Softening Our Inner Critic
Find nourishment in the weeds
Hi friends, today’s essay is about finding a healthy balance between negative self-talk and confidence in our abilities. If you’re new here, please subscribe to get my next essay in your inbox.
The more I write, the more conflicted I feel about my skill. On the one hand, I know I’m getting better. On the other, my standards are rising just as quickly. The delta between where I am and where I want to be keeps rising, or is at least staying constant.
I know my work is generally good, but I often don’t think it’s good because I’m so fixated on how it can be better. I’d like to be more confident looking at articles and chapters and saying, “Yeah, that’s great stuff,” but I rarely do.
I developed a critical inner voice early in life and for as long as I can remember, a significant chunk of my monkey mind chatter involved criticizing myself or others. I know this is bad; I don’t like it, but it’s extremely hard to turn off. And I know that my criticalness towards others stems from the intensity of my own self-criticalness. As I suspect it does with most people.
I realized this year that this is why alcohol has been a useful tool for me: it quiets the criticism. Work, video games, television, exercise, and other attention-consuming activities are also means of quieting it. I often wonder if other people packing their days with distracted obsessions ranging from work to fitness to TikTok also have their own painful internal chatter they’re trying to quiet.
I feel a certain amount of resistance to removing the critic entirely, though. Part of me believes there is a healthy amount of self-doubt or criticism. I don’t want to be blindly confident in my abilities only to be eventually smacked in the face by reality.
I also don’t want to wake up in ten years and realize I didn’t get any better at what I care about because I believed I was good enough. While it might be emotionally satisfying, getting stuck on the “Okay-Plateau”1 still feels quite sad. If I didn’t improve for ten years, I would feel like that time was somehow wasted, though I can’t easily explain what’s wasteful about it.
It may not be a perfect solution, but what I’m trying to embrace is a sort of “Beginner’s Mind” attitude toward self-talk. There’s a great line in “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” when discussing the challenging thoughts that can arise during meditation that reads:
“So even though you have some difficulty in your practice, even though you have some waves while you are sitting, those waves themselves will help you. So you should not be bothered by your mind. You should rather be grateful for the weeds, because eventually they will enrich your practice.”
It’s a rather beautiful way to look at imperfections. They are not ‘bad’. They are merely weeds to be plucked and sown back into the earth to nourish the plant. We don’t need to judge ourselves for our imperfections. Rather, we should be grateful for them as potential sources for future growth.
We can approach where we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going with a similar beginner’s mindset. It’s fun being a beginner because your hints of skill delight you, and you’re excited about how you could grow in the future. But once you see yourself as an expert, then the talk gets more negative. An expert state feels ‘finished,’ it’s defined by what it has achieved whereas a beginner state is defined by where it can go in the future.
The negativity comes from obsessing over some end or some level of achievement. If we focus on embracing being beginners and being excited about where we can go instead of where we are or are not, then perhaps the judgment can be quieted.
And so maybe this is the way out for my fellow self-flagellators: be excited about where you are and where you can go. Weeds are a gift. Pluck them with vigor, and don’t berate yourself for their existence. They will pop up again in new places and with new leaves you haven’t seen before, but if you can smile while you clear them, they don’t have to be a burden.
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I struggle with this. I’d say something that quiets this considerably is taking a posture towards yourself of “I love you, it’s ok” like you would comfort a child. This posture means nothing in terms of how hard I will try to achieve a goal, or what is the objective standard of good. It just doesn’t have to be so brutalizing.
Really like that Zen quote, but from my own experience with meditation, the best way I know how to explain it, is not the end result of quieting your mind. Because it's not about removing/avoiding the chatter, but listening to the chatter and making a decision that resolves each chatter, until you realize at some point, wow my mind is clear, everything has been addressed, nothing is stirring.
Also to your point about being a beginner or expert, I listened to Tim Dodd the everyday astronaut on Liv Boeree's podcast Win-Win that came out today. He said something that connected the dots even more for me on intelligence versus knowledge. He said something like, being an expert in something I could answer a question in one sentence, but I'm curious, so much so, I will go on and on explaining something as if I could grab the viewer/students attention at whatever point they will get curious and coming back for more. That he really enjoys when his patreon subscribers will comment that you didn't mention "this," at some point in his video, only to comment a minute later when he does explain it eventually. He loves that. Everyone knows that saying about being able to explain something to a child, but I found this a much more beautiful way to put it. Or as Ted Lasso misquoted Walt Whitman, "Be curious, not judgemental."