High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 386: Taming Your Inner Critic

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

“If you gave your inner genius as much credit as your inner critic, you would be light years ahead of where you are now.” Alan Cohen  Your inner critic is your disempowering inner voice that can sounds scared, angry, or judgmental. Remember your inner critic tends to lie to you. You want to name your inner critic to tame it. We all have an inner critic inside of us, and a key is to notice your inner critic. We want to respond to our inner critic with compassion and grace, and choose a more empowering and truthful statement to tell ourselves instead.    This Week’s Power Phrase: “I name my inner critic to tame it. I talk to myself powerful instead of listening to my inner critic.” 

Hi friends, my name is Dr. Sindra Kampoff, a national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. Every week I'm on the local radio sharing my top tips on exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best so you can accomplish all your dreams. Get ready for a jammed packed episode focused on practical tips to help you get after your goals and step out of your comfort zone. Let's go. On a Monday, we check in with our friend Dr. Sindra Kampoff. And Sindra, today we're talking about taming your inner critic. And we all have one of those. And I love that you usually start us out with a quote. What's the quote for today? This is a good one. It's from Alan Cohen. He said,

if you gave your inner genius as much credit as your inner critic, you'd be light years ahead of where you are now. It's true. So true. Every day we talk to ourselves like that. What inspired the topic today? Well, a couple of months ago, I was doing this really awesome virtual workshop with like 300 people on the call. And we were actually talking about naming our inner critic. And your inner critic is this disempowering voice that can be judgmental, maybe moving to procrastinate or sound angry or

scared. And we also talked about like drawing a picture of our inner critic actually to disempower it. So we talked about naming it, drawing a picture of it. Your inner critic, you know, sounds like I'm such an idiot. I could have done this better. You know, I'm not good enough. You know, I must not make a mistake. I might not be worthy. So that's what inspired today.

My inner critic's name is Gertrude. Oh, so that's like everything that that name embodies for you is Gertrude. Exactly. And she's gotten a little louder as I've gotten older, to be honest. That's a cool idea, though. Really smart idea. Why is it important today? I think it's important because we all have an inner critic inside of us. And our thinking is one of the most important factors in our success. And so we can let our inner critic get the best of us really sometimes without even realizing it. So if we believe that inner critic, we tend to not take risks, kind of fear failure.

We compare ourselves to others. We feel shame, nervousness, you know, maybe because we're going to look foolish. But the point is, we can't grow and we can't flourish if we listen to this inner critic. So what is the first step at being able to tame that critic? I think after you name it, the next step is to notice it. And what I mean by that is just noticing and listening to what's going on in your head. If we all have this inner critic, it can be even helpful to, you know, write down messages that your inner critic says just so you can see them more clearly. I think when we realize, when we write them down, we realize they're just not accurate and they're lies. So I think one

thing to remember is that your brain is really here to keep you safe. And we want to make sure we're not listening to that inner critic over time because it just leads to self-doubt and judgment of ourselves. All right. So after we're aware of it, what do we do with the next step? I think the next step is you could write, again, what I said is like write down these common lines that your inner critic says. But the key is like to be curious with your inner critic. And to help you think about that, you might ask yourself, you know, when does your inner critic go into overdrive? You know, what triggers your inner critic and what happens to your body or your emotions when you listen to the inner critic? And so when we're aware of our inner critic, then we can next challenge those messages and reframe them, challenge them, check them, and double check

that they're not just lies to ourselves. How do you suggest that we do that? I would say, you know, the key is to ask yourself, you know, is this, could this be more empowering? You know, is this thought really the truth? And is this what you know to be true about yourself and your potential? And have some grace while you're examining that question or those questions and extend yourself some disgrace and compassion, knowing that many times we're just lying to ourselves and we're not telling ourselves the truth. So tell yourself the truth instead. I think this is going to be an important one, a difficult one, but yeah, one that we should all try to do. How would you summarize today for us? Lisa, I'd say your inner critic is just your disempowering inner voice that can be

judgmental or angry or scared. And so we want to name our inner critic to tame it. So name it to tame it. And we all have this inner critic inside of us. So the key is to notice your inner critic. Remember, it's just, it tends to tell lies to you. And we want to respond to our inner critic with compassion and grace and choose a more empowering and truthful statement to tell ourselves instead. All right, we're going to need this, the power phrase for this week. What is it? I name my inner critic to tame it. I talk to myself powerfully instead of listening to my inner critic.

Cinder Kampoff, how do we get in touch with you? Get more information on your work? Yeah, you can head over to Dr. Cinder, it's at drcindra.com and you can find my book, Beyond Grit there or the podcast information about the High Performance Mindset podcast. All right, I'm going to take some time and think about a proper name for my inner critic

because I definitely know that it's in there along with everybody else. Thank you so much for your time today. Thanks, Lisa. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com.

See you next week.