaded epic sadness that washes over your whole body, pulling you into a shame spiral that inevitably drives you to complete isolation or destructive behavior. This is the nagging voice that keeps you playing small in life. It is the unwelcome murmur that’s telling you you’re not good enough, she did it better or you don’t deserve that.
Putting childhood correlation aside, the inner critic bully is real in our lives, so why doesn’t anyone talk about how to handle her? Well, darling, I am here to inspire you by doing just that.
Based on biased judgement and feeding off fear and guilt, the bully is completely ego driven. The bully shows up, guns blazing, as people pleasing, comparisonitis and limiting beliefs, telling you that you’re fat or you didn’t do a good job. It’s a low vibration energy and it is rampant in our society today.
What if I could tell you a trick that helps you combat this bully in real time, allowing more possibility and success to come through you, in a way that is aligned with your natural abilities as a woman? Would you like that? Don’t skip to the end, stay with me.
It’s a psychological fact that we actually choose all of our own thoughts, emotions, mindset and beliefs - and in that order. Some of the most common issues we face in America are the busyness trap, the overconsumption and the numbing distractions that we all succumb to at some point. This kind of lifestyle puts us on autopilot, easily allowing our actions to be guided by the first thing we see or hear. In other words, it keeps us in our ego and out of our body. When we we let ourselves go on autopilot, as humans, we will naturally choose to feed and follow the fear as a perceived safety mechanism of protection.
To overcome this bully, we need to become conscious enough to direct our energy, choosing faith over fear, acknowledging our concerns by getting crystal clear and not accepting things just the way they are. If you are on board for that statement, you are ready to overcome the bully!
This is really about how we can believe or trust in our capabilities to handle, accomplish or be what we want and feel SAFE. The bully keeps you stuck in that low vibration as I mentioned earlier, so the answer then is to somehow move that vibration up. Luckily, we, as women, have natural talents in the form of what I call feminine power principles such as nurturing, receptivity, flow, playfulness, surrender, intuition, love and more importantly, compassion. These help up harness our courage and power in the most easy and authentic way. When we are able to tap into compassion for ourselves and for our little girl who still lives inside us and just didn’t know better, as well as remember we absolutely did the best we can, we have opened up space to forgive, which opens up a whole plethora of high vibe opportunities.
I believe compassion cures everything.
It’s important to add that this process of handling our inner critic is also not about ignoring the bully, cutting them off or denying them, but by acknowledgement and shining light for healing to be available.
In order to choose compassion, we still have to be moved into this action. What I know is that the only thing that truly motivates people through pain and pleasure are their values. Values are the single most important part of success and happiness, in my opinion, and an integral part of handling the bully. We may want to choose compassion but we can still be fearful at the same time. Usually any conflict, concern or critical voice means our needs and values are not being met or experienced. Getting to know your values will help you know where to lead your voice, thoughts, beliefs and actions.
As an example, if a woman named Kate greatly valued freedom and her bully was saying “you are never going to make it in your career. You’ll always be stuck in this dead end job”, chances are she is just scared as hell that she’ll never have that joy to express how she wants to in her work. Maybe she doesn’t believe she can achieve financial abundance or have what it takes to find a better job. The core of her desire is that she craves freedom. This inner critic bully is showing up to remind her that it seems absent in her life at the moment and the only way to get it is to try something new, something she has never tried to do before. That fear stems from uncertainty, which can be paralyzing, yes, but totally capable of dissolving when she can get her sense of freedom in some way. She could go to the beach at lunch or spontaneously go on a girls getaway or start a freedom gratitude journal - all to enliven her sense of freedom that exists in her life now. From THIS place, the inner critic has nothing to say. The bully now knows it’s possible.
So, my point here is that the bully is here to protect you because you somehow think you can’t easily have what you want, but you now know better. The way to silence your inner critic for good is to own your values, take imperfect action that feels right, ideally using your feminine nature through compassion and open up your perspective to assure yourself that you are capable and deserving.
The next time you notice this bully pop up in your life, I encourage you to ask yourself this question: How can you use your feminine power to calm the critic and create the confidence to experience what you value most in the moment?
YOUR TURN!
I'd also love to you from you NOW, what is YOUR inner critic saying to you?
