Conquer Your Inner Critic: Ultimate Guide For Men

All right, gentlemen, welcome back to the mantalks 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, what where the majority of us as men go wrong in dealing with the inner critic. And then how we actually right 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 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. And when I look at the, the sort of therapeutic industrial complex of today and I look at a lot of the self help stuff that's out there. One of the things that I keep seeing is this notion of self love. And I think that for men and women, this concept of self love is very radically different. And for a lot of guys, they kind of get lost going down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out what that is. And I have a lot of guys reach out to me, they're like, what is self love and how do you define it and how do I build it? And I don't really like myself. And for me, one of the key areas, one of the key things that all of us can change, shift, develop very quickly is the Ability to speak to ourselves differently. And this is a key component in, in any type of self respect. I like that word better than self love. Do I love myself? I mean, sure, maybe. Yes. Do I respect myself? Yes. And respecting myself and acting in a way that, that is self respect oriented has dramatically changed my life. And learning how to have a good relationship with this part of me, with this inner critic has changed my life. Because for me, my inner critic, my inner dialogue, and I'm going to define inner critic here in a minute, but basically your inner critic is just a part of your inner dialogue as a part of how you speak to yourself. And all of us talk to ourselves in certain ways, maybe not all of us. There's actually a percentage of people that do not have any type of inner dialogue or inner narrative, which is a very different sort of thing. But my guess is that those individuals are just not aware of the narrative that's unfolding internally for the most part. Everybody in my perspective has some type of inner narrative and inner dialogue, and some people are just not aware of it anyway. How you speak to yourself matters. This inner critic is a huge part of it. And it can be an unlock code for your success, for your confidence, for how you interact with women, your girlfriend, your wife, your boss, people at work. It can dramatically shape and change your entire personality. Because if you are like me and you are like the way that I was for a very long time, I lacked self esteem, I lacked self compassion, I lacked any type of self respect. And the way that I spoke to myself was abusive, it was unhealthy, it was berating and mean and incredibly critical and shaming and demeaning like it was, it was brutal. Honestly. 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 gonna give that to you here in a moment. But he had me do this exercise where he had write out all 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 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. 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. So, you know, maybe your inner critic isn't that bad. Maybe this inner dialogue that you have with your critic is okay, and it shows up when you genuinely have done something wrong or you could have done something better. But for a lot of the men that I've worked with over the years, one of the major things they are contending with is this inner dialogue and this inner critic that is constantly berating them. So let's talk about where does it come from? Where does this inner critic come from and how it's formed? And then we're going to talk about how do you actually deal with it? How do you reshape this inner critic to be something productive and helpful and healthy in your life? All right, where does the inner critic come from? Where does this inner dialogue begin? The first place that is maybe the most apparent, maybe the most direct, is that it is learned. So 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. 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 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 but because you saw a parent doing this. So some people grow up with parents who are very self deprecative. So meaning they are, you know, openly criticizing themselves, right? So you may have had a dad that didn't like the way that he looked and he was constantly like, oh, I'm so fat, oh, I'm so out of shape. Oh, I'm just so fucking lazy. How come I can't, you know, get my shit together. You may have had a mother who did the exact same thing. I can never get things right and oh, I'm just all the problem. And you know, this sort of self shaming, self critical, self judging narrative that would get peppered out throughout your childhood and you would hear this and you would watch your parent with this sort of mentality and commentary out, you know, verbally where they were constantly critiquing themselves. That's another version of learned. You may have saw a parent do this and then carried on that legacy later on in life where you became somebody who did the same same thing, you know, and you might even find that the things that you are very critical of yourself for are the exact same things that they were critical of