Disarming your inner critic

What is the Inner Critic?

Most of us have the Inner Critic. That little nagging voice inside that points out every potential problem, highlights our flaws, and focuses all its attention on the negatives. It’s the human condition – being aware of threats helps us survive. Being aware of positive things doesn’t. So if you had one slightly negative piece of feedback to fifty positive ones – guess where your mind will focus its attention?

Often it’s useful — and somewhat right. Maybe you should do more exercise, spend less time scrolling socials, and have a healthier diet – most of us should. But if it’s constantly nagging you, no matter what you do; if it’s more hurtful than helpful – then quietening it would be good.

Can you imagine having a friendly, supportive voice inside?

Sound nice? Well, even better – the programme to help you with this is currently free, so sign up on my website.

What is the Inner Critic Programme?

This programme is devised to help people retrain their brains to disarm the inner critic and feel more positive. It’s a simple process, taking just a few minutes more or less daily for about a month, to try out different techniques and answer questions to improve your ability to be nice to yourself – and feel better inside.

This programme uses my ROAD framework – Reflect, Observe, Assess, Disarm – as a self-study approach. Every day has a question for you to answer, and some days might have an extra tool like positive journalling or mindfulness. You’ll keep tabs on how you’re feeling as you go through the programme –  and hopefully you’ll start to see an improvement in how positive you’re feeling within the first week of effort. There are 28 days of exercises – so you could be done within a month. The first cohort to try this achieved 5% improvement – which is not bad for a few minutes effort for several days.

Overview of the programme

• Benchmark survey – this is done at the start and the end, to assess in more detail how bad your critic is, and what impact it is having – and compare how you feel at the end versus the start.
• Step by step progress – each step has exercises which focus on a different stage of the ROAD framework. The last question of each step is a review or ‘synthesis’ of what you got from that step’s work – reflecting on what worked, and what you’ll want to continue in future.
  • Step 1 – Reflect – questions to help you figure out the sources and history of your critic.
  • Step 2 – Observe – questions to help you notice when the critic is causing your negative feelings, and how it talks to you.
  • Step 3 – Assess – questions to consider the accuracy of what the critic says and how it says it.
  • Step 4 – Disarm – questions to decide which tools work best for you in disarming the critic
• Exercises – the exercises just take a few minutes. Do them more or less daily over the course of a month or so – participants started to notice a difference even after just a week of daily practice. Doing it fairly frequently helps to retrain the brain to more positive thinking – if you do just one exercise every few weeks, it’s less likely to have impact.
  • Question – one or more questions for you to respond to each day.
  • Tool – a ‘Disarm’ tool to use on some of the days
  • Check-in – a one-question survey to capture how your inner narrative sounded that day, so you can see how it’s changing over time.

Free, as in free beer?

Similar programs can cost $1000. This is free while I’m testing it out and gathering data – so please, join in and let me know your thoughts, what’s working best for you and what’s less helpful.

Here’s some lovely feedback from participants so far:

• “As I progress with it, it’s slowing changing how I perceive or think about things which is really helpful.”
• “Too early to judge the results, but I definitely notice that I am able to go back and to think about why I have certain emotions.” (participant after first week)
• “Looking for the positive throughout the day changed my mindset”
• “I’m finding the daily prompts to focus and remind me to work on this useful”
• “I think the program is really good, I got a lot out of week 1. …. I did like the questions, some of them really made me think about things.”

So, why not sign up on my website today? Try it out and let me know what you think