Managing Your Inner Critic: Learning to Transform Criticism to Coaching
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Description
Do you have an inner voice saying "I should be better..." or "I should have known..."? Is it so familiar you've given it a name? Does it drain energy and distract you? In this panel, women who have faced their inner critic discuss how to change the conversation to build confidence and power. They'll discuss the critic, how it shows up, and how to reduce its negative impact.
Panelists
- Stacey Sargent (Connect Growth and Development, www.connectgd.com)
- Erin Chapple (Microsoft)
- Alyssa Henry (Amazon)
- Meg Layton(Symantec)
- Ira Pramanick (Google)
- Yolande Poirier(Oracle)
Session Notes
Inner critic is the negative voice. Sometimes there are multiple inner critics - "the committee".
Framework for dealing with inner critic:
- Increase Awareness
- Dig Deeper
- Find the Power
5 Basic Critics Personas
- Perfectionist - things must be exactly right or it's a failure or if I can't do it perfect you won't do it all
- Do It All Driver - doing everything even it's someone else's job
- The Fake & Fruad - eventually people will find out you're not fraud, you are where you are because you are lucky
- Pleaser - have to please everyone or you're no good
- Comparer - everything is a comparison and you're never the best
Job of critic is keeping you safe and protected. When you are vulnerable, afraid, etc. the critic
Increasing Awareness of Critic
- Find patterns
- What triggers it?
- What are your immediate reactions?
Increasing Awareness
Panelist story: she has trouble speaking up in meetings and copes by putting her comments in an email and sending to the group before the meeting. Or if she doesn't have enough info, she will write down notes so she doesn't have to think so much in meeting, she can speak as soon as an opportunity comes.
- Watch for the body language of your critic
- Journaling - everytime a message comes up put it on a post-it and put it aside, later go through it and look for patterns
Dig Deeper What's more true and less true? For the more true, try to get specifics. You'll find the critic comments are very broad and general. Try to get new perspectives. When you're in the middle of an attack - don't use this stragegy because you're not rational.
Panelist story: she works in distributed computing, finding ways to scale out systems to handle more. Realized that by being a "do-it-all" driver she was trying to scale herself up instead of out.
Panelist story: she has anxiety about opening reply emails from people she's asked to do something for her. Realized that after digging deeper, her worst fear has only happened once. Also realized that her fear is proportional to how much she values something and now that's a sign for her.
Finding the Power Try to figure out what's behind the critic. Why do you care so much? Is this related to a core value or belief? Oftentimes, our inner critics are related to something we value deeply.
Panelist story: helping people is important to her. Her Divine Flaw - if she got rid of the perfectionism she would get rid of caring about things.
Panelist story: she analyzed her flaw of not speaking up in meetings and realized that's a sign that she has something important to contribute to project. Also that it's okay not to talk all the time - people tend to listen more closely when a less talkative person speaks.
Tips, Tools, Strategies
- Alyssa: put myself in new situations, give myself enough me time, leverage the positive things
- Ira: listen and argue, accept what is true, make strategic steps to improve
- Erin: email order, pause and reflect, support with others
- Yolande: visuals, finding patterns, advance planning
- Meg: visual aids in office, photo of Grandmother in suffrage march, focus on values
- Stacey: this work take intentional action and practice to build your awareness, dig deeper and determine what you value.
The best resource you can have are the people around you and talking about it
Panelist suggestion for dealing with perfectionism - do iterative, sub-optimal solutions
Notes taken by Keita Del Valle, GHC 2010 Live Notetaker