themselves for that they shamed themselves for. Or you learned it through a parent being hyper critical of your other parent. And this is very common where, for example, you may have watched your mom be very critical of your dad for certain things, you know, like complaining about his anger or saying that he's super lazy or he doesn't help around the house or you know, maybe your mom was constantly complaining to you about him or maybe vice versa, right? Maybe your dad was constantly complaining to you about your mom and that infiltrates the way that you speak to yourself as a child because you don't Want your parents to bicker. You don't want your parents to be shaming one another and critiquing one another. So that's another way that it can be learned. All right, there's more, but those are. Those are hopefully sufficient examples for you to kind of see a direct correlation between the way you speak to yourself and where it may have come from. Next is neglect and abandonment. So the first one is very apparent, right? It's very in your face. And I've worked with a lot of men where they're like, well, not like, neither of my parents were very critical, and they were sort of supportive and they were loving, and yet my inner dialogue is terrible. You know, the way I talk to myself is not healthy at all. And yet I didn't see somebody being critical of one another. Like, my parents didn't criticize each other. They didn't criticize me. They were very supportive. Another version of this is neglect and abandonment. So you can create a very negative, unhealthy, demeaning inner dialogue when you have not got your needs met as a child. So here's what happens, okay? Developmentally, when you're a kid, you're like a little bundle of ego, and everything gets personalized. Everything. You know, when you're a kid, it's like your parents are fighting, and somehow the child will make it mean that there's something wrong with the child, right? It's like, there must be something wrong with me that mom and dad are fighting. So if you are a child and your dad is constantly working or he's constantly traveling, or you can't seem to get his attention when he's home, he won't talk to you about certain things. He kind of ignores you, right? He hangs out in the garage and works on his things, and he doesn't really invite you to go do that. And you feel this very deep sense of disconnection from him that can produce in a child, again, not in an adult, but in a child, this mentality of like, well, what's wrong with me that he doesn't want to spend time with me? There must be something going on with me. Because kids don't have perspective that their parents are going through their own crap. They just think, there must be something going on with me. There must be something wrong with me. And so for a lot of kids, when they are neglected, right? If you were a young boy who didn't get his needs met, didn't get a lot of attention or validation, maybe one of your parents left, right? Maybe they got Divorced, and you only saw your dad once a month or, you know, a couple times a year, that can get personalized and internalized by you as a child to mean that there's something defective about you. And what kids will do is they will constantly search for, how do I get that caregiver's attention? How do I get their love and their affection and their validation? And if they can't figure it out, it then puts them onto the hunt of, what's defective in me, what's wrong with me that I can't get that parent's attention, that I can't get their validation and their praise and their love. And that can form a very hostile view of themselves that carries on into adulthood. Okay? So again, this inner critic that we're talking about, this inner dialogue that we're talking about, has roots in your childhood. It's just inescapable, right? It might be in your young adult years. Right? In your teenage years, but it has roots in your childhood for sure. So neglect and abandonment are another big piece that will cause this inner dialogue. And the sort of caveat into this that I just want to add in before I move on to the last two is you may have grown up in an environment where your parents were around and they did spend time with you, but you couldn't seem to get things right with them, you know, or you were too much for them. Right? I've worked with a lot of men where they were just. They were rowdy boys, you know, they had a lot of energy. And there's sort of this perspective of, my parents don't really know how to handle me. They don't really know what to do with me. And that mentality can be enough. That belief can be enough to create the story or the narrative internally that there's something wrong with me. Because if you are with parents, your caregivers, you don't ever. As a child, no child wants to feel like mom and dad don't know how to deal with me. I'm too much for mom and dad. Because all of that gets interpreted in a child's mind as, there's something wrong with me. I'm broken, I'm deficient, I'm defective, et cetera. And that will carry on into the adult years, where you become a young man or an older man whose internal perspective of himself is, maybe you've become successful, maybe you've become confident in many ways and competent in many ways. But the underlying