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Daring Forever (Find your Extraordinary)
Five minute magic pt. 41 - The role of inner critic vs passerby critic
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Welcome to five Minute Magic from the Mindful Creative Podcast, a short bonus episode sharing tips and insights from the pages of the book of the same title. Every week, I'll be sharing one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process, your work, your business, or just food for thought for the weekend ahead. These episodes share content from the audiobook, and you can find a link to the full version in the Show Notes below. Today we're going to finish the last previews from the section Mindful. We're going to talk about the role of critic, the inner critic, and the passerby critic. I argue that inner critic is something that we need, something that holds us accountable to do stuff, to be actually on our toes, wanting to do better and trying sometimes a bit harder. Whereas the role of a passerby critic differs in two ways. Whether it's feedback from collaborators clients, sometimes it can be the fuel. Whereas having a passerby critic in the form of a stranger giving us unhelpful advice that they wouldn't even do themselves is sometimes very, very unhelpful. So let's get stuck in the inner.
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Critic when you order a takeaway, eat a packet sandwich, or even shove something in the microwave, you barely need to think about the process of making the food as you're barely involved beyond setting the right time and maybe giving something a little stir. If you begin cooking or baking things from scratch, then you become more invested in the process, but you're still likely following recipes worked out by others. If you get a little deeper into it, however, you might start deviating from the established ingredients. You might even start making your own recipes up. Creativity is a little like this, especially when you dedicate yourself to it. You gain the confidence and the abilities to think for yourself, but you also take on board the increased chances of making a mistake. In some ways, we're back to our highway metaphor from the first section, and it's these times when your inner critic can start turning up unwanted, making you question your decisions. And when you do make a mistake, it can begin to run around triumphantly shouting told you so. One of the major motivations of anyone who gets a creative business together is the lack of a manager standing over our shoulder. But if we allow it, our inner critic can quickly become the worst boss we've ever had. It can nag and berate us incessantly from the moment we wake up to the time we lie there struggling to sleep. Heck, it can even wake us up in the middle of the night without Any kind of inner critic. You could argue that we might never hold ourselves accountable. We wouldn't bother to push ourselves in pursuit of our best work. But if outer criticism can be constructive or destructive, so can internal criticism. The Passerby criticism. Our creativity is often used for all kinds of ends. If you're the kind of person who creates for their own gratification, not to share or produce work, then quietening your inner critic is perhaps the end of your struggle. Those of us who are compelled to share our creativity, for whatever reason, inevitably encounter the Passerby criticism. Feedback from others can be fuel for our creative tank. It gives us reason to continue, even when completing a piece of work has felt like moving a mountain. Once that work is out there, getting positive feedback and encouragement on it can motivate us to see what we can achieve next. However, encounters with strangers can sometimes bring us unwanted energy and feedback. It can be like putting diesel in a petrol engine, stopping us in our tracks. Worse still, it can drop a lit match into our fuel tank, igniting our inner critic and engulfing us in negativity. Negative feedback, however warranted, unwarranted, justified or unjustified, is something that our confidence is never quite ready for, however much we try and prepare ourselves for it. You can always remember that negative feedback tells you more about the person's state of mind, rather than how good your work actually is. Mindful, the desire to create stuff, achieve goals and conquer both internal and external criticism, and to be seen to do all of those things, can swamp our basic ability to function, let alone our creative engine. The important thing to remember here is that busy doesn't automatically mean good. The busy fool. Someone who is always rushing around without actually getting anything done is a very real person, and it's very easy to become one if we buy into too many of the myths described above and confuse appearances with reality. Have you ever looked at a creative brief and felt like you couldn't cope? There's too much information trying to rush in all at once, and perhaps too many ideas trying to rush out at the same moment. I'm guessing that's not a state of mind in which you can rationally sit down and do your best work. To have a full mind is to be overwhelmed, to have our engine flooded, bringing us to a forcible standstill. Sooner or later, imposter syndrome might kick in. We might freeze and find hours have passed and we have nothing to show for it. Yet we might still feel stuck in a high gear. It can feel like pedalling furiously on a bike when the chain has come off. We can only move when we have room to move in. This applies as much mentally as it does physically. If we jam our heads with things like imposter syndrome, negative self talk, and unrealistic expectations on top of things like deadlines and ideas, then we don't so much get in our own way as box ourselves into a corner. Here, the only way to move forwards is to stop fighting and surrender to the stoppage. Only when the wheels have stopped spinning quite so fast can you begin to catch your breath and say, right, okay, what's going on here? From that point, some of the helping methods we've discussed in this book will make themselves apparent, and through purposeful slowing down, you can begin to find momentum. Information overload is a symptom of our desire to not focus on what's important. It is a choice. Brian Solis.