Introduction
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, for those times when achieving everything is still not enough.
Most of us have spent years arguing with a voice in our head, and losing. It turns up at the same moments, says much the same things, and no amount of evidence to the contrary makes the slightest difference.
In this episode, we look at what happens when you stop arguing with that voice and start watching it instead. We explore why believing the critic and fighting the critic are the same move in different clothes, and what becomes available once you stop treating its words as a verdict on you.
We also look at Sue, a consultant who changed her relationship with her inner critic without challenging a single thing it said, and at why the first few days of this feel worse rather than better.
Key Themes
- Two responses that both fail
- Why noticing beats arguing every time
- Sue and the notebook experiment
- Verdict or information: the distinction
- Why it feels worse before better
Timestamps
- 0:00 Arguing with the voice, and losing
- 2:10 Two responses that both fail
- 3:05 Noticing instead of answering
- 4:00 Sue and the notebook
- 7:00 When did you last hear it arrive
- 8:45 A verdict, or information
- 11:40 The half second that changes things
- 15:00 Why it feels worse first
- 16:45 What to hold on to
- 19:20 A question to take with you
If You Prefer Video
Connected Blog
The Notebook Test
Believing the critical voice and arguing with it both put your worth on trial. There is a third option, and it starts with a notebook.
Related Blogs and Episodes
The Narrator and the Person
You are not your inner critic. You’re the one it’s been commentating on. Here’s why that distinction actually matters.
When Your Inner Critic Sounds Like Wisdom
The most dangerous inner critic sounds like strategy, not criticism. Here is the test that unmasks it.
Episode 030 – The Critical Voice
You think the critical voice in your head is yours. Listen more closely. It has favourite phrases, a particular tone, and an accent that isn’t yours.
Episode 031 – When The Inner Critic Sounds Like Wisdom
What if your most strategic-sounding decisions are actually being made by fear? Discover how the inner critic disguises itself as your best thinking.
Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. You’ve probably spent years arguing with a voice in your head and losing. Today we stop arguing with it and we start watching it instead, because watching it turns out to be the thing that changes it. 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 in the previous episode, We took a look underneath the critical voice and we found something very specific.
It comes back to the same handful of accusations time after time, year after year, and that consistency was the clue that we needed. Turns out the voice is guarding a belief about who you have to be, and it triggers every time that belief feels threatened. We finished the previous episode on a question for you to put to that inner voice. Not, how do I make this stop? And not, is it right? The question was simply, what are you trying to protect me from? Today, I want to explore what happens after you ask that, because something changes when you stop treating the voice as a verdict to be argued with And start treating it as something that you can watch, describe, and learn from. And that shift has a name. It’s a move from self-criticism to self-awareness. It’s a good deal more practical than it might sound. Now, if you haven’t already, remember to give us a follow, a subscribe, a like on whatever platform you’re listening on.
It’s the easiest way to make sure that you do not miss a single episode. Most people relate to their inner critic in one of two ways. Some will believe it. The voice says the work is not good enough and that hits as a fact, so they go back and do more. Others, others will fight it. They have read enough to know that the voice is unfair, so they argue. They list the evidence. They remind themselves of what they have achieved.
They try To talk it down. Both of those responses have something in common, namely that they treat the voice as a claim that has to be settled. True or false, guilty or innocent, the court is in session either way, and you are in the dock either way. There is, however, a third position. It’s far less obvious than it ought to be. You are aware of the voice. You notice it without agreeing with it and without arguing back. You register that it’s arrived.
You note what it said, when it said it, and what you were doing at the time. You treat it as an event. You don’t treat it as a ruling. Now, yeah, that sounds like a small move. Which is why most people don’t make it. And yet, and yet, it’s one of those small things that starts to change everything. And we’ll look at some of, some of the reasons why that is as we go on. Let me give you a picture of how this looks in practice.
So let’s take Sue. Sue runs a consultancy. Does good work with good clients, has a business model that most people would be very pleased with. Every time Sue sent a proposal, the same thing happened. She would write it, she would read over it, and she’d sit there with her hand hovering over the mouse while a voice told her that the client’s going to see straight through this. Sound familiar? She tried arguing with that voice. She had a list of past wins that she would run through in her head. The list never worked because the voice had already moved on to the next thing.
