how to finally silence your inner critic (for the women who have already done the work)

This video is not for the women starting their self-love journey. This is for the girls who have done the work, but are still fighting against their mind, because that is exactly where I was a few years ago. I had read all of the books, done all the work, worked on myself, started the businesses. I was in such a great self-loving, confident place, and yet my inner critic was defeating me every single day. And that is why it's so necessary for me to make this video today. The one for the woman who has already done the work. She has the tools, she has grown, she's reached such high levels. But every single time she tries to go higher, she just keeps running into the same old wall. And that's what nobody tells you that I had to learn the hard way. When you grow and when you get smarter and more business-minded and more confident and more self-loving, your inner critic does not go away. Just because you're on your fifth business empire doesn't mean that voice is gonna die. And unless you have the real strategies in place, it doesn't even mean it's gonna get easier to deal with. Your inner critic will grow as you do. It will collect more and more evidence on your business journey, on your self-improvement journey of all of the little attacks that it can use against you. It will get quieter and more subtle to the point where you won't even realise it's your inner critic anymore. You're gonna think, this is the voice that helps me make smart, safe business decisions that reel me in. That inner critic has grown to the point where it stopped sounding like self-hate and now it's starting to sound a bit like wisdom. You worked on yourself at the beginning and now it's not about the fact that you hate yourself or you don't feel enough for your insecure. Now it's saying, you're not ready yet. Are you sure you wanna take that step? And it's this horrible little obstacle in the way of you mastering your self-concept and your life. And this is exactly how you're gonna deal with it, the grown high level woman way. (upbeat music) Right before we start, self-concept is a huge part of this video and a part of the work that you have to do to really deal with this problem. And if you're struggling and you wanna tool that's gonna help you make this easier, I've developed that for you in my Obsessive Benefesting Journal. Now this journal is filled with so many different pages. You are not met with the same old pages every single day. It has loads of different backed techniques that I have used for so many years to manifest my dream life, one of which being the self-concept work page. None of people talk about the importance of using self-concept to get what you want. In my eyes, it's the most efficient top best of all methods of every other way of manifesting. And if you don't master that, all your hard work honestly does go to waste. We already have so many amazing reviews on this journal. You can check out on the website if people actually experiencing real results and manifesting their desires in a faster way than ever before. So be sure to check it out. Chap to number one, meet your very own built-in bully. Because understanding it is the first step to defeating it. First of all, we need to break a misconception that so many of the pieces of content don't do. You having an inner critic is not a sign that you want insecure or broken or unhealed. It's not a character flaw. It's literally just the way that your brain is wired to work. Your brain is constantly scanning for threats and its only desire is to keep you safe. Whether that aids your growth journey or not, it does not give an F. So when you are a highly ambitious person, whether you run a business or you're trying to become the top student in your class and you are working endlessly, you are always thinking how you can get better. You are reading self-help books. You are listening to podcasts. You want to launch something, be visible. Your brain sees that as this is new territory. I am often scared. There are so many threats that come with this. I don't want to do this. Your brain literally sees you showing up being visible online and potentially being humiliated or having a fear of being seen, the same as literally being physically attacked. That's how your brain sees it. And when you see that, you can kind of stop taking it so personally. You're like, "Oh, my brain is just doing what it's supposed "to do, which is what's giving me safe." That's fine. This isn't a real threat, babe. Okay, we're not in the jungle about to get attacked by you, but I'm literally just posting on Instagram. I think it's gonna help me and my business grow. So the next time that little voice in your brain, your inner critic is telling you, don't post, don't be perceived. Don't be visible in front of these people. I'm gonna like it, you're gonna be cringe. Remember that is not truth, that is not fact. That's just a survival mechanism. And it really makes sense when you think about it, like your negative self talk is always at its highest when you're about to grow. When you're about to reach new levels and do something you have never done before, that's when your brain wants to come up with a hundred and one reasons as to why this wouldn't work. And I'll tell you one little hack that helps me, not always, but I do the sparray can. Whenever I have an idea for a piece of content, I try to execute it the next day or that week. And any single time I've left it longer, maybe because I'm waiting for my videographer to become available or I'm waiting for my schedule to open up, that's when my brain starts telling me, oh my god, this isn't good enough. This is kind of cringe. What were you thinking with that idea? Every single time. But when I execute it the next