Overcoming Self-Sabotage: Transforming Your Inner Critic into Your Ally
00:00:00.000 | Why are we all walking around beating ourselves up and not taking bold actions?
00:00:04.280 | Is it that people don't know that that's what you need to do?
00:00:06.840 | And that's your life's work?
00:00:08.160 | Or is it that it's actually really hard and there are easier ways to do it?
00:00:11.280 | Or maybe it's both.
00:00:12.480 | It's a great, it's a great, it's a great question.
00:00:14.560 | Um, I think a lot of people, if you intellectually ask them,
00:00:18.160 | should, are those things good to do?
00:00:19.840 | They'd be like, oh yeah, just like eating my vegetables and working out
00:00:23.080 | every day and spending time slowing down on plugging for my phone
00:00:26.080 | and connecting with my spouse.
00:00:27.120 | Yeah, that's awesome.
00:00:27.680 | It's great.
00:00:28.120 | But are we doing all those things?
00:00:29.480 | Right.
00:00:30.160 | And the reason we don't, just like we don't do all those other healthy habits.
00:00:33.240 | Well, maybe some people do, but the reason it's a challenge to do something
00:00:36.480 | that sounds very simple is because there's an emotional, uh, driver
00:00:42.480 | underneath the surface and each one has a payoff.
00:00:45.960 | The bold, I start with the bold action.
00:00:47.920 | There's a huge set of payoffs for not taking bold action.
00:00:51.600 | And one of the payoffs is we get to avoid the thing that everyone by
00:00:56.680 | default is trying to avoid in life, which is pain.
00:01:00.000 | And so when we take a bold action, we're going to experience
00:01:02.360 | a variety of forms of pain.
00:01:04.480 | Some of it's just discomfort, you know, to wake up, to focus, to take the
00:01:08.840 | action, to consistently follow up.
00:01:10.520 | It's, it's, there's a discomfort to that.
00:01:12.400 | And then there's an emotional discomfort of what if they don't like my show?
00:01:16.360 | What if someone doesn't agree with me?
00:01:19.120 | What if someone criticizes?
00:01:20.400 | What about if my work's not good enough?
00:01:22.040 | What if I'm rejected?
00:01:23.360 | It all comes down to that.
00:01:24.240 | Disapproved of rejected.
00:01:25.920 | And most people are so afraid of that.
00:01:29.240 | And even unconsciously avoiding that, that they push the action to later.
00:01:34.600 | They, they make it way smaller.
00:01:37.080 | They delay it.
00:01:37.880 | They hesitate.
00:01:38.520 | And they don't even necessarily know that that's what we're doing, right?
00:01:42.000 | It's just like, no, I'm busy now this, but underneath I'm scared.
00:01:45.680 | And then we got our, you know, we don't want to, we want to look macho.
00:01:49.360 | We don't want to say we're scared.
00:01:51.040 | So we say I'm stressed and I'm too busy.
00:01:52.920 | So that's the payoff for the bold action.
00:01:55.280 | You might say, what is the payoff for treating yourself bad?
00:01:58.200 | I mean, obviously that's, that's terrible.
00:02:00.360 | Well, I would say that it actually serves the same master.
00:02:04.760 | So when I tell myself that's going to fail, I'm not good.
00:02:08.480 | I didn't do that right.
00:02:09.560 | That's creating this, uh, it's almost like a fog and amnesia.
00:02:14.120 | I kind of forget my strengths.
00:02:15.920 | I say, I'm sure you've done that.
00:02:17.280 | I've done that.
00:02:17.800 | It's like two in the morning.
00:02:18.680 | And the way you're seeing yourself is like this helpless, incompetent person.
00:02:22.880 | You're like, wait a minute, that's weird.
00:02:24.200 | Why am I even believing this?
00:02:25.240 | Because the more we believe that we, uh, stay in this kind of shell, it's like a
00:02:30.720 | protective walls of this negative identity.
00:02:33.680 | I'm a nobody.
00:02:34.600 | Who am I?
00:02:35.240 | And that nobody who's nothing is even further from taking that bold action.
00:02:40.280 | And all of this is, is under the umbrella of what I call your safety police, which
00:02:45.800 | is a, like a mechanism in your psychology.
00:02:47.840 | You could think of it.
00:02:48.560 | That is its purpose is single fold.
00:02:52.040 | It is to keep you safe.
00:02:53.400 | And the safety police is like a survival mechanism inside that's run amok.
00:02:57.720 | It's, it's just too high.