So she tried something different. I got her to not argue with it. Instead, she wrote what it said down word for word in a notebook, the exact sentence that the voice used. And she did that every single time for 2 weeks. By the end of that 2 weeks, she had about 30 entries. And they all came down to basically, they boiled down to 3 sentences, the same 3 sentences time after time, slightly different wording depending on the situation. But the same 3 accusations over and over and over again. She also noticed there was a pattern in the timing as well.
The voice arrived at the exact moment before someone whose opinion mattered would see something that she’d made. Never arrived during the work, never after it, always at that threshold. Hmm. Now here’s what I invite you to notice about that fortnight. She didn’t fix anything. She didn’t challenge a single one of those sentences. She didn’t do affirmations. She didn’t reframe.
She didn’t talk back. None of that. She wrote them down and the whole thing lost most of its authority. You see, something that says the same 3 things at the same predictable moments And that gets really hard to take seriously as a voice of truth. It starts to sound like what it actually is, a recording. Oh yeah, Sue still hears it and she sends the proposals anyway and she sends them faster than she used to. You can imagine the powerful results she gets as a result. Let me put a question to you.
Pay attention to this one because it’s a little bit more awkward than it first appears. When did you last notice your inner critic arriving? I don’t mean the last time you felt bad about your work or the last time you redid something that was already finished. I mean the actual moment where you caught a voice saying a specific sentence to you And you knew it as it happened. When was the last time you noticed that? Most people, most people tend not to be able to answer that question. They can tell me in detail how the criticism feels, how heavy the day was, how long they spent going over something over and over it. They can’t tell me what it said or when it started. Which, when you think about it, makes sense. The voice doesn’t announce itself.
It arrives already merged with your own thinking, in your own accent, using your own vocabulary. And by the time you’re aware of anything, you’re already 3 steps into acting on it. That’s its secret. That’s its power. The real problem with self-criticism is that it operates invisibly. And that does a lot more damage than the harshness ever could on its own. You feel the consequences all day without ever seeing the cause. That sucks.
Here is a distinction I would like to offer you. Is it a verdict or is it information? You see, When the voice speaks and you take it as a verdict, the question in front of you is whether it is correct. Excuse me. That’s the only question available, and it has 2 answers. Both of those answers cost you. If you accept it, you feel worse and you work harder. If you reject it, you have to keep rejecting it because a verdict that you argued with comes back for Round 2. When you take the same words, however, not as a verdict but as information, a different question opens up.
Not, is it true? But rather, what does this tell me? What set it off? What is it protecting? And where did it learn that particular sentence? The words themselves don’t change, the voice doesn’t suddenly get kinder while you do this. What does change though is what you do with what it says, and that turns out to matter a lot more than the content. Think about the lady with a notebook. They’ll see straight through this is a devastating sentence when you receive it as a judgment. Or a judgment on your competence. The same sentence written down as entry number 11, now that’s a piece of data about a pattern with a history. Tells you something about what she learned to fear and also gives an indication as to when she learned to fear it, and that is information that you can work with. Whereas a verdict A verdict is something you have to put up with, you have to accept.
And there is something rather freeing in all of this, namely that you no longer have to establish whether that voice is right. That question, whether it was right or wrong, that was always the trap. Because Arguing your case requires you to accept that the case exists. The moment you start assembling evidence for your own worth, you have agreed that your worth is on trial and that the voice gets to preside. Watching that voice— now that, that doesn’t put you in the dock at all. Let’s dig down a level here because I think the reason this works is worth taking a moment to understand. The critic, you see, runs on speed. It depends on the gap between the thought arriving and you acting on it being as close to zero as possible.
Voice fires, feeling lands, behaviour follows. The whole sequence happens faster than your attention can keep up with it. Voice, feeling, behavior. Bam, bam, bam. Awareness. Now, awareness introduces a delay. It’s a small one, maybe half a second, maybe less. But there is that delay in which you register what is happening rather than simply be carried by what is happening.