day or that week, I get the job done, I post it, boom, blown up. I 100% still hear my inner critic because it never goes away. However, now I've just shifted the way that I perceive it. I view it as, oh, this is the proof that I'm expanding. I'm doing something new. I'm not staying in the same old box, doing the same old stuff that I always have done and therefore staying the same old person I always have been. No, oh my god, I'm in a growth phase. That's why my brain is so scared. It's trying to tear me down. It doesn't want to see me win. And then I use that as proof to do the (beep) anyway, because every single time I've done something that my brain thought was scary, oh, after a couple more times of doing it, it's not scary anymore. Because now it's predictable to the brain. It knows what's happening. For somebody starting out in social media, posting a YouTube video might be effing terrifying. To me, sometimes, yeah, I feel overwhelmed and it does feel like a lot of pressure, especially when there's like millions of people watching. But I've done it enough times and forced myself and done it even with the fear of the inner critic that it's not that big of a deal anymore. And that it doesn't scream at me anymore and I can do it pretty much with ease. But I have to say the absolute worst part of the inner critic is that it's not just this self-hating voice. It is something that you end up identifying with that gives you such real anxiety. Because it's so busy telling you, you're not ready for this, this is too big of a risk, this is too big of a step, that you start using that to determine and define who you are as a person and what you're capable of. Whole time, the voice isn't even the truth. When that little voice is saying but everybody else is further along than you or everyone else is doing better than you, that arrives as a fact. It feels like useful evidence to determine where you are and what you can be and do. And when it starts to feel like that, when it starts actually impacting yourself concept which is the worst thing that can possibly happen, you have to remember yourself, that voice is a form of self-criticism and self-punishment, not self-awareness. They are two very different things. And the second that you start confusing those thoughts but this is just me being self-aware and I'm just trying to keep it realistic, you've lost the game. And then that's when it starts killing your self-concept. Because true self-awareness is, this is my current situation. I'm assessing this so I know how I can move forward and keep going. Self-criticism, self-punishment is, all of these people are doing this or here's all the facts as to why I can't move forward. 99% of the time it all sounds very identical so it's really important that you keep that distinction at the top of your mind. Especially because for the people watching this video, you've done the work, you've watched my videos before, you've got a level of self-bluff, self-growth, you've made your progress and now your inner critic has matched your level. So every single time you progress in your life, you're like met with a new, more evolved, smarter version of your inner critic that you don't even know how to deal with. You don't recognize it because while you defeated it in your last level, it's now collated a bunch of new limiting beliefs and a bunch of new evidence to meet you at where you are right now. If it sounded the same as it always has been, you would easily be able to ignore it and it would never bother you again. It would have disappeared years ago when you did all the inner work. And I actually noticed this recently in my life and it almost tripped me up where I got into a really, really slumpy state, which I dive deeper into on my vlog channel because I'm documenting how I'm getting out of it at the moment. And during this slumpy state where I just felt like I can't do anything, I feel tired, I'm overwhelmed. That little inner critic was saying, skip the gym. That's your self care you deserve it. You need to make your life as easy as possible. You don't have the capacity to do that. So I listened to the voice and I didn't go to the gym. Even though going to the gym every single day, I'd been so consistent with it, I was loving it. Skipped it for a week felt even worse. It just drove me even deeper into that slump and then it was that much harder to get out. Now that I'm out of it, I look back and I was like, why the aftertoday listen to the voice, it didn't even make any logical sense. Yes, going to the gym when you're tired might be frustrating, but that's why you heck your happy hormones. That's why you improve your mental health. That's why you move your body, do the most self-respecting thing you can do for yourself, for your body, for your health. Why the hell would you skip that? You can skip every other thing on a lazy day, but you should at least take a 20 minute walk around the block. That's just basic foundation of self-respect and self-love. And that is exactly what the evolved inner critic does. It makes skipping a workout and doing things that are actually good for you. Skipping those things sound like self-care. And that's why it's so dangerous because it doesn't feel like you're being self-sabotaging. It feels like you're being sensible and responsible. So right before we move on to chapter number two, which is all the actions and minds at shifts you can implement to actually overcome this inner critic. First, I want to break down where this inner critic even comes from, two places. The first one, the voices you grew up around because that inner critic forms in childhood. Children internalize voices of their primary caregivers, the people that they're always around. So if you grew up with family members or siblings who were always talking about everybody else