What to do when your inner critic has a lot to say.

Last week, I got to speak to an awesome group of womxn in tech about using our voices at work. It was a last-minute request, and I literally had 72 hours to write, revise, rehearse, and deliver my talk. 

I was a little bit nervous, but the whole thing turned out to be super fun. 

I love helping people understand that the things the inner critic says aren't truths, even if she acts like they are. 

And because I love the talk I wrote, I also want to share it with you, so you can use your voice at work without being derailed by the mean things your brain says. 

So here it is:

How to talk to your inner critic more than you listen to her

When we think about using our voices in our careers, most of us tend to think about the act of speaking up. Speaking up in a meeting, speaking up when we want a promotion, speaking up when we see something that we want to change. And this is important.

But there’s also another essential way to use our voices that is often overlooked, and that is how we speak to ourselves, inside our own heads. We all have that inner critic voice, and for some of us, it’s very chatty. Who here has an inner critic with a lot to say? (I definitely raised my hand, too - my strong inner critic is part of what brought me to coaching!)

This inner critic is often the exact thing that keeps us from speaking up and using our voices at work.

Have you ever wanted to say something in a meeting, but you didn’t, because the voice in your head said you needed to be completely sure before it was ok to speak? Have you ever hesitated to ask for that promotion because the voice in your head said that you weren’t qualified for it, even though you’d been performing above and beyond your role for quite some time? Have you ever held your tongue when you saw something you wanted to change, even though every bone in your body wanted to speak up, because the voice in your head was afraid that someone else wouldn’t like your suggestion?

In order to speak up at work, we need to speak up to the inner critic. But first, we first need to take few moments to understand her.

The thing is, the voice in our heads that says all this mean stuff isn’t actually us talking to ourselves. The inner critic voice is actually deeply informed by our social conditioning and by the biases of the human brain.

As womxn, we've learned a certain set of social expectations, which usually included being really good at everything, not bothering anyone, and also taking responsibility for everyone else’s feelings. If you could make it look effortless, that would also be good. Talk about a tall order!

Even if you don’t consciously agree with these cultural ideas, they may still show up in your inner critic’s commentary, because as kids, we absorb all kinds of thoughts and ideas from everyone around us, especially authority figures, even if we would never take advice from them today.

On top of that, the brain has certain biases that distort how we see the world. Negativity bias kept our species alive a long time ago, but now it means that your brain is much more likely to remember and obsess about negative stuff while simultaneously ignoring what’s going well, because what’s going well was less important for keeping humans alive back in the day.

The brain also evolved for physical threats, not intellectual ones. So when you’re stressed about an email, it treats the email like an animal that is trying to attack you, instead of seeing it for what it is - words on a screen that can in no way physically harm you.

On top of that, there’s confirmation bias. This bias means your brain privileges information that agrees with its current beliefs and ignores data that contradicts it.

When you combine cultural conditioning with negativity bias, what you get is that inner critic voice that many of us know so well. The voice that questions what we’re doing and tells us we’re not ready and comments snidely on all our choices but never actually offers any helpful feedback. And when you add in confirmation bias, what you have is that voice constantly showing you data that supports its criticism but also suppressing data that would disrupt it. That’s why you can do ten things amazingly well, but if you mess one thing up, your brain will hyper-focus on it and tell you it means you’re terrible.

As a coach, what I know is that the inner critic is not as mean as it seems. All this voice is doing is parroting back things it’s heard before, with a bias for the negative. And, despite how its commentary sounds, it’s actually doing this because it’s trying to keep you safe. It wants to protect you, and the way it knows how to try to do that is to prevent you from doing anything that might be dangerous. And it just so happens to think that anything it hasn’t experienced before or doesn’t know about or already like is probably dangerous.

This is how our own brains keep us from doing the exact things we want to do.

We want to speak up in the meeting, but to our brain, this is unknown territory and the potential threat is the same as a lion who wants to eat us. We want to ask for a promotion, but our brain hasn’t experienced the new job, so it’s not sure that it’s safe and it would rather not be unpleasantly surprised. We want to speak up about something we want to change, but as much as we want to change this thing, our brain also isn’t sure how other people will respond, and it doesn’t realize that the risk is a conversation not rejection from the social tribe.

This all might sound like bad news, but it’s actually very, very good news.

Once we realize why our brain is saying all the things it says, everything changes. Our brain’s mean comments don’t seem so mean anymore. Once you can see your brain’s criticisms as reflections of your social conditioning amplified by evolutionary mechanisms gone awry, you realize they aren’t actually about you at all. Our brain’s criticisms bother us because we think they’re true and that they mean something bad about us. But it’s just your brain playing back something it learned in 1994 because it’s afraid that an email is a lion and it wants to protect you from dying, and knowing this changes the way the whole situation feels.

Now that you understand your inner critic, it’s a lot easier to handle her, and using our voice is the key to doing that. Once you understand why your brain says mean things to you and that they don’t mean anything about you, then you can shift the power dynamic.

Instead of listening to the things your brain says and worrying that maybe they’re true, you can talk to your inner critic more than you listen to her.

I learned this concept in the Clutch, an amazing coaching community created by my coach and mentor, Kara Loewentheil (spoiler alert: I also coach in the Clutch). One of the womxn in this group told us about this concept, which she'd learned from Dr. James Gills, a triathlete who has completed six double triathlons. When asked how he did it, he said he talks to himself more than he listens to himself. 

I love the idea of talking to your inner critic more than you listen to her. When you listen to your inner critic more than you talk to her, you fall for your brain’s story that it’s not safe or things might not work out or you’re not ready or whatever the current story is.

When you talk to your inner critic more than you listen to her, you are choosing the story you tell yourself on purpose. When you choose how to think on purpose instead of letting your inner critic run the show, your outside voice will follow suit. Why? Because you have very good reasons for speaking up in a meeting or asking for a promotion or calling attention to something you want to change.

And when you talk to your inner critic more than you listen to her, you’re using your brainpower to galvanize yourself into action instead of letting your brain’s biases and your old social conditioning keep you quiet.