Introduction
Your inner critic is not random. It has favourite targets, the same handful of themes it returns to again and again. And if you follow those themes down far enough, they lead somewhere very specific. They lead to a belief about who you have to be. In this episode we go there, and we find that the voice you have been treating as a nuisance to be managed is actually standing guard over something, using the only method it knows, against a threat that stopped existing decades ago.
Key Themes
- A voice that repeats the same theme is defending a belief, not assessing the work
- The critic guards an identity claim formed in childhood, with far less information
- Collapsing who you are into what you do is what gives the critic its grip
- The critic is a frightened protector, which is why fighting it head on fails
- Ask what it is protecting you from, rather than how to make it stop
Timestamps
- 00:00 Your critic has favourite targets
- 00:45 Where we have been, and where we go today
- 02:30 Listening for the theme underneath the specifics
- 05:00 The rule a child wrote, and the enforcer they built to keep it
- 08:30 What does your critic keep saying, underneath the specifics?
- 10:30 Who you are, and what you do
- 13:30 The critic as a frightened protector, and why fighting it fails
- 16:00 A different question to ask this week
- 17:30 What is coming next
- 18:15 Your reflective question
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Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. Your inner critic is not random. It has favourite targets. It has the same handful of themes that it returns to again and again. And if you follow those themes down far enough, they lead to somewhere, somewhere very specific. They lead to a belief About who you have to be. Today, we’re gonna go there. Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble.
Because success shouldn’t cost Everything. Welcome back. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, and welcome to episode 35, The Identity Beneath the Pattern. In the past couple of episodes, we’ve been changing our relationship with the critical voice, you know, that inner critic. We questioned whether its harshness is keeping our standards up, And we separated the standard from the self-punishment that tends to go along with it. Today, we are going to go behind the voice itself, and we’re going to examine what it is actually protecting. Because so far, we have treated the critic as a nuisance to be managed, whereas today, I want to suggest something, something different. And that is that the critic, for all of its cruelty, for all of its hurtfulness, is actually trying to guard something to protect us.
And until you see what it’s guarding, it’s going to keep doing its job. Before we go any further, if you’re finding this useful, and I certainly hope you are, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. It’s the easiest way to keep up to date with all the episodes. And hey, give us a comment as well, a review. Let people know what you’re finding about this. So how are we going to follow where the voice is coming from and what it’s protecting? We can start by listening to our critic and listening to it more closely than we usually do. Not to obey it and not to argue with it, but simply for awareness. Simply to notice what it’s going after.
Because that inner critic is not indiscriminate. It’s not random. It doesn’t attack everything. It has themes. For one person, it could be a version of, you’re not good enough. For someone else, it could be that you’re going to be found out. And for yet another person, it could simply be— you’re too much, or you’re falling behind, or you should have this handled by now. It’s going to be different for each person, but whatever yours is, it is remarkably consistent.
It’s going to be the same accusations dressed up for different occasions across the years. And this is why that consistency is important. A voice that returns to the same theme That reliability is not really commenting on the work in front of it. It’s protecting a particular belief that it and you have about yourself, and it gets triggered whenever that belief is under attack. The work, hey, the work is just the situation. The belief is the subject. So the critic is doing its job. It’s a strange, painful job, to be sure, but it is a job and it is doing it.
It’s standing guard. It’s standing guard over an idea about who you are, and it attacks you to keep you in line with that belief, that idea about who you are. And it does that because somewhere in your past, staying in line with that belief Kept you safe. Let me show you what it looks like when someone finally sees this. Someone notices that their inner critic always says the same thing underneath the specifics. It’s always the same things that it says, the same points it raises. Whatever the surface complaint, It comes back to that one line. It could be, for example, you’re only worth something if you’re exceptional.
Ordinary isn’t safe. Ordinary is failure. For a long time, they take that as simply the truth. It’s just the way it is. The way that you might take the water you swim in as simply the thing you swim in. It’s a high standard. The person thinks it’s just ambition. It’s the way things are.
Sound familiar? But then, then they trace it back and they find that it has a history. Perhaps they grew up somewhere, somewhere that attention and warmth arrived when they achieved And disappeared when they didn’t. Nothing dramatic, nothing anyone did deliberately on purpose, just a quiet repeating lesson. Attention and warmth when you achieve, lack of attention, lack of warmth when you don’t. Being exceptional was how they stayed loved. Being ordinary, that was how they disappeared. A child in that situation, they’re going to draw the obvious conclusions and they’re going to build a rule around it, and that conclusion and the rule could be something like, I must be exceptional at all times, otherwise I’m at risk. Then, being the resourceful child that they are, Internally, they build an enforcer to hold them to that rule, a voice that attacks any sign of being ordinary, because to that child, being ordinary means danger.
That’s what they learned in that situation. 20, 30, 40 years later, the danger, that’s long gone, but the enforcer is still very much on duty, still attacking every sign of ordinariness in a life where being ordinary for an afternoon costs precisely nothing. They built the critic to keep themselves safe, and it did for a time, but it is now still trying to keep them safe using the only method it knows Against a threat that no longer exists. So here’s where I would like to invite you to pause and to reflect. What does your inner critic keep saying underneath all of the specifics? What’s the underlying message? If you strip away the particular complaint about the particular thing, What’s the belief that it is defending time after time after time? And then, if you’re able, follow it back. Where might you have first learned that this particular thing was the thing that you had to be? This particular way was the way that you had to be? Where did you first learn that? Don’t rush. Don’t rush this. Take the time that you need.
