--- title: "What Your Inner Critic Is Actually Protecting" id: "21648" type: "post" slug: "what-your-inner-critic-is-actually-protecting" published_at: "2026-09-13T23:00:00+00:00" modified_at: "2026-09-14T17:26:42+00:00" url: "https://keithblakemorenoble.com/what-your-inner-critic-is-actually-protecting/" markdown_url: "https://keithblakemorenoble.com/what-your-inner-critic-is-actually-protecting.md" excerpt: "Your inner critic is not the problem. The problem is the claim which it has been guarding since childhood…" taxonomy_category: - "Fear" - "Identity" - "Mindset" - "Overachieving" - "Patterns" taxonomy_post_tag: - "Beliefs" - "Identity" - "Inner Critic" - "Protection" - "self-worth" --- [Skip to content](#content) # What Your Inner Critic Is Actually Protecting - Published September 14, 2026 Your inner critic is not the problem. The problem is the claim which it has been guarding since childhood… [PrevPrevious blogThe Standard Was Never the Problem](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-standard-was-never-the-problem/) [Next blogThe Notebook TestNext](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-notebook-test/) #### Table of Contents Heres something fun to try before we dive in – complete the following sentence as fast as you can, without pausing to think about it. Just go with your gut feel, the first answer that comes to mind. “I am only acceptable if I am…” I’m going to bet that you got an answer, and that it came pretty quickly. It was probably also only a single word or a couple of words. Possibly something like “strong”. Or “exceptional”. Or “delivering”. or “the best”. Or something similar. The important thing to notice is not so much what the answer was, but the speed with which it presented itself – it came quickly because you weren’t building an answer, you were reading one which was already there… ## The Voice Isn’t The Problem Most people. when they want to conquer their Inner Critic, will go straight to attacking the Voice. They’ll either try to silence it, or to argue with it, or to replace it with something more positive. Unfortunately, most of the time that doesn’t really work, or if it does work then it only does so for a short time – and sure enough within a week the Voice is back as it was, loud as ever. If you listen to your inner critic for a week or so, really listen to it with a view to hearing it rather than countering it, then you’ll start to notice that it isn’t as random or indiscriminate as it might at first appear. It levels the same accusations time after time. It might be along the lines of “You’re not good enough”, or “They’re going to find you out” or “You’re falling further and further behind” or whatever. The point is that it’ll keep using the same sort of language, the same attacks, over and over. Which is an important realisation to discover. Because a voice which keeps returning to the same them isn’t commenting on what it sees before it, it’s using its age-old defence mechanisms to defend a very strongly held position. The work upon which it is commenting is simply the trigger; the position it’s defending? That’s the word or two you answered at the start of this blog. ## The Role Of The Guard. Notice the times when your inner critic is at it’s most ardent. Perhaps it’s just before you get seen, or just after you make a visible mistake, or on the things most important to who you believe you are. That is not random – that’s the behaviour pattern of a guard. And this is a guard who attacks you first, before anyone else gets a chance to attack you. It does this on the basis that seeing your own flaws first makes them less dangerous for you when someone else inevitably spots them. By attacking you first, the guard keeps you polishing and honing and revising and holding back – all the sorts of things which reduce the risk of what it actually fears, namely the risk of you being expo9sed before your peers. Looking at it from this perspective, it becomes apparent that everything your inner critic (or guard) does is rational and comes from a place of protecting you. After all, if your acceptance is conditional, then the only safe course of action is constant vigilance. The problem, it turns out, was never the guard – the problem is what your guard believes about what’s at stake. ## Where Did The Sentence Come From? Back to the opening sentence you completed rather quickly. The condition was not chosen by you as you are now. It was not chosen by you as an adult at any point in time. It was chosen by you, as a child, doing your best with what you had to navigate life and establish some set of rules. Somewhere back in your past, a child noticed what got rewarded with warmth, and what got the warmth removed. Realistically, it was probably not something dramatic or even deliberate, just a pattern repeated often enough to become a learned behaviour. Such as Achievement bringing Attention, or Being Useful bringing Approval, or Being Reliable earning you your place. Any child in that sort of situation will draw the obvious conclusions about what behaviours and actions get them rewarded or kept or safe. That was intelligent reasoning, done by someone small, young, and with limited information. And it absolutely served you well at the time. The problem arises from what happened next – the conclusions you made before the age of seven became a permanent and fundamental fact of life, rather than simply a strategy for one childhood situation. A fundamental fact which needed to be guarded at all costs, and so your young mind creating just such a guard. And you’ve been listening to it and obeying it ever since. ## Seeing It In Action