You can only rise as far as your inner critic allows.
Not only in creative endeavours. In business, love, friendship, leadership, parenting, sport, and health. Everywhere your potential wants to stretch.
The inner critic ‘control-voice’ in your head isn’t creating your future. It’s protecting the past. It polices the goldfish bowl, your comfort zone. Safe, predictable, playing small.
Potential doesn’t want a bowl. Potential wants the whole fucking ocean. But the ocean means the unknown, and the control-voice hates unknowns. So it sends in the inner critic with bite and bile:
- “You’re not good enough.”
- “You haven’t got what it takes.”
- “You’re second-rate.”
Believe it, and the critic wins. Life shrinks. Circles tighten. The song stays unsung.
Exhibit A + B.
Van Gogh wanted the ocean. His critic called him worthless. He believed it, and it drove him insane. He sold four paintings in his life, and he died believing he was a complete failure.
Harper Lee won a Pulitzer for To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most celebrated novels ever. Then nothing. She didn’t publish another novel for fifty-five years! The fear of not living up to her debut locked her back in the goldfish bowl.
Swap the critic for the advocate.
The inner critic is a pattern posed as ‘the truth’, a script learned from past wins, wounds, and warnings. It speaks with authority and it feels real. Cortisol and adrenaline flow through your body.
But it’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s a goldfish bowl built out of your own self-limiting beliefs and insecurities.
If you believe your inner critic, it becomes your reality. If you peel back the curtain, the goldfish bowl cracks, and the ocean of potential opens wide.
Real YOU is my talk and workshop that helps people peel back the curtain and replace their inner critic with the inner advocate: a voice that speaks to their worth in any situation.
| One Question for You | If your inner critic had no control over you, how would your day be different? And your world? |
| Two Quotes from Others | 1.“To realise that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually.” – Eckart Tolle (The Power of Now, 1997) 2. “The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude.” – Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search For Meaning, 1946) |
I’m always open for a chat. Just reach out. If you think someone else might be interested, please forward on …
