Dealing with Our Own Inner Critic
By: Patrick Oliver Jones
Tags: Motivation, Self Doubt, Inner Critic, Acting, Inner Voice

A few years ago I was performing in a summer season at a well-known regional theater. While in performances of one show, rehearsals started for the next show. It was rough going at first pulling double duty, not to mention the second show was an original piece with rewrites and changes coming as often as there were rehearsals.

By opening night I’d yet to have a solid run-through. I was nervous but knew that somehow, someway things would come together. However, that was not the case this time. My performance (if you can call it that) was one of missed cues, dropped lines, and at one point 20 seconds of me standing on stage alone as I tried to figure out where the conductor was in the music. Those seconds might as well have been years. I was absolutely frozen.

Dreadful and demoralizing.

For the first time in my acting career, I left the stage at intermission (yeah, all that was just Act I) and went out behind the theater and just cried. I felt like the worst actor on the planet and all alone. Yet I was not alone, because right there with me was a little voice inside reminding and recounting every harrowing second of Act One…over and over and over again. Telling me I was no good and a hack and not worth even one penny of what I was being paid. I honestly felt like my days as an actor were over. I needed to find another profession, and my inner critic was ready with suggestions.

No help at all.

Honestly, that voice wasn’t there to help or push me onward. It was there with one purpose: to exaggerate and highlight every mistake, to demean and dismiss every ounce of self-worth and talent I may have once had. And to add insult to injury, moments from other shows where I’d messed up onstage also found their way into my memory. My inner critic was determined to not let this go.

“I am the worst!”

“How can I call myself an actor?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“Why don’t I just quit?”

This is what the inner critic does: it makes us less happy with ourselves and more likely to fall apart when something goes wrong. Because we begin to feel and more importantly believe that something is innately wrong with us, making any improvement or reassurance of self-worth almost futile and destined for failure. It does all this is some twisted effort to keep us from risking too much and failing any further. It fears another failure that much.

But you can be sure that this voice will come whether or not the failings are obvious or even real. That’s why the inner critic is a particularly difficult problem, because it affects everything in our lives and causes us to struggle with trust and insecurity.

Auditions tend to go pretty well till we start listening to self-doubt, right? And how often do relationships begin to falter when someone begins to feel less than and not worthy of the other?

So what can we do when we have this inner critic, this voice inside us that can so easily convince us that we’re neither valued nor valuable?

While there’s no magic bullet, here are a few thoughts on the best ways to deal with this persistent and nagging critic inside all of us.

1. Recognize the voice

Often these inner put-downs are time-tested statements that have become ingrained in our subconscious. They spring up almost out of habit, are usually subtle, and almost seem true in the moment. But that’s because our inner voice loves to overgeneralize our failure and focus only on the setbacks. Amy Morin, psychotherapist and international bestselling mental strength author, puts it this way: “Filtering out the positive can prevent you from establishing a realistic outlook on a situation. Developing a balanced outlook requires you to notice both the positive and the negative.”

2. Distance yourself

Shutting down our inner voice isn’t the answer nor does it really work. It will always find its way back again. Also, getting immersed in the feelings it brings up and try to sort through them isn't going to be helpful either, since it will often drag us back into the cycle of those negative emotions.

Research by Ethan Kross, of the University of Michigan’s Emotion & Self Control Lab, and his colleague Ozlem Ayduk, of the University of California, Berkeley, suggests the best intervention may be to respond to our inner critic from a detached perspective — almost as if we were another person. And this is called self-distancing, where we replace the first-person pronoun “I” with “you” or “he/she” when talking to ourselves.

(Patrick, what happened is no reflection on your abilities. You missed a musical entrance because you couldn’t see the monitor, and now you know to make sure blocking doesn’t get in the way next time. Every show is new show and a chance to improve upon a previous performance.)

Photo by Ugo Mendes Donelli on Unsplash

3. Change the narrative

One of the biggest problems is that we have a story we tell ourselves, in our heads, about ourselves. The inner voice knows us inside and out and is good at making that story full of evidence to back up its distorted and destructive view of ourselves. It’s basically a highlights reel of our worst traits and lowest points.

So how can we flip the script and learn to be more positive and accurate when talking with ourselves? By revising the story and reframing a negative experience. Change a mental picture that centers on a bad performance, for example, by opening up the frame to include other wonderful, positive moments on stage as well. That way we can see failure as a singular moment and not a reflection on our intelligence, character, talent, or anything else the inner critic chooses to attack. But rather, it’s only one piece of much larger story.

4. Focus on self-Improvement

Our inner critic loves to hear itself talk and will drone on incessantly about the same failings time and time again. The broken record will feel like a continuous cycle, rather than what it really is — a glimpse of one mistake or a series of mistakes on repeat. That inner critic may be trying to keep us from further failure in its own demented way, but it is actually keeping us stuck in a rut of diminished growth. So let’s move beyond seeing ourselves as bad performers or people and have an honest view of our lives…as mere works in progress.

Perfection is impossible and therefore not the goal. Progress and improvement are much more attainable and lofty exercises of our energies. Dolly Chugh, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, believes that being “good-ish” encourages us to take risks, make mistakes, and most importantly learn from them. The emphasis is not on who we are, but who we’re becoming. To make this shift, Chugh advises that we activate a new, growth-oriented inner voice that stands opposite of the self-critic. Again, we’re offering up another story, a counterpoint, to the self-defeating record that tends to play in our minds.

5. Find other voices

Last but not least, we have to look outside ourselves for other words of encouragement and advice. Both life and the stage are not meant to be experienced alone, there are a multitude of people with perspectives that can not only deepen but enhance our own understanding as we deal with our inner critic.

The more voices, the more ideas, the more stories we can hear and learn from, then the less likely one setback or failure will become the fated path we must constantly tread or hear about. As Andre De Shields so eloquently stated in his Tony Award acceptance speech:

- Surround yourself with people whose eyes light up when they see you coming. - Slowly is the fastest way to get where you want to be. - The top of one mountain is the bottom of the next. So keep climbing.

Now those are words to hear. That is a voice to listen to.