Conquer Your Inner Critic, Build Confidence

Foreign.

Gentlemen, welcome back to the mantalk Show. Today we are going to take a deep dive into the inner critic. Defeating the inner critic, dealing with the voice inside of you that is constantly and incessantly shaming you, guilting you, criticizing you, judging you, beating the crap out of you. However you want to describe that. But we're going to talk about where it comes from, what creates it, where the majority of us as men go wrong in dealing with the inner critic, and then how we actually write that ship. How do we actually work with the inner critic or reestablish or rehabilitate our relationship to it to get better results? Because here's the. Here's the truth of the matter. If you talk to anybody, if you listen to anyone who is successful, any man that has done something meaningful in his life, what. What he will talk about, if you really listen closely, is that the way he speaks to himself matters profoundly. Right? The way that you speak to yourself as a man is incredibly important for your success in any part of your life, whether it's with your health, your own psychology, your relationship, your finances, your body, your sex life. Like, it just doesn't matter. The way that you speak to yourself is arguably one of the most important things that any of us need to learn. And yet it is a skill set that is often not taught. It's the reason why the majority of men go into therapy or seek a coach in the first place is that the way that they're speaking to themselves internally is absolute garbage. And they are beating the crap out of themselves. They're belittling themselves, shaming themselves, being abusive towards themselves, judging and criticizing themselves. And yet this is the one thing that is within our purview and our control that we. That we can shift, that can make such a radical difference in our life. I remember going through an experience with my first mentor, and he had me do this exercise. And I do variations of exercises that help men really get a sense of what their inner critic is like. And I'm going to give that to you here in a moment. But he had me do this exercise where he had me write out all of of or not all of, but, you know, a good amount of what my inner critic would say to me on a daily basis when I was waking up in the morning and, you know, doing my morning routine and whatever. Like, whatever I was doing during the day. And I wrote it out, and he said, okay, read it out to me. And I remember sitting there and being like, you actually want to hear this? And he said, yeah, I Was like, this is embarrassing. And I struggled to read it off to him. And because the truth was, when I was confronted with what that voice inside of me was saying and another human being was saying, read it out. Tell me what it says. Tell me what it sounds like. It was undeniable to me that if I spoke to any other human being like that, it would be abusive. I knew that it would be abusive. I knew that it would be unhealthy and damaging and harmful. And yet this was how I spoke to myself on a daily basis. What the hell's wrong with you? You're so freaking stupid. How come you can never get things right? You're such a piece of garbage. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, just critiquing the smallest things. Why'd you do that? That was so dumb. It was incessant. And this voice in me was one of the loudest voices that I had. It was. It was constantly there. It was constantly switched on. It was at max power all the time. I've worked with a lot of guys, and there's a few different versions of this, but I've worked with a lot of men who had one or both parents who were incredibly critical. They were nitpicking everything that they did right. How you put your clothes on, you know, how you put your homework in your backpack, how things looked in your room. I remember working with a couple gentlemen who grew up with military fathers, and when their father would come home from being on tour, they would literally have to stand, you know, sort of like at attention outside of their room while their father inspected their room and then would basically dish out punishment to their son at 5, at 6, at 7, based on how bad or how not up to code their room looked. And that's just a glimpse. Now that's, you know, you could say you could have an argument that maybe that's teaching that boy discipline, and. And that can be a very good thing. But if that permeates your entire relationship with that parent, where they are constantly and incessantly critiquing, criticizing and complaining about everything that you do, you are going to take that on. That is going to permeate into your psyche. That is going to permeate into how you view yourself. That is going to shift shape and mold the way that you, as a man, view your own identity, your own worth, and your own value. So it can be learned in the sense that you had a very critical parent, and you've adopted that legacy of being incredibly critical or harsh towards yourself. So that's one version it can also be learned because you saw a parent doing this. However, we generally have to have some coping mechanisms that are in place to help us deal with that shame. So I've worked with a lot of professional athletes, incredible musicians and artists, Fortune 500 CEOs and executives, hedge fund managers, finance people in the bank system, et cetera, that have been incredibly successful. And they almost always come to me at this very pivotal moment in their life. And the moment is as follows. They have been on this upward trajectory for a very long time where they have had success after success after success. And how they have done that has been by driving themselves with this dark or shame based motivation. And so they are ruthless with themselves. They're ruthless. Nothing's ever good enough. There's sort of this internal narrative and dialogue with themselves that is fixated on perfectionism. It's fixated and this sort of like obsession with things have to be perfect, perfect. Otherwise I'm a screw up, right? Otherwise I'm a fuck up. And so this can be very motivating for a period of time, but eventually it has such a net negative impact that it's not sustainable. So every single man that uses this dark or shame based motivation, that uses his inner critic and as a kind of fuel, like a rocket fuel, to try and climb the ladder of success in any area of life, doesn't matter what it is, will eventually run out of fuel or that fuel will start to combust against him, it'll start to work against him and he will start to self destruct and