Take all the time you need. There is a real answer. It’s not always a comfortable one to meet. It won’t always come to you immediately because your mind is protecting you. But allow yourself the time to relax, to pause, to ponder, to trace it back and just see where it came from. Here’s something for us to consider today, and that is the difference between who you are and what you do. The reason that I want to share, the reason that I’m inviting us to consider this, is that the critic depends upon collapsing those two, collapsing the difference between who you are and what you do. What you do, that’s your work, your output, your performance, the visible results of your effort, and it’s going to vary.
Some days it’s excellent, yeah, some days not so, not so much, and that, that my friend is simply the nature of doing things. Sometimes it will be excellent, sometimes, sometimes you’ll be struggling to get out of bed. Who you are, well, that’s the person underneath all of that. That’s the person doing the work. And the critic’s entire operation depends on convincing you that what you are and who you are are the same thing. And it does this because it needs you to believe that a shortfall in what you do is a verdict on who you are, that A piece of ordinary work makes you an ordinary person, and that an ordinary person isn’t safe. It wants to do that even though it’s not true. You see, when you can prise the two apart, the what you are and the who you are, when you can separate those, the critic loses its grip.
A piece of work falling short becomes piece of work falling short. No more, no less. It stops being evidence about your fundamental worth. However, while the two stay connected, joined, fused together, everything that you do is a referendum on who you are, your identity. And no wonder the voice is frightened, because on those terms, the stakes of every ordinary Tuesday Are enormous. There is a second thing to consider alongside it, and this is going to reframe the entire voice. The distinction to make here is between the critic as an attacker and the critic as a protector. It feels like an attacker.
It feels like it’s attacking you. It certainly behaves like it’s attacking you. but its actual intention, the reason this inner critic exists, is actually protection. It’s a guard, but a guard that’s never been told that the war is now over. So let’s stay with this because it’s going to challenge how you relate to the voice from, from here on in. If the critic is a frightened protector, rather than a simple enemy, then fighting it head on, that’s going to fail. And hopefully now you can start to understand why. When you attack your inner critic, you’re actually attacking part of yourself, and you’re attacking the part of yourself that believes that it is the only thing that’s keeping you safe.
It doesn’t hear reason. It digs in. And the harder you fight it, the harder it will fight back, because from its perspective, You are trying to destroy your own protection. If it feels it is the only thing that’s protecting you and you start attacking it, it is going to defend because it believes it’s protecting you. Which is why the way through this inner critic is not fighting. It’s understanding what it’s protecting, what it’s standing guard over, and then addressing that directly. The belief behind it all, the I’m only acceptable if the ordinary is dangerous, I’ll be found out, whatever that belief is, it was formed by someone much younger than you. And it was formed with far less information than you have now.
And it was formed in a situation that no longer applies. All of which means It can be updated. And when the belief behind the inner critic is updated, challenged, softened, the voice guarding it, the voice protecting it, has got less to do. And so it naturally quietens all by itself. That’s the real key. Unfortunately, it’s more than we can do properly in the time that we have right, right now. But it is exactly what we’re exploring in the Overachievers Club series on the inner critic. Um, it goes into a good deal more depth than this one episode can reach, but hopefully this episode has helped you to start loosening that inner critic.
For now, the shift is simply to see the voice differently— not an enemy to defeat, but a frightened part of you protecting a rule that no longer exists, but has never been shown that the rule can change. So for this week, here’s something for you to try. When the critic fires, and it will, see if you can ask a different question from usual. Not, how do I make it stop? Certainly don’t say, oh, this is wrong. You are wrong. You’re not right. Instead, ask, What are you trying to protect me from here? You might be surprised what surfaces. Often underneath the attack there is a fear.
Fear of being seen as a fraud, fear of being ordinary, fear of falling behind and losing your place, or whatever it is. The attack is the surface, the fear underneath it, that’s the thing. You don’t have to resolve the fear this week. Just becoming aware of it, that changes something because you stop taking the critic at face value as a truth teller about you, about you and your work and your value. And you start seeing it as a very frightened, scared part of you pointing at something that’s scaring it. And that is a very different relationship. Everything that we do down the line builds upon that. Do be gentle with whatever arises here.
You’re meeting a part of yourself that’s been working very, very hard for a very long time on your behalf. It’s been doing its very best to protect you, maybe clumsily, maybe painfully, but always On your behalf, looking out for you. Be gentle with it. Next time, we’re going to ask what takes the place of the critic when we quieten it. What takes its place? Because if the voice isn’t the thing keeping you sharp, something has to do that work. And the alternative, well, it ain’t blind positivity, and it’s certainly not lowering your standards. It is a different capacity completely. So next week, next episode, we go from self-criticism to self-awareness.
Until then, here’s the question for you to carry you through the week. If the belief that your critic has been protecting turns out to be not true, i.e., if you’re acceptable whether or not you’re exceptional, What would you stop having to do? If the belief that your critic has been protecting turns out to be not true, what would you stop having to do? That’s something to ponder on over the coming week until the next episode. Hopefully today’s episode has hit for you, and if it has, a review or a rating on your preferred platform Really helps other people to find the show. Please share this with someone whose inner critic works harder than anyone realises. And if you haven’t already, follow or subscribe so that you’re ready for all of the future episodes. Hey, head over to keithbn.link/top where you’ll find all of the episodes in the Overachievers Podcast. Find this episode, episode 35, and in there you’ll find the show notes along with some additional resources. That are worth exploring.
I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, and I will be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed.
