can’t you come up with anything?!”
“Wow – so you’ve got a master’s in marketing and this is all
“You’re an idiot! Think, for chrissakes!”
Yikes!
Your creative paralysis is all the more frustrating because you’ve been on the other side. You’ve had moments when you danced at the intersection of your skills, interests, natural abilities, and aptitudes. You were excited, completely engaged, and seemed to be an endless fount of ideas and solutions. You felt completely knowledgeable, powerful, and competent. Whatever it was that you were doing, you totally nailed it. The experience was fantastic.
For many of us, creating is a tortured process. The torture, however, is not inherent in creating itself, but instead comes from the fears we have around our ability to create. The constellation of our fears manifests as the Inner Critic. This psychological construct can trick us into believing the very worst about ourselves and our ability to create or do anything else of value in the world. It blocks the amazing ideas we have inside from coming out. The Inner Critic keeps us from accessing and expressing the very thing we desire: the flow of our creativity.
Based on several years of research on the creative process, articles written and presentations developed and delivered around the world, survey feedback, coaching clients, and most importantly, talking with conference and workshop attendees and other creatives of all sorts in multiple industries, I know that the Inner Critic is the largest block to creativity that exists.
To create, we need to acknowledge the Inner Critic and the damage it does to our work life, personal life, and general well-being.
To create lasting change, however, we really need to learn how to break its power over us so we can regain our capacity to create.
I wrote this book because I want you to be able to work better, produce more, and create with a higher level of excellence than you already do. By identifying and disempowering the various forms of the Inner Critic that plague us, we can remove the barricades standing between us and our full creative expression. This book will help you do just that.
However, I also wrote this book because I feel your pain. I know the topography of self-criticism personally: I have struggled with a particularly mean and relentless Inner Critic that has made me miserable at for most of my life. Because of my own Inner Critic, I have traveled far and wide in the lands of self-judgment and self-doubt, dismissing the creativity that I did have, believing that my work wasn’t good enough, and being so focused on what others were doing that I couldn’t see my own strengths or progress.
Imagine being able to create without the internal mental friction of the Inner Critic. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? It’s not just a pipe dream – it can be done. I know because I’ve experienced it myself.
You see, not only do I write this book from the standpoint of someone who was unsure that she was truly creative; I also write it from the standpoint of someone who has finally silenced her Inner Critic, who embraces and owns her creativity, and who now feels unstoppable.
Triumphing Over My Own Inner Critic
There are those who, by either good fortune or hard work, are not afflicted by self-doubt and don’t seem to have much of an Inner Critic at all. And then there are the rest of us: we who struggle daily to maintain a modicum of self-assurance as we go through our work and personal lives because of the barrage of self-critical inner dialogue that is our constant companion.
I used to be in this latter group – until I had an experience that changed my life. Let me tell you what happened.
When I wrote my first book, The CSS Detective Guide, the experience did not start out all sunshine and Santa Claus. I landed a book contract from a serendipitous meeting at a tech conference party, and I was thrilled to be on track to achieving my two big life goals:
1 Becoming an author, and
2 Using my expert status to become a speaker.
There was only one problem: I was terrified.
The first two days of my unrealistically aggressive schedule (four and a half months to write a 250-page tech book) found me sobbing on my couch. And let me be clear about this: I wasn’t sniffling quietly and dabbing at my eyes with a tissue. Oh no. I blubbered while sitting on the side of my couch, as my tears flowed onto the plush sage green fabric of the pillow I clutched to my chest. My fears of not knowing enough, looking stupid, being judged, being a fake and a fraud, and not being good enough all plagued me to the point of near-paralysis. Finally, on the third day I bucked up, put on my big-girl pants, and finally sat down to the very hard work of...researching. You know, the incredibly advanced and rigorous task of looking up articles on the web, reading them, and then earmarking relevant information to put in my book. Yes, it’s true: I had worked myself up into an emotional froth over something that I could practically do in my sleep. As a friend of mine would say: Crazypants!
During the next eight months of writing my book (because doing it in four and a half months was completely untenable), I came up against that inner critical voice that tried to block my ideas and creatively paralyze me almost daily. This voice told me every day that
my ideas were stupid
even though I had taught this subject for five years at a college level, that I wasn’t enough of an expert on it
my web designs were amateur and simplistic
people would judge me negatively and criticize my book for not being in-depth, complete, or advanced enough
That’s right: every day.
The way I often describe the experience is that instead of exercising creativity, I practiced its evil twin: destructivity. With every fearful thought of not being expert enough, not knowing enough, wondering if my writing was any good, and doubting my ability to design websites, I tore myself down. To try to build myself up, each day I had to focus on what was directly in front of me and do my best to ignore my anxieties about my perceived deficiencies. But they were still there.
Sometime in the fourth month of writing, I’d had enough. I needed
to figure out how to turn off (or at least manage) this unending parade of self-critical thoughts. I did a little bit of research on self-criticism and found out about this thing called the Inner Critic. Although I didn’t know it, something clicked inside of me, because a few days later, an idea for a presentation came to me in the shower. Still dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, I grabbed pencil and paper to jot down four pages of notes. A few weeks later, I was awakened at 5 a.m. by an idea for a creativity-busting workshop. Something big was brewing in my subconscious.
However, while I was designing the website for The CSS Detective Guide, I had a truly magical experience that changed everything.
To have my book’s website up before I spoke on a panel at the major tech conference South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive at the end of the week, I sat down to create my website mockup in Photoshop from a sketch so I could code it more easily. Much to my surprise, my quick sit-down consumed me, so much so that I was an hour and a half late going to a friend’s house for dinner. Through the whole evening, I longed to return to my designing, so when I got home at 12:30 a.m., I thought “I’ll just do a little bit and then go to bed.” 1 a.m., then 2 a.m., and then 3 a.m. rolled by, and I just couldn’t stop. With my favorite jazz playing in the background, I was in the
