Rosie explains how your inner critic developed to help you survive and belong. It protected you from danger and helped you fit in, but it can also shut down creativity. The goal is keeping what works while quieting what doesn't.
Talk a little bit, Rosie, about the role this inner critic plays in our lives. Is it always harmful, or does it sometimes serve a useful purpose?
No. Spoiler alert. I guess in the end of the book, I come to love Sam because these parts of us are really the parts that help us fit in to our early lives and our families, that help us scan the environment for really belonging, for what it takes to belong in a group or in an environment and stay safe. So that might be stopping us from running across the street. It might be stopping our wildest creativity because the adults around us need us to be a little quieter. It might be that there were traumatic situations in people's lives that they wouldn't have survived if they didn't shut a part of themselves off. And so these parts of us are the parts that help us stay in line or shut parts of ourselves down to survive. So none of us would actually be here without this?
Yeah, I mean, they serve us right in many cases. The reason we are where we are right now, they've played a big role in it. The trick, as you write in your book, is if we can become aware of it, we can make sure we take the functional parts of them rather than the dysfunctional parts.
Wow. Exactly.
Reducing Regrettable Attrition in Organizations by Fixing the System, Not the People Reducing Regret