It’s easy to sit and nod along to the idea in abstract, but a far more useful thing is to spot it in action. I did this with someone I worked with recently (no names, they’re happy for me to share the example but would rather not be publicly identified). They had turned down something which, to be honest, would have been rather good for them. And to be fair, they did come up with a lot of excellent-sounding excuses – the timing wasn’t right, they had too much workload, all the usual stuff. It wasn’t until I invited them to look at other similar decisions that they realised there was a very definite pattern there. Sure, each time there was a different plausible-sounding objection, but every time the outcome was the same – namely staying where they were so they couldn’t be seen to fail. When they dug deeper, what came up was along the lines of “I’m only acceptable when I’m competent.”. And being competent ment never being seen to get it wrong. So, of course, their Guard was diligently steering them away from any possible situation where they might risk getting it publicly wrong, even if that meant missing out on excellent opportunities… ## So What Now? Hopefully by this point you’ve come up with your own answer to the opening question, and you’ve traced it back to where the answer originally came from. Which raises an important question – if the claim isn’t actually true, and if your acceptability was never actually conditional, then what is the point in the Guard in the first place? And what do you do now? Very good questions, and certainly something I’d love to leave you with to have a think about over the coming week – love to know what conclusions you come up with! If you fancy going in to much more depth about this, and finding some powerful answers, then check out “The Inner Critic”, which is part of [The Overachievers Club](https://KeithBlakemoreNoble.com/work-with-me/the-overachievers-club/) – it’s a course of 8 modules which look deeper at where the voice came from, what it is protecting, and how you can maintain your standards while retiring that voice. On the other hand, if you prefer something a little more relaxed and fun, take [The Overachiever Quiz](https://KeithBlakemoreNoble.com/work-with-me/the-overachievers-club/what-kind-of-achiever-are-you/?#quiz) – 10 fun questions to find out what kind of overachiever you are, and what to do with that information. ## Connected Podcast Episode ### Episode 035 – The Identity Beneath the Pattern Your critic returns to the same accusation for years. That consistency is the clue. It is guarding a belief about who you have to be. [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/009-operating-from-inherent-worth/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/009-operating-from-inherent-worth/) [Listen…](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/episode-035-the-identity-beneath-the-pattern/) [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/episode-035-the-identity-beneath-the-pattern/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/episode-035-the-identity-beneath-the-pattern/) ## Relevant Related Blogs and Episodes [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-narrator-and-the-person/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-narrator-and-the-person/) ### 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. [Read more…](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-narrator-and-the-person/) ### The Weight You Carry Without Realising You have been carrying this weight so long it feels like personality. But it is a pattern. And once you can see it, everything changes. [Read more…](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-weight-you-carry-without-realising/) [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-weight-you-carry-without-realising/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-weight-you-carry-without-realising/) [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/008-separating-identity-from-achievement/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/008-separating-identity-from-achievement/) ### Episode 008 – Separating Identity from Achievement Discover how to separate your self-worth from achievement and build a stable identity beyond results with Keith Blakemore Noble. [Listen…](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/008-separating-identity-from-achievement/) ### The One About Hidden Benefits Uncover the hidden benefits that stop change – secondary gain explained. Keith digs into overcoming hidden benefits in this solo episode. [Listen](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/the-one-about-hidden-benefits/) […](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/005-how-responsibility-quietly-expands/) [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/the-one-about-hidden-benefits/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/the-one-about-hidden-benefits/) #### Keith Blakemore-Noble Keith Blakemore-Noble is The Overachiever’s Coach. For over sixteen years he has worked with driven, capable individuals to identify and restructure the internal patterns that keep them stuck despite their success. A former Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the British Computer Society, Keith brings a systems thinker’s precision to mindset change. He is the founder of The Overachievers Club, host of The Overachievers Podcast, and author of six published books including The Masks We Wear and AntiManipulation, with his forthcoming Overachiever-based book in development. He uses Mindset Mastery, his bespoke blend of hypnosis, NLP, and coaching, to create rapid, deep, and lasting change.