How to Transform Your Inner Critic Into an Inner Evaluator
“Change is the end result of all true learning.”
— Leo Buscaglia, author
Much of what people think of as the Inner Critic is precisely what we are dealing with in this book: the voice of self-criticizing, self-doubt, and self-berating. However, there is another part of our psyche I think of more as “the Inner Editor,” or even more accurately as, “the Inner Evaluator.” This part of ourselves is the expert at what we do, who genuinely knows the pearls of our work that grow from our preliminary “SFD” (Sh*tty First Draft) product.
Personally, I trust my Inner Evaluator. She has a seasoned eye and is all about discernment. She’s the part of my brain that takes in everything that I read and makes note of the prose that I find compelling and that I do not, and uses that information to keep me on track with my writing. She’s the one who loves earrings as much as I do, and guides me toward making the earrings that she and I both would love to see more of in the world. She is a foodie, a lover of indie films, adores good neo soul music, and has a weakness for soft fabric. She is the one who helps me uphold my standards of quality. And I appreciate her for it.
This Inner Evaluator is in stark contrast to the mean Inner Critic, who browbeats me for not doing everything “perfectly,” who drives me to exhaustion, and who wakes me up in the middle of the night in anxiety about something that I could wait to fix until the next day – all in the name of supposedly keeping me safe from potential future threat. That one is my Inner Critic. She’s the one who needs another job.
We can put the position of the Inner Critic as the hyper-vigilant protector of your mental well-being to good use. It wants to be useful and do its job and fulfill its duty. What most people don’t know is that the Inner Critic is actually trainable. What we need to do is to give it other jobs that it is better suited for.
Creative Dose: The Inner Critic As An Intern
Purpose: To assign your Inner Critic another job to give yourself mental space
Just because the Inner Critic is desperate to distract you with thoughts of potential future doom doesn’t mean you have to shift your focus from what you’re working on and listen to it.
As the Inner Critic tries to be useful by protecting you, you can enlist its help by telling it that protecting you actually doesn’t mean blocking ideas by distracting you with your fears. You can tell it that being useful means being cooperative and giving you the space you need to initially let as many of your ideas out as possible so you have more to choose from and can pick out the best later.
Part 1: Ask for space
Usually, when you need someone to give you some space, the easiest and most effective way to get it is to ask for it. In the sage words of the old adage: “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
Because the Inner Critic is clearly very eager to help, tell it that the best way to do so is for it to be quiet to help ideas flow more freely. Thank your Inner Critic in advance for its assistance, and return to what you were working on.
Part 2: Plus Ten
Put the practice of mindfulness into place. Gently yet respectfully tell your self-critical thoughts to come back later. When you are in the midst of working on something and your Inner Critic pops up and starts to steer you off track, task it with giving you unfettered space to create.
Tell it, “I’ll be with you in a moment – just give me ten more minutes.”
Much in the way you would deal with a spunky intern for whom you haven’t had time to organize any work, or an annoying coworker looming over the edge of your cubicle when you are trying to focus, every time your Inner Critic returns, tell it the same. The practice of pushing it away should make it quiet down enough for you to continue creating.
Part 3: The Inner Evaluator Internship
If your Inner Critic is particularly enthusiastic when it comes to upholding its duties by making you super self-critical, then trick it and then retrain it. Because the Inner Critic is masterful at critiquing and editing, strike a deal: tell it you are going to give it a promotion to assist your Inner Evaluator so that it can help you with quality control.
Tell it you don’t have anything for it to do right now, but it should come back to help you and your Inner Evaluator at a later stage of the process when you are ready for feedback, vetting ideas, critiquing and editing.71 Tell it that it will get promoted if it gets good at being quiet when you are ideating, and then weighing in when you need help seeing which ideas are the strongest.
When it is the appropriate time, ask your Inner Critic as Inner Evaluator wannabe, “What do you think this work needs instead? What can be done to make it better?”
This exercise will start to train your Inner Critic to apply the skills that it is particularly good at only when needed and not before, which will help it move to the position of the Inner Evaluator instead. It will take to its new responsibilities like it was made for them, and all will be a lot quieter on the self-critical front as well.
This post is an excerpt from book Banish Your Inner Critic, under the chapter heading “Reassign Duty”. Reprinted with permission.
