Be Your Brilliance
Creative Dose: Tune In To Your Strengths
Share Your Brilliance
Creative Dose: Share Your Expertise
Be Stronger Together
Have (At Least) Two Heads
Creative Dose: The Buddy System
Give Validation, Get Validation
Creative Dose: Give What You Didn’t Get
Welcome Home
Afterword
Realizing Dreams
What’s Next?
Take the Work Further
Work With Me
Connect With Me
Connect with me online
Share the Love
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
“Banish your inner critic to Madagascar on an expedition to search for rare lemurs.”
— Marelisa Fabrega, writer & blogger (inspired by SARK, Make Your Creative Dreams Real)
Introduction
Are You Doing Your Best Work?
You’re feeling the pressure to perform: you’re on a tight deadline, and there is a lot riding on your ability to come up with something great.
But, try as you might...nothing. You can’t think, you can’t problem-solve. You’re uninspired. Generating new or interesting ideas?
You wish!
Why?
Because you
shoot down your ideas before they even have a chance
call yourself a failure because others around you are succeeding
discount your ideas because they aren’t 100 percent original
tell yourself that you’re just not creative at all
have a hard time valuing what you create
can’t imagine creating without anguish and effort, so you make it true...
Unsurprisingly, you, my friend, are completely creatively blocked.
And then, when you tune into your internal self-talk, you find a steady torrent of self-chastisement, internal insults, and put-downs:
“Why can’t you come up with anything?!”
“Wow – so you’ve got a master’s in marketing and this is all
“You’re an idiot! Think, for chrissakes!”
Yikes!
Your creative paralysis is all the more frustrating because you’ve been on the other side. You’ve had moments when you danced at the intersection of your skills, interests, natural abilities, and aptitudes. You were excited, completely engaged, and seemed to be an endless fount of ideas and solutions. You felt completely knowledgeable, powerful, and competent. Whatever it was that you were doing, you totally nailed it. The experience was fantastic.
For many of us, creating is a tortured process. The torture, however, is not inherent in creating itself, but instead comes from the fears we have around our ability to create. The constellation of our fears manifests as the Inner Critic. This psychological construct can trick us into believing the very worst about ourselves and our ability to create or do anything else of value in the world. It blocks the amazing ideas we have inside from coming out. The Inner Critic keeps us from accessing and expressing the very thing we desire: the flow of our creativity.
Based on several years of research on the creative process, articles written and presentations developed and delivered around the world, survey feedback, coaching clients, and most importantly, talking with conference and workshop attendees and other creatives of all sorts in multiple industries, I know that the Inner Critic is the largest block to creativity that exists.
To create, we need to acknowledge the Inner Critic and the damage it does to our work life, personal life, and general well-being.
To create lasting change, however, we really need to learn how to break its power over us so we can regain our capacity to create.
I wrote this book because I want you to be able to work better, produce more, and create with a higher level of excellence than you already do. By identifying and disempowering the various forms of the Inner Critic that plague us, we can remove the barricades standing between us and our full creative expression. This book will help you do just that.
However, I also wrote this book because I feel your pain. I know the topography of self-criticism personally: I have struggled with a particularly mean and relentless Inner Critic that has made me miserable at for most of my life. Because of my own Inner Critic, I have traveled far and wide in the lands of self-judgment and self-doubt, dismissing the creativity that I did have, believing that my work wasn’t good enough, and being so focused on what others were doing that I couldn’t see my own strengths or progress.
Imagine being able to create without the internal mental friction of the Inner Critic. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? It’s not just a pipe dream – it can be done. I know because I’ve experienced it myself.
You see, not only do I write this book from the standpoint of someone who was unsure that she was truly creative; I also write it from the standpoint of someone who has finally silenced her Inner Critic, who embraces and owns her creativity, and who now feels unstoppable.
Triumphing Over My Own Inner Critic
There are those who, by either good fortune or hard work, are not afflicted by self-doubt and don’t seem to have much of an Inner Critic at all. And then there are the rest of us: we who struggle daily to maintain a modicum of self-assurance as we go through our work and personal lives because of the barrage of self-critical inner dialogue that is our constant companion.
I used to be in this latter group – until I had an experience that changed my life. Let me tell you what happened.
When I wrote my first book, The CSS Detective Guide, the experience did not start out all sunshine and Santa Claus. I landed a book contract from a serendipitous meeting at a tech conference party, and I was thrilled to be on track to achieving my two big life goals:
1 Becoming an author, and
2 Using my expert status to become a speaker.
There was only one problem: I was terrified.
The first two days of my unrealistically aggressive schedule (four and a half months to write a 250-page tech book) found me sobbing on my couch. And let me be clear about this: I wasn’t sniffling quietly and dabbing at my eyes with a tissue. Oh no. I blubbered while sitting on the side of my couch, as my tears flowed onto the plush sage green fabric of the pillow I clutched to my chest. My fears of not knowing enough, looking stupid, being judged, being a fake and a fraud, and not being good enough all plagued me to the point of near-paralysis. Finally, on the third day I bucked up, put on my big-girl pants, and finally sat down to the very hard work of...researching. You know, the incredibly advanced and rigorous task of looking up articles on the web, reading them, and then earmarking relevant information to put in my book. Yes, it’s true: I had worked myself up into an emotional froth over something that I could practically do in my sleep. As a friend of mine would say: Crazypants!
During