feeling is how you talk to yourself is very dark, very abrasive, very Demeaning, et cetera. Now the third thing that can cause this very harsh inner dialogue is trauma. Now you might notice a theme in a lot of these deep dives. A man's guide to that trauma shows up a lot in a lot of these different areas. And it can, it can really form your perspective that there's something wrong with you. Right? So, and, and I'm not saying that that's true, but what can happen is if you experience physical abuse or sexual abuse as a kid, even if you're a part of like, you know, a pretty bad accident or something like that, it can create the dialogue that something's wrong with you. You know, that person hurt you or took advantage of you because there was something wrong, faulty about you. And you have to figure out what that is. And so a lot of our inner criticism, a lot of this hostile narrative and commentary towards ourselves comes from this place of there must be something wrong with me and I need to figure it out, I need to scout it out. And it becomes for a lot of people this sort of never ending process. Now, the last piece, number four, four that I'm going to touch on and I'm going to expand on this because here's, here's this get, this is where it gets really interesting for me, okay? And I'm going to explain why in just a minute you can have this inner critic and this inner dialogue have started because of what I call dark motivation or shame based motivation. So you may have grown up in an environment. I'm going to unpack this because this is a huge, huge piece for a lot of the men that I've worked with, especially a lot of men who have been very successful in their lives, or a lot of men who feel stuck in their lives and they haven't been successful. This is part of the reason. So shame based motivation. You may have grown up in an environment where discipline was a punishment, right? Where you, your father or your mother, one of your caretakers or parents, one of your coaches, used shame, used punishment, used verbal attacks to try and motivate you, to try and change your behavior. All right? So you may have grown up in an environment where when you started playing a sport, football, hockey, basketball, et cetera, your dad would come out to the games and after the games or during the games, he would try and motivate you inadvertently by shaming you. Like, you know, don't do that, or like, why the hell would you do that? Do this instead. Or like, you gotta, like, you just gotta run faster and like, get over the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he would he, his intentions maybe were good, but he was using shame and verbal attacks and criticism to try and get you to be better. All right? To try and motivate you to perform, to improve, to whatever it is. And this can work. This can work, but the side effects are damaging. And here's why. Shame based motivation, or dark motivation as I call it, can actually propel you to do and achieve some pretty wild things. Sometimes, 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. 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 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 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 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 cliff on the other side of that was pretty steep. And this is what I see with a ton of men, a ton of men that I've worked with, men that you probably know, right, Men that you've probably seen in the modern spotlight of musicians and athletes and CEOs and executives. The men who have this kind of meteoric rise or, you know, a slow, steady rise, and then for whatever reason, they just start to sabotage, they start to self destruct and implode. And the reason for that is that they are using their inner critic to try and gain success. And what happens is that they are never fulfilled. They try and get to this place of I'll be happy when, when I hit that first place, you know, when I, you know, IPO my company, when I sell my company for $500 million, then I'll be happy. The problem is that their inner dialogue doesn't shift, right? The way that they speak to themselves and view themselves, their, their relationship, as we can say with themselves different, doesn't change when the success happens. So the shitty self talk stays the same. And then there's this paradox and this sort of brutally frustrating experience for these guys where they have this success, but they're still bagging on themselves constantly. They're still, you know, berating themselves and beating the crap out of themselves constantly. And it's a, a really frustrating experience because they're like, well, wait, I've been successful. Like I just conquered this huge mountain and yet I'm, I'm like in my head critiquing how I could have or should have done it better. And I'm not able to celebrate it. I'm not actually able to acknowledge myself. And so this is the last little caveat that I'm going to say before I talk about how to deal with it, which is one of the main things that this overly dominant inner critic mentality can have. One of the main things that this overly dominant inner critic can impact you with is that you lack the ability to really validate, acknowledge and appreciate yourself. And that is fundamentally.