00:02:58.800 | The dial is set too high.
00:03:00.160 | And so safety means no pain, no rejection, no threat, no danger, no risk.
00:03:06.280 | And so you tell yourself you're a nobody and you avoid the action and you get to
00:03:10.640 | stay in that bubble, which feels safer in the moment.
00:03:14.080 | Of course, meanwhile, your life is passing you by.
00:03:17.200 | So it seems like both of those are a little bit like, uh, like this voice in
00:03:20.720 | your head, this inner critic that is kind of controlling you.
00:03:23.960 | Is that a fair assumption?
00:03:25.880 | Yes.
00:03:26.720 | Yeah.
00:03:26.960 | The inner critic, you could think of it as like the mouthpiece of the safety police.
00:03:30.240 | It's the one who's kind of narrating.
00:03:31.760 | And the crazy thing is like, why do people believe it?
00:03:34.080 | It's almost like, because it's familiar and also because it has proximity, you
00:03:41.120 | know, it's, it's coming from in your head.
00:03:42.680 | And so it's like, you're, it's closer than your closest friend.
00:03:46.480 | And so like, where is that?
00:03:47.520 | Okay.
00:03:48.000 | I guess that's true.
00:03:49.040 | And I'll often do that with clients.
00:03:50.560 | I'm like, where is that voice coming from?
00:03:52.160 | And they're like, what do you mean?
00:03:52.960 | Like, it's from my childhood.
00:03:54.080 | I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:03:55.040 | Right now.
00:03:55.520 | Where, how are you even hearing that thing?
00:03:57.840 | And then it's like a confusing mindfulness question.
00:04:00.240 | They're like, I don't know.
00:04:01.840 | Right.
00:04:02.240 | But it's close.
00:04:03.600 | And all of a sudden we assume because it's close and we've heard it a lot that it's
00:04:07.520 | true.
00:04:07.920 | But if you pay attention, this is probably one of the tools I help clients break free
00:04:10.880 | with is if you pay attention to its track record of predictions, it's really bad.
00:04:17.040 | It's really, it's all, you're going to fail at that meeting.
00:04:19.760 | No, one's going to buy the thing.
00:04:21.120 | And you go there and it goes okay.
00:04:22.640 | And people buy the thing that person would never go out with you.
00:04:25.120 | And then the person goes out with you, right?
00:04:26.640 | Maybe not that one, but the next one.
00:04:28.480 | And if you look at its track record, it's terrible.
00:04:30.960 | But then still the very next day, think about that.
00:04:32.960 | If you had like a financial advisor and they were just, they couldn't beat the
00:04:36.320 | market.
00:04:36.640 | They were wrong all the time and you just keep going back to them.
00:04:39.760 | And you're like, well, what do you think this time?
00:04:41.440 | And they're just so certain that you keep going to it.
00:04:44.160 | And I think that's how we are with the inner critic.
00:04:46.080 | So what do we do with both of these areas?
00:04:48.720 | And what are the tactics?
00:04:50.480 | Yeah, great question.
00:04:51.520 | So a lot of people, when they discover this, they're like, okay, how do I kill the
00:04:56.000 | critic, right?
00:04:56.560 | It's the enemy, slay the demon.
00:04:58.240 | And I don't think it works that way.
00:05:01.360 | You can think of like the parts of our psychology as that old show Survivor.
00:05:05.680 | I don't know if it's still running.
00:05:06.560 | You can't vote them off the island.
00:05:09.600 | You can't get rid of them, right?
00:05:11.440 | They actually are a part in there.
00:05:13.440 | The problem is not the survivor and the safety police.
00:05:16.000 | The problem is the dial.
00:05:17.360 | The setting is too high.
00:05:18.640 | You do need some survival skills that prevents you from jumping off the 30 foot
00:05:23.120 | building and breaking your legs, right?
00:05:25.760 | It's like you have a sense of risk and all that.
00:05:28.640 | The issue is that we need to turn the dial down.
00:05:31.120 | And so the first thing that people have to do is they have to even know this
00:05:34.320 | conversation that we're having exists and say, wait a minute, it's not just me,
00:05:38.320 | Aziz or you, Chris, it's, there's a lot of diseases in there.
00:05:40.960 | There's a lot of parts inside.
00:05:42.160 | And one of the parts is this inner critic.
00:05:43.920 | So the first thing I do with people is can you, I, can you know when your critic
00:05:47.120 | is talking, can, do you know when it's you thinking versus the critic?
