Welcome to Monday Motivation – Your Inner Critic, Part 1

 Hello and welcome my friends. I hope everyone is having a wonderful week of writing. 

By far, the most common thing I coach writers – and this is writers from all backgrounds, projects, and level of accomplish (I’m talking brand new to #1 NYT people) – is their relationship with their inner critic. 

We have ALL heard this term – the inner critic – and like a lot of really important things, we’ve heard about that inner critic so much that it just doesn’t register as something that impacts our lives. But, here’s the thing: your relationship with your inner critic defines the limits of your writing life. Let me say that again: your relationship with your inner critic defines the limits of your writing life. 

So what is the inner critic and why is it so important? In coaching, we call the inner critic “the saboteur…” coaching just loves those kind of mysterious names. But, in essence, your inner critic is the tiny voice in your head that tells you what you can and cannot do. Calling it a voice is really generous. Generally, the inner critic manifests in writers when they hear themselves saying things like, I can’t I won’t I’m not able to… 

The inner critic is around to keep you safe. It is an ancient system that keeps you from taking a risk… especially when you can remember a time when that risk didn’t pay off. And, on the balance, it is has been great for humanity. It has kept us safe, kept us in tribes, kept us close to the fire and away from dangerous animals, and kept us believing the same thing… all of the good stuff needed for the survival of a species. But, while the inner critic has helped the human race survive, it will not help you thrive. 

Here’s the thing, inherent in writing is risk. And, more than that, failure. To write is to fail 9 times, only to get it almost right on the tenth. In writing, we are inundated by rejection, by criticism veiled as feedback, by naysayers, by people who tell us that we’ll never writing a thing – and that is probably because they have unrealized dreams. 

You see, your inner critic wants to keep you safe from all those reasons above. When you’ve been rejected, your inner critic says, “I’ve got you,” and shuts down any attempt at what might lead to a similar failure.

But the writing life is a life of failure, criticism and risk. It is impossible to learn to write and not flub sentences, miswrite characters, have flat dialogue. It is actually impossible because the skills to be a writer are not born into anyone. Even if you don’t show your writing to a single soul… we still place expectations on ourselves. And those expectations come with the risk of meeting them or not. 

And so we have two forces who are diametrically opposed. The inner critic, who wants to keep you from writing, and your desire to write, which is rife with failure. The two are in a constant battle. 

This is a battle that will never ever go away. I’ve learned through coaching and interviewing some of the most successful writers on the planet that the professional writer does not ever shed the inner critic. The professional writer learns how to write through or around it.
Said another way, it does not matter if you are a #1 NYT bestseller or a writer attempting your first story, the inner critic is going to be there, doing its best to keep you safe, aka keep you from taking a risk, aka stop you from writing. 

And so what in the world can we do? For this first week, don’t want try to silence or suppress the inner critic. This might sound harsh, but you will not have the awareness to even make a dent. It’ll be like playing whack-a-mole where you are always swinging too slow. 

I’ve this a million times, but the first step is awareness. Get a journal and pencil or pen. It is f

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