A priority, fundamentally needed. When it comes to self respect, when it comes to any type of self love, self esteem, self worth, however we want to put it. If you want to have a healthy relationship with yourself. You need to have the capacity to be compassionate to yourself sometimes, to have grace with yourself. Often and specifically, you need to have the capacity to be able to validate yourself and acknowledge yourself for effort, for hard work, for success. Because if you can't do those things, no amount of success will ever be satisfactory. It will never. You won't be able to metabolize the success that you have or the accolades or the appreciation that you get externally. Eventually it will all wear off. And what's left is this inability to actually acknowledge yourself for what you have done and accomplished. Accomplished and become okay. 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 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 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. Mine came from a caretaker who was very, very sort of verbally abusive, often was hypercritical, would tear me down even as a boy, you know, when I was 7 or 8 years old, tearing me apart verbally and emotionally and criticizing me. And like, anytime I would do anything wrong, they were on me and they were criticizing me, and it was brutal. It sucked. And so. But I didn't know that. I didn't know that I was carrying on the legacy of somebody in my childhood until I really started to lose. Look at it. So get to the origins of your. Of your inner critic. So here's some questions that can help you do that. Number one, who does my inner critic remind me of? Who does my inner critic remind me of? Number two, what things does my inner critic say that sound familiar? What things does my inner critic say that sounds familiar? And to whom do they sound familiar to? Okay, and number three is what circumstances in my childhood may have helped to develop this part of me? What circumstances, experiences, memories from my childhood may have helped to develop this part of me? And likely for some people, there's going to be these, like, very acute moments, and for other people, it's going to be this ongoing barrage of things. All right, for me, it was that one. Number two. Okay, so number one, identify the origins of the voice. 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. There's. 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. 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? So 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. That's number two. Figure out what it wants and what it's trying to help you do. Number three, set some boundaries. Set some boundaries, okay? Just like if you were at a pub or you're at a bar and there's some obnoxious drunk guy that is just berating you and talking shit to you and being annoying, you're probably going to set some boundaries with them. You're not going to just sit there and take it. You're going to say, like, hey, man, listen. Like, that's. That's enough. All right? That's enough. Thanks. That's enough. So practice saying enough to the inner critic. Now, this requires you to connect with a little bit of your own anger, all right? And this is the big piece for a lot of men. You have to connect to a little bit of your own anger to say, enough. Like, enough, I got it. Or to say, it's not okay to talk to me like that. And you can literally have a little bit of a dialogue with this part. The challenge for most men is that this aspect of them has just run rampant unchecked forever, for decades, and they've never actually tried to engage that part of them. The inner critic comes up, that inner dialogue starts, and they just become that inner dialogue. And there's no pushback. There's no boundary. There's no. I'm like, enough. Don't speak to me like that. You know, that's enough. Don't talk to me like that. None of that happens. So set some boundaries with this part of you, and you might even want to write it out like, what's okay? What's not okay? What will I tolerate? What will I not tolerate? And then when you hear that voice start to come online, you can, internally or even externally, it might help you to do so. Just say, enough, Enough. I don't want to hear that. Don't talk to me like that. We can have a more productive conversation. So what. What boundaries do you need to set with that? Part? Number four, and this is absolutely essential, repurpose this loyal soldier. Because again, your inner critic is a loyal soldier. It is it for A lot of men. It can be a really potent force and it needs a purpose again. You can't just kill it off. You can't just try and shoo it away. You need to repurpose this part of you. So what function do you want it to serve? What function do you want it to serve? For me, 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 gonna 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, and prompting and interrupting me, 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 reign 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 to 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. I probably shouldn't have said that, you know, so it starts to carry more weight and gravity when the criticism does come up. So repurpose it. So what purpose do you want it to serve? My recommendation for you is that you, you follow suit with the path that I took, which is that you try and repurpose this inner critic to be an inner validator, an inner gratitude giver, an inner appreciator. And because it is a potent force in your life, and you will, when doing this, you'll move from that dark motivation, that shame based motivation to light motivation, which is imbued, which is really built from appreciation, validation, recognition and being able to give those things to yourself in a healthy way. And then number five is build a solid relationship with this part of you. It's a useful, useful part of you. It has likely just been trained in an unhelpful way. So start to build a relationship with this part and that can be your commitment and your dedication for the next three to six months where you're like, I'm going to build a healthy relationship with my inner critic and I'm going to repurpose this part of me to be something helpful and useful. Stop trying to kill it off, it won't happen. Repurpose it. Give it a new mission. Remember, it's a loyal circle soldier. It needs a mission, it needs a directive. And so you can guide it. For me, I found the most helpful thing for every man that I've worked with to repurpose this part of them and myself towards gratitude, towards recognition, towards validation. All right, 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.