00:05:51.280 | Now we don't have to get crazy, you know, it's philosophical, like what is me,
00:05:55.520 | right?
00:05:56.240 | But, you know, are, are you seeing clearly, are you having a distorted view of
00:06:02.240 | yourself as incapable and unlovable?
00:06:04.720 | You'll, you'll start to hear the critic and get better at it because you'll know
00:06:08.880 | it's languages and extremes.
00:06:10.320 | It's going to go awful.
00:06:12.640 | Everyone's going to think you're terrible.
00:06:15.360 | It magnifies, it's just, just like a fun house distoral mirror.
00:06:19.440 | So you got to get one is identify the critic and just get good at it.
00:06:23.200 | So with clients, I'll have them do an awareness exercise usually for like a
00:06:26.000 | week or two where they're just noting it, tracking it.
00:06:28.560 | I'll have them name it too.
00:06:30.080 | And some people just call it the critic.
00:06:31.840 | Some people come up with these like pretty funny, creative, silly names, um,
00:06:36.000 | just to break the pattern a little bit.
00:06:38.080 | So you start to, to, to name it.
00:06:40.400 | Then the, the biggest technique you could call it tool is not some hack to just
00:06:48.560 | know what to say.
00:06:49.200 | It actually is deeper than that.
00:06:51.840 | You have to make what I call the decision of a lifetime.
00:06:54.160 | So I have a book called on my own side, which is guiding people through this.
00:06:57.840 | And so you're aware of this critic and they're like, yeah, yeah, it's do it.
00:07:01.680 | It's all the time.
00:07:02.240 | I can name it.
00:07:02.880 | I can see it now.
00:07:03.840 | Okay, great.
00:07:04.400 | Take a moment and really pay attention to what's happening here.
00:07:09.040 | Like really observe it for a while.
00:07:11.360 | Cause when you do, hopefully there's some part inside of you.
00:07:14.640 | It's like when you watch a movie or, I mean, maybe this has happened in your life.
00:07:18.160 | You're watching someone be almost in an abusive relationship.
00:07:21.760 | And you know, if you're watching a movie and, and what's that one with Leonardo
00:07:26.400 | DiCaprio and Robert De Niro from way back in the day, this boy's like some just terrible
00:07:31.200 | abusive stepfather.
00:07:32.240 | When you're watching that movie and you're identifying with the young character, every
00:07:36.160 | part of your body wants that young, you know, son or character to like, stand up to that
00:07:43.120 | tyrant and say like, this is effed up.
00:07:46.960 | Like I'm leaving your house.
00:07:48.320 | I'm out, I'm done.
00:07:49.520 | And basically people have to have that moment inside of themselves.
00:07:55.200 | Because what happens is like, okay, the critics beating them up and they're believing it.
00:07:59.040 | And they're like, okay, I caught it.
00:08:00.240 | Now what do I do?
00:08:01.520 | But the energy is not there.
00:08:03.840 | You need to have a revolution inside.
00:08:06.560 | You need to usurp the power of the critic and take control of your, of your inner self
00:08:12.560 | and be the captain of your ship as I call it.
00:08:14.320 | And that means like the critic is the parent kicking you around.
00:08:18.720 | You need to become the parent.
00:08:20.000 | So it's a decision.
00:08:20.960 | The decision comes from like reaching a threshold moment of really observing, like, this is
00:08:25.520 | effed up.
00:08:26.080 | I can't like, what is this?
00:08:28.000 | What am I doing to myself?
00:08:29.280 | And you got to have this sense of almost outrage or disgust or revulsion or something.
00:08:34.720 | You say, all right, that's it.
00:08:35.600 | I'm going to take control here.
00:08:37.200 | Because otherwise, before that decision, it always goes like this.
00:08:40.160 | And I see this all the time.
00:08:41.840 | People go to cognitive therapy.
00:08:43.360 | They teach them how to deal with their negative thoughts, which is their critic.
00:08:46.160 | And they'll write out the critical thoughts.
00:08:47.920 | You're a loser or nobody likes you.
00:08:49.520 | And they're like, okay, what do I do?
00:08:51.040 | And the therapist is like, challenge the thought.
00:08:53.120 | And they're like, okay, I'm good.
00:08:55.600 | And many people do like me.
00:08:57.200 | Is that right?
00:08:59.200 | And it's, it's got no power because they're still, they're framed.
00:09:04.320 | They're still living within the reality created by their critic.
00:09:08.320 | They still see themselves that way.
00:09:09.920 | And so we have to shatter that and be willing to see what's really true.