Part 1- Inner Diversity

(Text version below audio player)

This is the 1st – in a series of 4 – where I’ll be focusing on transforming your relationship with the inner critic. I’ll explain what I think your critic is up to, and share my method for alleviating patterns of unnecessary pain, as I outline my Inner Critic Taming Process. Wouldn’t it be great to transform your critic into your ally? That’s the goal of these 4 Inner Critic blog posts. 

We’re complex creatures: actually – weird as this sounds – we’re so multi-faceted and complex that some parts of us can’t even relate to the other parts of us! For instance, inside my head lives a very shy person – and also another part of me can be quite assertive, and then there’s the country girl in me who loved spending many years as a farmer, way far away from everything – and the city girl part of me that loves to dress up, go downtown, and people watch. There are so many diverse parts to our personalities – its like each of us has a whole committee living inside our head.

Just like most committees I’ve sat on, our inner committee is made up of various roles: there’s the confident one that does most of the talking, the quiet one who catches important things that everyone else misses, the historian who remembers all the stories that led to where we are, the social one who cultivates alliances, etc. A committee needs to include a variety of participant styles in order to remain productive: just as we also need to consciously occupy all aspects of our own inner committee, in order to be fully present, creative, and productive in diverse areas of daily life. Research shows, time and time again, that when it comes to creativity, innovation, or just good decision-making – a team made up of dissimilar personalities and viewpoints comes up with the most creative and sustainable approaches to problem solving.

Whether we’re conscious of it or not – some negotiation between our inner committee members is going on much of the time. Ideally – the committee in our head is democratic – so that any decision we make will represent all the various aspects of our needs. However, these different parts of our personality often disagree – and unfortunately – one part can end up overriding another part. If all of our inner parts don’t get a say in a decision making process, then we can end up sabotaging ourselves down the road. It happens all the time. We vow to stick with a new food plan and then we override it when dessert rolls around. We promise ourselves we’ll meet a deadline but find we’re too tired to work overtime. We decide to be more engaged with a new neighbor but we continue avoiding her. When we don’t arrive at a decision democratically then the problem we were trying to solve just keeps recycling.

When I ran a court mediation program, I had a goal of keeping the recidivism rate down: I didn’t want people to end up back in court over a similar conflict.

My mantra was: There is only one reason people don’t keep their agreements = because they never fully agreed in the first place.

I trained mediators to make sure that whenever our clients reached a negotiated agreement, it meant that both parties agreed that their needs were being met on 3 distinctly different levels: strategy, feelings, and core values. Otherwise some part of their inner committee that didn’t get its needs met would surely sabotage the agreement later on – consciously or unconsciously, and they’d end up back in court. For instance, one of the parties might have thought the agreement was a good plan, but they were afraid to say it didn’t feel comfortable in some way. Or they felt happy to reach an agreement, but actually the chosen strategy went against their values of fairness – they were giving in more than they believed was right. If we agree to a strategy or approach without taking our feelings and core values into account – we won’t stay happy with the agreement for very long.

It’s no different when it comes to our inner negotiations. When we allow all the different aspects of our personality to interact – then our inner diversity can inform our decisions and enable us to meet our needs on all 3 levels – rather than one aspect of us marginalizing or eventually sabotaging another part.

But how do we do this?!

How do we honor our own inner diversity? A big part of this process is learning to befriend and make good use of all our committee members – especially our inner critic. The critic can seem like a scary bully and cause us to override other inner voices. Most of us have a pretty mean inner critic – and if we don’t invite our critic to the negotiation table – it just barges in anyway, and then we end up having to deal with a very powerful part of ourselves that’s even more riled up than usual – because it wasn’t invited to participate.

So, in this 4-part series, I’m going to give you some tips for befriending this abusive voice – and transforming it into one of your most powerful allies. Yes. You heard it right. Invite your inner critic to the negotiation table. Your critic can be – and wants to be – a powerful ally.

I’d love to know your thoughts after reading or listening to this blog post. Please consider emailing me with any feedback you have. And thanks so much for being here!