does your Creativity Cheerleader say to you?
How do his or her words and actions make you feel?
Hold the feeling of being supported in your mind to have it anchor itself in your being.
Part 3: Your Future Creatively Confident Self
In addition to (or instead of) your warm support coming from someone else, you can have it come from yourself. But it’s not the you from the present – it’s the you from the future who is completely confident about owning her or his creativity.
That’s right: your future creatively confident self can be your Creativity Cheerleader to coach you through your Inner Critic angst.
If you need help, think about what you needed to hear when you were in the throes of an Inner Critic attack in the past.
What kind of advice and guidance would you have wanted to hear back then?
Knowing what you know now, what would you tell your past self?
Now in the present, your badass creative self has come from the future to show you some love and give you some support.
What kind of wise advice and guidance does your future self offer?
How does your future self encourage you to be kind to yourself?
No matter who you choose as your creativity cheerleader, to start to build and exercise your self-compassion muscles, keep this voice of guidance and support in mind as you dive into this process.
Glean Your Inner Critic Afflictions
“GUlL: I’m afflicted.
ROS: I see.
GUlL: Glean what afflicts me.”
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Now that we are more familiar with the practices that provide a common thread throughout the work that we are doing, we’re well-equipped to set out on the road to change and empowerment.
Our first order of business is to understand the workings of the Inner Critic. It’s been doing its job for so long that you may be numb to its presence. But it’s there, trust me.
These exercises are designed to help you get a better handle on how your Inner Critic shows up in your life and affects you, and some new ways to start dealing with it.
Ready? Let’s do this.
Recognize Your Inner Critical Voice
“It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.”
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
The Inner Critic is so strongly convinced of its position that it uses incendiary language to make its point. In fact, this is one of the easiest ways to detect the Inner Critic. Whenever you think in absolutes or hyperbole like, “I’ll never get better at this” or “I’m always behind schedule” you can be sure that you’re witnessing the Inner Critic’s handiwork.
One key practice of meditation is acknowledging thoughts that come up and then ignoring them to focus your attention elsewhere. When you create distance between you and your self-critical thoughts, you’ll begin to notice that they are often temporary. One will bubble up into your consciousness, then be replaced by another one, and so on. The only way a thought sticks is when you pay attention to it.
Here’s the great thing about employing a more mindful approach to your Inner Critic: you start seeing its comments as just thoughts. You stop seeing whatever your Inner Critic presents as immediate calls to action, accurate, or even true. You’ll find that some thoughts are worth paying attention to and some are not. Guess which the ones the Inner Critic generates are? It’s a whole new world.
Until you build your awareness of your habitual inner critical thoughts, however, it may help to poke a stick at them to bring them out into the open.
Purpose: To start to unearth your inner critical thoughts
You know you have an active Inner Critic, but you’ve gotten so used to its diatribes that it barely registers with you anymore, right? To bring your inner critical voice back into your consciousness, we’re going to use Mad Libs to imitate your Inner Critic.
Fill in the following sentences with the first words that come to you. Write as many variations of each sentence as you can before moving on to the next one. Or you can run through the list multiple times, answering each question differently.
I can’t because .
I’m not enough.
I’m afraid that I’m because I .
I never because I always .
I’m afraid that I’ll because I .
I can’t because I’m not as
as others.
If I then people will .
I shouldn’t because I haven’t .
I because my ideas .
I’m too .
Did you discover some thoughts and beliefs that you didn’t know were there? Nice work! Now you are better equipped to start the process
of refuting or dismissing them. You may want to do these Mad Libs every couple of months to see if you can bring to light any new mistaken beliefs that have been lying just beneath the surface of your conscious mind.
Here’s a bonus question for you:
My biggest fear around my creativity is
__________________________________________________
__________________________________________________
__________________________________________________
Spend time on this question. Is it patently true? Is it circumstantially true? Make a commitment to start challenging this fear.
Remember, we’re now using mindfulness to observe our thoughts, so don’t believe everything you think.
Give It A Name
As you are well aware, trying not to think about something never works. The term for this phenomenon is “thought stopping.”39 It’s ineffective because it forces you to pay attention to the very thought that you’re trying so desperately to avoid. Similarly, attempting to act like your Inner Critic doesn’t exist and isn’t wreaking havoc in your consciousness when you are having an “episode” is like denying that you’re trying to walk with a broken leg. It’s painful and unnecessary. Being in denial about something doesn’t change the facts. Most of the time, the most helpful thing to do is to call a spade
