Banish Your Inner Critic. Denise Jacobs

is a shape-shifter, assuming various guises to most effectively push you to avoid future threats to the self.

      At keynotes and in workshops, I often lead an exercise I call an indoor “snowball fight.” In this exercise, audience members write down the answer the question “What is your biggest fear around creativity?” on a blank piece of paper and then throw their balled-up paper at each other. These “snowballs” have become the best unlikely research tool. After gathering and compiling the responses over several months, I noticed similarities, trends, and frequently verbatim responses. It is from this information that I’ve determined the forms of the Inner Critic that affect creative people the most.

      Some of the forms of the Inner Critic I’ve identified are common psychology terms. For those that aren’t, I’ve created monikers for them.

Creative Dose: The Many Faces of The Inner Critic

      Purpose: To recognize the various guises of the Inner Critic

      Read through this list of the various forms of the Inner Critic and put a check by each one that strikes a chord with you.

       Judgment Dread: You have a paralyzing fear of having your ideas and work be judged and criticized by others. You hold yourself and your ideas back and are loathe to put yourself out there creatively. You feel crushed by feedback and criticism. For fear of being judged, you lack self-trust.

       High Self-Criticism: Little or nothing that you do creatively is right, good, or acceptable. You are overly critical of your ideas and frequent dismiss them. You’re rarely pleased with your work and consequently discount your efforts.

       Deficiency Anxiety: You feel that you are somehow intrinsically lacking or inadequate at your core, and that you, your ideas, and your creations aren’t good enough.

       Proficiency Anxiety: You’re afraid of not knowing enough, not being good at what you do, or not being able to keep up with acquiring new knowledge and skills.

       Originality Anxiety: You believe everything you create must be new, unique, and cutting-edge, and if it is not, that it doesn’t have any merit or value.

       Comparison Syndrome: You feel inadequate and therefore can’t see your unique brilliance. You experience despair from envy of others’ success, feeling like a failure in comparison.

       Creativity Denial: You’re in full-on denial about having any creativity or being creative at all. By holding on to this belief, you make it true, blocking the generation of creative ideas. This behavior starts a self-perpetuating cycle in which you are less able to come up with original ideas. It’s a self-imposed state of creativity paralysis.

       Overwhelm Obstruction: You are so focused on the stuff you feel you “have” to do that you don’t have the bandwidth to divert to creative thinking. Being creatively inspired seems like a pipe dream and something for other people. Doing anything creative is yet another thing to do on the long list of things that are already on your plate.

       Creativity Misgivings: You sometimes think of yourself as creative, but you don’t trust your creativity at all – you see your creativity as fleeting, unreliable, and capricious. You live in perpetual fear that your creativity will dry up and that your capacity to come up with any more ideas will disappear.

Know Thy Inner Critic

      The previous exercises have helped us build awareness as to when our Inner Critic shows up. Now you can more clearly identify your inner critical thoughts when they come up and call out your Inner Critic when it tries to take over your thinking (and you may have even given it a name). You’re starting to calmly observe inner critical thoughts instead of reacting to them, and you’ve become more familiar with the various forms of the Inner Critic.

      Now it’s time to go deep.

      For our minds to start making the medicine of new thoughts, we need to know exactly what we’re treating.

      To start banishing your Inner Critic in earnest, you need to go beyond merely knowing about the different forms of the Inner Critic – you need to know which form plagues you the most.

Creative Dose: Identify Your Inner Critic Achilles’ Heel

      Purpose: To determine which aspects of the Inner Critic are most relevant to you

      Like the Greek mythological hero Achilles, we all have a particular area where our Inner Critic is the most vocal, doing its best to trigger fear and inhibit our behavior to keep us safe. I think of this as our Inner Critic Achilles’ heel.

      To see which versions of the Inner Critic are most relevant to you, complete the Inner Critic Achilles’ Heel Questionnaire. Which of the phrases closely describe thoughts you’ve had or have regularly?

      Inner Critic Achilles’ Heel Questionnaire