weft of the fabric of how we relate to ourselves.
Although the Inner Critic is also known as the inner critical voice7, you may not detect its presence by actually hearing a voice. The Inner Critic can be sneaky, working to avoid detection by trying to appear as your native thoughts. So familiar as to be invisible, your Inner Critic reflex may be so automatic that you may not even register the thoughts. If you do not detect its presence, you’ll most likely recognize the Inner Critic through the habitual negative self-talk that directly influences your behavior.
What drives the Inner Critic? The desire to protect ourselves.
Our emotional minds developed the Inner Critic as a protection strategy against situations in which we could be judged, rejected, or criticized. In its determination to keep these potential future threats at bay, the Inner Critic defends our well-being and social safety the moment we have a sense of losing either. I think of the Inner Critic as a proactive mental threat-to-self system.
But all of this still doesn’t answer the question of what’s the true source of the Inner Critic. What do our inner critical thoughts have in common at their core? One word: Fear.
If you’re feeling anxious, guilty, or ashamed around your creativity, it’s likely a result of the Inner Critic’s handiwork. When we are deep in the woods of our inner critical thoughts, in essence, we are experiencing fear. Having these feelings disrupts relaxed and ordered thinking, and in its place, we experience what Csikszentmihalyi calls “disordered attention.” In this state, we turn our attention inward and focus on the negative, destroying our ability to pursue positive external goals or even accomplish the task at hand. The more we are in this state of mind, the more our capacity for enjoyment plummets as it become more difficult to learn anything new. Instead, we rehash old information, wandering the forest of our fears with no means to problem-solve our way out of it.
Creativity vs. The Inner Critic
Earlier, we learned that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that judges, criticizes, and rules self-inhibition, falls silent when we go into creative flow. This is the seat of the Inner Critic. Research shows that not only does a quiet Inner Critic facilitate creative flow, but creative flow conversely keeps the Inner Critic quiet. Creativity and the Inner Critic, then, are inextricably connected. But they are binary: they cannot coexist. If your Inner Critic is in control, then accessing your creativity will be elusive at best and impossible at worst.
Yes, you’ve had success with creative projects, and yes, you may have been fairly satisfied with what you produced after the fact. However, if you had an overly active Inner Critic during the process, the fact that you were able to produce was despite its overbearing presence rather than because of its allegedly beneficial input. Instead of feeling protected, you had to slog through a quagmire of anxiety. Is this really how you want to create?
Any self-judgment, self-criticism, or doubts about your abilities will obliterate creative flow, ripping you from your creative high to cast you back on the ground while you grapple with your fears. Your prefrontal cortex, which was previously favorably inactive, fires back up with a litany of allegedly rational reasons to go into self-protection mode. All while this transpires, the door to your creative power slams shut and you cannot fully realize your vision. The Inner Critic is the enemy of creativity, productivity, and sanity.
In contrast, when we are in creative flow, we feel the full potential of our personal creative power, an enhanced and strengthened sense of self. People who experience creative flow regularly report feeling focused and creative, engaged and motivated, active and connected, and strong and in control. This place of empowerment is our true creative home.
Feeling fully creative like this is what we want and need. But so many of us cut ourselves off from this power, by judging ideas before they have a chance to develop, attempting to attain unreachable standards, creating barriers for ourselves, keeping our imaginations under wraps, or denying that we are creative at all. But we can do better. We can do more with this powerful force.
If you think of creating as an unpleasant and agonizing process – then you’re not thinking about actual creating. Instead, you’re recalling the sensation of the Inner Critic triggering your fears and supplanting the process. It’s the Inner Critic that makes creating painful. Your critical thoughts are the main blockade to your creativity. They thwart the fluid process of ideas moving from your internal subconscious universe to your conscious mind to access and make tangible.
In succumbing to the voice of doubt, we relinquish our creative power to the Inner Critic. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the struggle for wrestling control from the Inner Critic is no less than the battle for the self. Make no mistake: the struggle is real.
Here is the simple truth:
To be creative, you have to silence the Inner Critic.
Banishing the Inner Critic is what we need to do to reclaim our creative power.
Reclaiming Creativity
First, the bad news: we each have an Inner Critic, and try as we might, we can neither run away from our Inner Critic nor completely destroy it. The Inner Critic is a part of our psyche and being human.
Don’t throw up your hands in despair! Despite all of the psychological power that it holds, the Inner Critic is really a way of thinking – a series of thoughts. Even more simply put, it is electrical impulses in the brain. Neurons firing. Chemicals being released and recognized by receptors in the brain. Just as we can learn to control our breathing, we can learn to have a better handle on these processes in our brains to be more in control of our thoughts, beliefs, and consequent actions.
Now here’s the good news: if we can learn to switch off (or at the very least, tone down) the self-evaluation, self-judgment and criticism, and self-doubt, then we can activate and light up the areas in the brain associated with self-expression. We can create the space and lay the foundations for getting into our creative flow.
Remember that child full of wonder and unfettered creativity at the beginning of the chapter? That’s you deep inside. Also inside is the self that embodies all of the inherent potential you were born with and that will always be there: the capacities you’ve realized and those that you have yet to actualize. I like to think of this as your true self, your Creative Self. It existed before the layers of societal expectation were heaped upon your shoulders, and it will stand triumphant once you shake off the shoulds, musts, and oughts. This part of you is what you started with: completely connected to your own flow of ideas, with a perspective on the world which only you have, and an experiential filter that comprises your own unique creativity.
This inherent Creative Self is key. It is what fills people with awe when witnessing an inspired musical performance or a gifted athlete. This complete absence of friction, self-doubt, and self-judgment entrances and inspires us. It’s beautiful. Their complete expression of the Creative Self gives us something to aspire to ourselves.
Did you know that there is no word in the Tibetan language for creativity or being creative? The closest translation is “natural.”7 In other words, if you want to be more creative, you have to be more natural, more of yourself. However, the Inner Critic tells us that only if we’re hard on ourselves can we become the people we’re meant to be. This is a lie. The people who we are meant to be are exactly who we are. We’re meant to become more of ourselves – not cookie cutter copies of those around us.
Your Creative Self is where your creative power lies, the source of your brilliance. This is your powerful self; it is your brain clicking into gear and activating the wonderfully complex network that is hardwired not only into your brain but your soul. The Creative Self trusts itself, knows its strengths, and delights in pushing its boundaries. The Creative Self
