The other side of the Inner Critic: Too Little, Too Late?

In contrast to the overly active and harsh Inner Critic that I discussed in my previous post, I’d like to emphasize the other extreme in this post: The person with too little inner critic.

I’m sure you’ve met these people who don’t seem to worry about mistakes, or worse, they don’t even perceive them to be mistakes. Or, if they do, it has nothing to do with them, of course. Others and circumstances are to blame. There are ample examples cluttering our news these days. Or the colleague who does not seem to feel bad about failing, who does not see the need for corrections, and who continues with an inflated self-esteem still ten times bigger than yours at your best. Or how about the leader who exercises hardly any (detectable) self-evaluation and self-criticism.  And this one: The manager who tolerates only positive experiences and facts and does not accept anyone pointing out difficulties, problems or negative aspects of a situation or proposal let alone pointing out any flaws in the manager’s way of thinking, acting, and choosing. The above people can often be hard to work with, especially when things change course and don’t go as expected.

Many more examples abound, but the bottom line is an under-active, underused inner critic that could otherwise assist the person with reality checks and help him advance insights, skills, and results if it were activated better and more frequently.

For the purpose of this article I will place people with an under-active inner critic into one of three groups:

1.   People who have so far gotten away with not exercising too much reflection and self-evaluation and who have somehow not received adequate feedback (sometimes hardly any at all), or who have been able to effectively fend off the feedback that was given, resulting in very little insights into their blind spots and weaknesses. Here we stumble on people who generally don’t have bad intentions nor are they necessarily unwilling. It just hasn’t occurred to them much, they have not been very active in the field of personal development (or just from one perspective) and people around them have remained silent or ineffective in their communication of feedback.

2.   People who do (or once did) hear the inner critic but are too afraid (even though they don’t seem to be) to pay attention to it in an impossible quest to appear infallible, in control, and superior, generally born out of deep-rooted insecurity that they have learned to mask with an attitude and appearance of seemingly high self-confidence, invincibleness, and arrogance. Eventually these people will not hear their inner critic anymore. Denial, suppression, and projection abound, even though they might show themselves larger than life and with an inflated ego.

3.   Increasingly worrying, the third category is the domain of psychopathology where we find psychopaths, sociopaths, and the like, who, strange as it may sound, do have an operating inner critic but it has gone all awry in the worst possible way.

I will leave this third category for other blogs to discuss, and just want to remind readers that we all have a responsibility in at least attempting to provide people with an under-active inner critic of the first two categories with the necessary feedback in a way that chances are highest for them to listen and contemplate. This is not an easy task and it requires insight into personalities, into the effect of certain styles of communication, and it requires, not least of all, courage and persistence – but it is doable. And not just doable but very needed especially at higher levels in organizations, where I too often encounter managers and leaders who go unchallenged, who receive reviews that leave out the critics that were never voiced, either out of politeness, cultural norms, fear for reprisal, or any other reason. This is damaging to the person, eventually, and more importantly, it’s damaging to the organization as a whole. Make sure you know you’ve done all you know to do to provide others with clear, respectful, useful feedback to help them better develop (or listen to) their inner critic in order to grow and learn.

So to answer the questions in the title: Too little inner critic? Yes! Too late for developing the inner critic?  Hardly ever! And if you happen to be one of the people with an underused inner critic, don’t wait for a scandal or a disaster to happen and trigger you.

Taming Your Internal Critic

Something you do not want to take with you into this brand new year is an overly active “internal critic” who is constantly judging, criticizing, and condemning you.

“Good isn’t good enough, look at others, they’re so much better.”

“Don’t you dare mess this up, you’ll be a failure.”

“How come you still haven’t mastered this yet. That’s pretty darn dumb!”

 

I’m sure you at least recognize one of these internal messages, and they are totally fine as long as it’s a first response rather than a strong and persistent belief that greatly affects how you think, feel, and respond.

Just to be clear, absolutely everyone has an inner critic, a disapproving inner voice, and in fact, this is originally a good thing. Part of the inner critic is the rational analysis of self, a mechanism that can be helpful to understand and anticipate criticism as long as it doesn’t harm your self-concept in the long term. In addition, your critical inner voice originally had good intentions: It wants to help you succeed in life and it strives for a great job and wonderful relationships. It wants for people to love you and it likes to see you happy and successful.

So where does this inner critic come from and how does it develop into a liability rather than an asset? Your internal critic was formed when you were a young child. It is based on messages you received from parents, caretakers, and other significant people in your life. These messages were internalized into your own ‘little parent’, into your ever present critical voice. Its goal was to protect you by teaching you to adjust to the world and to the people around you in order for you to meet people’s expectations. For the internal critic to be functioning well it had to keep your desires and demands under control. This was done through stern and strict criticizing and correcting of your behavior so that negative comments and disapproval from the outside world could be prevented. This is, to a certain extent, a helpful mechanism, however, for many people their critical inner voice grew wild and out of control, acting too eagerly and fanatically, thereby defeating its own purpose and threatening you and bringing you down more than helping you and lifting you up.

To make matters even worse, an overactive internal critic is hard to recognize as an originally protective mechanism. Its messages wrongly turn into set facts that are not debatable. The inner critic conveys messages that turn what was supposed to be a helpful guideline, into harsh and judgmental commands. Your inner critic does not know (anymore) how to moderate and control itself and is like a wild, dangerous animal on the loose. Many experts believe that the self-criticism of your inner critic is almost always destructive, rarely constructive. They state that a habit of internal criticism will penetrate to your very essence, and you will think and feel like a failure in important life areas. Sometimes the critical self judgments will be so pervasive that you can feel like a total failure. Of course we are talking of a very active and wild inner critic which you might or might not recognize. The important thing is that you do not need to continue these anxious, depressed, hopeless ways of thinking. Cognitive behavioral techniques can provide the necessary correction and relief, and for some just common sense.

