How Working With Your Inner Critic Can Set You Free

Learning to Work With Your Inner Critic

If you have been seeking self-improvement for any length of time, you might have noticed that as much as you change and try to be better, your brain still has negative thoughts about you.

Most of us want to know how to get this to stop.  We’d like to reprogram our brains once and for all to think positive thoughts about us.

But this is impossible.  Your negative thoughts are just your brain is doing its job.  The problem is not that the brain is giving us negative thoughts.  The problem is that we are letting ourselves be imprisoned by these thoughts, and allowing them to keep us from the life we really want to be living.  

In this episode, I’m sharing ways to liberate yourself from your own thoughts.  You can do anything, have anything, and be anything when you break free of the tyranny of your own brain.

Why Does Working With Your Inner Critic Matter? 

Our brain has negative thoughts about us and our life. We would like that to stop. We sometimes think that because our brain never stops feeding us these negative thoughts they must be true. And so we try to do things to change ourselves and be better in some way, in the hopes that that will quiet our brain.

But if you have been alive for a long and if you have been in the game of self-improvement for a while, you have probably found that as hard as you try and as much as you change, your brain still hasn’t changed its mind about you and all the things that are wrong about you.

So how do we get our brains to stop this?

And the answer is, we don’t.

We aren’t going to change the biology of the brain. Our work is to manage our brains to get the results we want in our life.

The point of thought work is not to eliminate the thoughts that are making you uncomfortable or think less of yourself. The point of thought work is to LIBERATE yourself from those thoughts—from the tyranny that those thoughts have over you and the way you are living your life.

Working With Your Inner Critic: A Tool to Freedom

Instead of believing the thoughts, your brain gives you, try adding “I am thinking” in front of your thoughts.

Move into the watcher, into the thinker position. What you are doing is moving yourself from taking on the identity of whatever your brain has offered you, to become the person taking responsibility for the thinking the thought which AUTOMATICALLY gives you power to stop thinking the thought or to think something different.

Alternative Thoughts to Believe

Once you recognize that you have a choice in what you think, by using the “I Am Thinking” tool, you can consider other options.

1. You are doing it right.

So one of the tyrannical thoughts the brain offers us all the time is that you are doing it all wrong, and that you’re never going to get it right, that you are failing as a human and doing it all badly.
But the truth is you are always doing it right. You make chocies, given the knowledge and capacity you have in that moment. And it’s all right.

You are always supposed to do it in the exact way you are because the way you are doing it is a result of the thoughts you are thinking and the things you are feeling. It is a result of who you are and what you know right now. And when you know more and when you think differently, you might do it differently, but that doesn’t make it wrong. It’s always right because it is always what is

2. You cannot fail.

Your brain wants to tell you that you can’t succeed, and you are never going to make it, but that is impossible. You cannot fail. Because earth life is about education, the only failure possible would be not learning. And you can’t not learn. You learn without even trying in every experience you have. Even if you repeat experiences, you are still learning. It is impossible not to.

3. You are infinitely beloved.

Your brain says that you would be much more loveable if certain things were different about you. It says you need to change to be loved. But it is wrong about this as well. You cannot be more lovable.

God loves us as we are. 100%. Not as we are supposed to be. But as we are. Not because we don’t have flaws, but because he knows we do. He sees them all, but he doesn’t think we shouldn’t be flawed in the exact ways we are. He sees all of us. Who we were. Who we are. Who we will be. And he doesn’t think we should be any different than exactly who we are right now. And he loves all of it.

Your choices will of course give you different life experiences, but they cannot change your Father’s care, watchfulness, love, and value of you. In fact nothing you do, adds or subtracts from your worth or your lovability in any way.

Mentioned on the podcast:

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She Let Go, a poem by Safire Rose

The Parable of the Prodigal Son (The Parable of the Father)

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