How to Silence your inner critic

Day 316 / 365

We all have this voice inside our heads, the chatterbox that goes on and on. It’s a critic and quite a strict one. And this voice has a lot of effect on our day to day life.

The problem with this critic is that its a bit biased towards pointing out our shortcomings and failures. Pessimism seems to be the default setting for humans and thinking motivational and positive thoughts takes conscious effort. Whenever you catch yourself in such a negative conversation with this voice it's important for you to make that conscious effort. You need to fight back and remind yourselves of your successes as well.

Back in college, I had this image of myself as someone who always leaves things half done. I had given up on a lot of projects without completing them, so that led me to believe that that’s the sort of person I am. This meant that whenever I faced any challenges in anything, I had the voice inside me saying that you are going to give up, just like always.

Then I had the idea of listing down all the things that I have successfully completed. From then on every new task that I took up, whether it was a freelance project or a new book I started reading, I had that list to proof the inner critic wrong.

If you tried this yourself, that is making an effort to focus on your successes than your failures, you would be surprised at how much the negative bias of that inner critic had misled you.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Things that happy people do