Before we move on to helpful techniques to counteract the harsh critic and the negative self judgments that damage your self-esteem and impact your functioning, I want to stress again that the above is not the complete story of the inner critic. That would not be a very hopeful picture, of course, but more importantly, it would not be a realistic one either. I am sure it is obvious that there are vast differences between people in the effectiveness of their inner critic. For some people it still functions as a helpful companion to get closer to whatever goals they have set out to pursue. Not everyone’s inner critic is out of control or devastating.  But for those whose inner critic took over, there are successful ways to detect and correct your inner critic before it runs wild or turns for the worse, so that it can be working in your best interest again. There are ways to regain control over your beliefs about yourself and the world around you.

In order to detect a dysfunctional inner critic you have to borrow from cognitive psychology and its tools like the RET, the Rational Emotive Training, also known as the Rational Effectiveness Training. According to cognitive psychology and the RET our emotions are caused not by situations or people but by the way we perceive them, by the beliefs we hold of them. Some beliefs and some lines of thinking are healthier and more rational than others.

Recognizing and minimizing mistakes in perception and thinking

In order to use cognitive techniques to keep your inner critic under control, you first have to be aware of and understand which particular perception and thinking mistakes you make. The most common ones are:

1.   Black-and-white thinking, e.g. dividing your characteristics and qualities into absolute all or nothing categories.

2.   Identifying yourself with your characteristics and your mistakes, thinking that this is who you are. 

3.   Exaggerating, such as looking at a one-time negative experience as a recurring situation rather than realizing it is an incident - nothing more, nothing less.

4.   Mental filtering: the tendency to convert neutral or positive experiences into negative ones and constantly preoccupying yourself with these ‘negative’ experiences.

5.   Mind reading: this refers to the tendency to instantly and persistently think you know what others are thinking, including what they think about you, like that people look down on you and think negatively of you, without any verification whether this assumption is correct.

6.   The crystal ball: predicting the future with an ever bad ending without any sensible data supporting this prediction.

7.   Responding emotionally: using your emotions as the basis for your thoughts and actions rather than the other way around. One example is: “I feel inferior so I must be inferior.”  

8.   Should/must be – should/must have thinking: criticizing yourself with should-haves and overly strict rules and impossible demands.

9.   Self-blame or accountability gone wild: holding just you responsible for things that have happened (or not happened) in situations where you are only partly or totally not responsible. Be assured, this is not a plea against personal accountability which I regard as a crucial element of a healthy person and a healthy society.

In many cases, knowing these ‘faulty beliefs and thoughts’ and being aware of when they pop up, can help you tame your internal critic. Extra measures to take include:

1.   Repeating short, concrete sentences  like: “Stop, this is bad for my self-
confidence and it’s not getting me anywhere.”

2.   Confirming your self-esteem by realizing that your worth as a person doesn’t change with a mistake, and it is not just comprised of your failures. Your self-esteem starts with accepting who you are, with your strengths and you’re your shadows. (This is again, not a license to not hold yourself accountable. It is just a license not to condemn and criticize yourself overly.)

3.   Make the internal critic redundant by a healthier handling of:
a.    The absolute need to do everything right, the first time.
b.    An over-concern with praise and a total melt-down in the absence of praise.
c.    The need to control all negative feelings like the feelings associated with failing. The good news and the bad news is one and the same: Everyone who lives and takes risks, will fail at some point in time. Fail forward and upward by learning from it and by realizing that failing is part of living.
d.   Fear of rejection, anger, and frustration. Three feelings commonly known as ‘negative’ feelings but they are part of life. Know them, see them developing, curb them where you can and accept that they are part of life just as joy, pride, and happiness are.

4.   Be kind to yourself. People with a strong internal critic usually haven’t properly learned to be kind and to take care of themselves. What do you see when you look in the mirror? Are you highly critical of yourself? Do you just see that slight dent in your nose and that pimple on your cheek that seems to be growing more and more important as you look into that mirror longer? These perceptions and thoughts leave you feeling inadequate and unattractive. Or do you notice that your hair has a beautiful shine to it and that your eye lashes are long and beautiful, despite the dent and the pimple that are also there?  The picture in the mirror, of course, remains the same, but what you focus on, whether it’s when looking in the mirror or when evaluating your day or your skills and accomplishments, your positive and caring thoughts about yourself make a difference in terms of your mood and your self-esteem, and therefore in your next steps and the results you create.

5.   Last, the way you handle guilt and mistakes is often related to the internal critic. Guilt is only a helpful emotion up to the point where it leads to insights and correction and where ever it leads to more responsible future behavior. For many people, however, guilt simply leads them into feeling bad, worried and depressed, possibly avoiding the issue or self-medicating with alcohol or drugs. Remember, guilt can go on forever, while a mistake, so common for humans, can often be corrected.

To sum it all up: Don’t allow your inner critic to become a source of self-criticism, shame, worries, depression, and a lack of self-esteem. Know that your inner critic is always present and will never be satisfied, so better learn to tame and control it rather than trying to satisfy it. Don’t let your inner critic convince you that others are necessarily better, smarter, more beautiful. Tame your inner critic into a voice that, in a mild and friendly manner, reminds you that something might not be such a good idea rather than yelling “What a stupid idea, once again” at you.