he will start to sabotage and he will start to implode every part of his life because he's proving the story of what he's been saying to himself for so long, freaking long, right? Because if you shame yourself and belittle yourself and criticize yourself towards success, you can reach some pretty high highs. But when you get there, you fall off the cliff just as fast. And that happens because it is unsustainable to motivate yourself with shame. Period. Period, full stop. It is unsustainable to motivate yourself with shame and, and criticism. You might have some high highs, you might get to places that you didn't think you could get before. It might even serve a purpose for a period of time in your life. I'm not advocating for it, but I know that for myself. I did leverage shame based motivation for a period of time in my life. I did criticize myself towards an upward trajectory, but the, the, the, the cliff on the other side of that was pretty steep and this is what I see with a ton of men. So. So with all that said, how do you deal with it? What do you do with this part? Well, what I want you to know is what you do not do, which is what almost every single man ever on the history and the face of the planet does. I did it. You've probably done it. Every single man I've ever worked with has tried to do this. You do not try to kill it off. I know that's probably a shocker, but stop trying to kill it off. You cannot kill off, shut down, silence. This part. This is what so many men try and do. They have this terrible inner dialogue and they think, f this part, I'm just going to eradicate it. I'm going to nuke it. And that doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? Because of the one major psychological lesson that I want you and every human being to know, which is that what you reject grows stronger. What you try and reject psychologically grows stronger. So if you're having a psychological conversation with yourself, right? If you're having a conversation with yourself and you can hear this part of you that's like criticizing and getting on you, and you just try and reject that part of your, like, F you, I'm not going to listen to you ever. That part of you is going to get stronger. It is going to grow. It's just like people that struggle with anxiety. The more you try and reject that anxiety, the more you try and ignore or kill off that anxiety, the stronger it gets. This is a fundamental, irrefutable psychological principle that I wish everybody understood because it is not a pathway to change, transformation, healing, or betterment in any way, shape or form. It will not work, I promise you. I. I tried it. I've seen tens of thousands of men that have tried it, and it just doesn't work. So if that's not the path, then what is the path? First, number one, identify the origins of your inner critic. Identify the origins of your inner critic. Number two, figure out what it wants and what it's trying to help you do. There's a very interesting label for this part of us in ifs. It's called the Loyal Soldier. Well, there's different names for it depending on what literature you're reading. But I like the Loyal Soldier. I think that that's a very apt name. So figure out what this part wants and what it's trying to help you do. Because this part of you, this inner critic, is not evil. It is not an evil part. It is A loyal soldier that in your childhood was trying to help you figure something out. It was trying to help you figure out how do you get dad's approval? How do you get a good relationship with mom? How do you get safety in your environment? How do you get the approval or validation from your coach? How do you get a sense of belonging in your family system? So it's a loyal soldier that is trying to help you to do something. So here's a couple questions that you can dive into. First is, what is this part of me trying to protect me from? What is this part of me trying to protect me from? And be a little bit more in depth than just failure or getting it wrong. Try and flush out with a little bit of like creative writing or thinking through it. You might even use a voice, you know, voice note and actually talk it out loud. What is this part? What is your inner critic trying to protect you from? What is it trying to move you towards and what is it trying to help you achieve? So what is it trying to protect you from? Move you towards and help you achieve? I repurposed my inner critic into my inner gratitude, my inner validator, my inner appreciation machine. And this changed my life. I shit you not. It took a while. I'm going to just put that caveat in. It took like three to six months of consistent daily gratitude journaling, you know, catching that inner critic popping up and prompting and interrupting and be like, that's enough. You know, what do I want to appreciate myself for right now? Because I'm putting an effort in and instead of allowing it free rein to criticize and dump all over me, I would interrupt, set a boundary, and then refunction it, reprogram it, rewire it, whatever word you want to use. But I would course correct it to say, hey, remember, we are going for gratitude. We're going for appreciation, we're going for validation. So instead of tearing me up right now, even though I may have screwed up, let's talk about what I did do, right? What did go well? And slowly this part of me, this inner critic got repurposed to a self validation mechanism within me. Ah, that went really well. Oh, I did really well with that. Oh, that worked really well. And sometimes it still pops up and it's like, that wasn't so great. And usually when it pops up now, because it sort of follows this 80, 20 rule now, where 80% of the time there's just validation and recognition and gratitude and appreciation for what's working well the 20% of the time when the criticism comes up, it's usually pretty valid. You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, I see that. That's. That's right. I probably shouldn't have done that. Or, yeah, you know what? That was a stupid mistake. That was. I probably shouldn't have said that, you know, so it starts to carry more weight and gravity when the criticism does come up. If you enjoyed this, a man's guide. Please man it forward, man it forward to just one person. Share it with just one person that you know will benefit from this. This is how this channel grows. Please don't forget to subscribe, whether you're listening to the podcast on Spotify or Apple or you're watching me on YouTube and share with a friend. And as always, until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.

Sam.