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Hello & Goodbye: Your Inner Critic

by Joanna Kleinman
 ∙ Jun 27 ∙ 3 Min Read

The voice in your mind that speaks to you all day long that is responsible for almost all of your suffering is what I call your Inner Critic.  It is the voice that tells you what you need to fix, to change, to improve, and where you are just not good enough.  There is not a human being alive who escapes from this voice.  What most people don’t realize, is that you are actually separate from this voice.

Most people think that it is the circumstances of their lives that determine how they feel. When we are listening to our Inner Critic, we are always looking for something outside ourselves to help us feel the way we want to feel.  And it is our Inner Critic who convinces us that if we just just fix this, change that, perfect some aspect of ourselves, we can make sure that life goes exactly the way that you want it to go, and avoid emotions that will make you feel uncomfortable.  Like fear of the unknown, failure, embarrassment, sadness, loneliness, anxiety.

This is how our Inner Critic can keep us stuck.  She squashes our dreams by telling us that it is waaay too scary to feel these emotions, so we should avoid them at all costs.  So rather than choosing to focus on our past successes and accomplishments, she automatically focuses on our past failures so that we can somehow prevent those painful emotions from surfacing again.  

But here’s the thing that most people don’t know about emotions:  Your emotions are created by your thoughts.  And almost all of the thoughts that you think that cause painful emotions are generated by your Inner Critic.  So when you are avoiding emotions, what you are really avoiding is the thinking that comes along with the emotion. 

But your thoughts are not facts.  Your thoughts are stories that your inner critic made up a long time ago, and you have been relating to like it’s a fact.  

The only way you can live the life you want, is if you are willing to allow yourself to FEEL an emotion.  Emotions won’t kill you. In fact, your emotion can illuminate the broken record thinking has been keeping you from going for your dreams.  When you actually allow yourself to turn toward an emotion, and allow yourself to feel it, you begin to recognize you can feel the fear of rejection, failure, sadness, loneliness, anger, resentment, and know that you can actually handle feeling it. When you really understand that, that is the secret to designing the life of your dreams!

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