And that gap is where everything that you want lives. In that gap, you can ask, what set this off? In that gap, you can decide whether to send the thing anyway. Without that gap, there’s nothing to decide because something has already decided on your behalf. And there is a second thing happening too. Well, it’s a lot more mechanical than people might think. Describing something changes how you deal with it. When you note the tone of the voice, when you note the pace of the voice, who it sounds like, whether it’s loud or quiet, whether it’s flat, whether it comes from close by or from somewhere behind you, all of these things, when you notice these, you have stepped into the position of observer. You cannot be fully inside an experience and be describing it from the outside at the same time.
That’s why just ignore it never works. Ignoring it keeps you in the same position with the voice in the same place. Only now you’re just pretending not to hear it. La la la la la, I can’t hear you. And the voice gets louder and louder to compensate. Describing it, that moves you out from the situation, moves you somewhere completely different. Remember what we discovered, what we uncovered in the previous episode? The voice is not an intruder. It’s part of you doing a job that it was given a long time ago.
And it’s standing guard over a belief About who you have to be in order to be safe. Watching it, observing that voice, that is how you find out what belief it is standing guard over. And discovering that belief, that’s the only way that you’re ever going to get it to stand down. You can’t negotiate with something you haven’t identified. And awareness, that’s how we identify it. There is one more thing worth saying about that delay, that gap, that half second, because people often expect it to feel like progress. And to be honest, at first it rarely does. The gap is uncomfortable.
When the voice fires and you neither believe it nor fight it, You’re left with discomfort and nothing to do about it. Doing something is precisely the habit you have spent decades building. Believing it gives you an action. That action is to work harder. Fighting it, that gives you an action, which is to argue. Watching it, that gives you nothing to do at all. And for someone who handles difficulty by doing or fighting, that can feel a lot worse than either of those alternatives. The good news is that discomfort will pass.
What you’re feeling in the moment is the absence of a reflex, and a reflex stop— that you stop feeding Well, that reflex weakens. However, if you go looking for this and you find that the first few days feel worse than, than better, that isn’t a sign that it’s not working. That is in fact a sign that it is working because that’s roughly what it feels like when it is working. The first few days will feel worse and it will gradually start to feel better the more you do it. I’m not going to give you a technique here because what this really amounts to is change in where you are standing. However, that said, there are a few things worth holding on to here. First thing is catch the arrival, not the aftermath. The aftermath, you already know the aftermath, you’ve been living it for decades.
The arrival, that is where the information is. Write the sentence down, use the exact words. Paraphrasing, that’s going to lose the things which matter, namely how specific and how repetitive the words turn out to be. Write those words down verbatim. Expect to find very few lines. Most people discover that they’ve been running 2 or 3 accusations for much of their life. The accusations have been dressed up differently for different occasions, but it’s actually only 2 or 3 accusations over and over and over again. Another thing is to notice the timing as much as the content, the moment that it chooses Tells you what it believes it is protecting.
Oh yeah, don’t aim for silence. That’s the wrong target. That’s the wrong thing. Chasing it, that’s going to have you treating every appearance of the voice as a failure, which hands it a fresh accusation, something else to work with. The voice will keep turning up. Absolutely. What changes Is that you get to hear it arrive, you know roughly what it’s going to say, and you are able to carry on. That is what self-awareness gives you here.
The critic stays and it stops running you from somewhere that you can’t see. In the next episode, I want to look at something that sits very close to this. The distance between the role you play and the person playing it. What happens when those two collapse into each other? What it costs you when they do. That’s going to be in the next episode, The Role and the Person. We’ll see you same time next week. But until then, here’s a question I would love to leave you with. If you wrote down the exact words your inner critic used over the next, over the next fortnight, How many different sentences do you think that you’re going to end up with? Have a guess at the number now, write it down somewhere, and then, hey, find out by writing it down, writing down the exact words your inner critic uses every time for the next fortnight.
The gap between what you guessed and what you find, that’s where the interesting part sits. Hey, if this episode landed with you, and I really hope it did, it would mean a lot to me if you leave a review or a rating on whatever platform you’re catching this. Helps other people find the show as well. Do share it with someone you think would benefit from it. And if you haven’t already, hit follow or subscribe so that you’re ready for every episode. And head over to keithbn.link/top You’ll find all of the episodes, including this episode, where you’ll find the show notes along with some additional resources worth exploring. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, and I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed.