who was always judging what other people were, what they did judging other people's life choices, no wonder now you're in your 20s and you feel too scared to wear the outfit outside. Because those are the voices you grew up around, now you assume that everybody else is thinking that way about you but most importantly, your inner critic got that voice from them. Hearing judgments, criticisms, commentary on other women's choices or their outfits or what they're doing then becomes the template for how you talk about yourself and how you judge your own choices. And the second place the inner critic comes from is evidence that comes from specific experiences you have had and lived. For example, maybe people hating on you online or a specific comment from a friend, two faced friendships, something traumatic that happened at school in a friendship or in a dating scenario, being insulted by other people, being judged for other things or again, hearing your close friends judging other people. From all of these little experiences, your brain takes all of that compiles it into this mountain of evidence as to why now you can be judged or why that's not good enough or why you're too overdressed for this thing or why now you have to overthink this decision you're going to make. Chapter 2, the self-love protocol, aka all the methods you need to move differently. The first method is by far the most overlooked, which is the harshness of your inner critic is directly correlated with how harshly you move through the world. The harshest that you judge other people's actions, the more that you look down and other people, the more that you're in, other people's businesses and you're judging whether they're dressed correctly or what they're doing is correctly. That's exactly how you're going to judge yourself because that's your normal, that's your world, that's now how you've trained your brain to think in that pattern. When you catch yourself thinking that somebody's work isn't good enough or they should do them better or they're just not good enough or oh my god, like that person never puts any effort in, I could never go out looking like that or why would you do that. All of that harshness is going to come right back around in a circle to you. And that is exactly why my favorite method for quietening the inner critic is to just show more grace and compassion to everybody around you. It doesn't even need to be like an outward verbal thing, just the way you think about things. Let's say maybe you have a family member that is really effing getting on your nerves. You don't even need to respond necessarily with kindness in that situation if you don't want to, but it's about the way that you respond in your mind. Not this person is so effing stupid, why can't they say anything, we're doing anything right. But rather, this is how this person believes it's nothing personal about me. This is how they were raised and they're just presenting a case for what they think is right. This is how they choose to live their life and that doesn't affect me. So I'm okay with it. It's literally just that tiny little shift from going from judging and insulting someone to just attaching and just giving the grace and the compassion and moving on. And you do this by actually looking at the bigger picture of somebody's circumstances, maybe the knowledge and the resources they have, the fact that their life path has been very different to yours and you can't expect everybody else to have the exact same level of knowledge that you have had, which you acquired from living the very unique life path lessons journey that you have lived. Not everybody has had that. So therefore what even is judgment? You can't even judge anybody in a fair way. Once you start doing that, you start training your brain to think in that way and you'll notice that you're actually kinder to yourself because then you'll start considering your circumstances and the knowledge and resources you had at the time of maybe a past cringy, embarrassing memory that now you're not going to judge yourself so harshly about. The second method is super effective, but it does require the most discipline and this is about interrupting the narrative as it happens. Because you have to remember that inner critic does not just pop into a life one day like fully formed and fully at its like highest strength and power. It starts as a seed and it gets bigger and bigger and stronger over time. The more that you water that seed by believing in it, responding to it and not shutting it the hell up, it's in your power and it's literally your responsibility to stop it every single time. The inner critic comes out with a thought such as you're not good enough. If you're not actively rewriting that, telling it what it should think, you're just letting it run wild. And then within five years that inner critic has gotten so powerful because you've never stopped listening to it. You have never invalidated it. And this is exactly why four years on this channel now, I've been talking about something called the portfolio of proof and this is like a mental portfolio you keep in your mind of evidence of every single time you prove the inner critic wrong. Every single time you were competent, every single time you did something that scared you, but it ended up being amazing, basically all the positive evidence about you and your capabilities and how much you can be. The bigger that portfolio is, the more it destroys the inner critic. And this requires so much discipline because it is a daily conscious choice like every single time that your inner critic wants to say like, "Oh, you sure want to do that? That's kind of scary." You then have to pick something out from the portfolio of proof and be like, "Actually, remember that other thing that I did that was so scary and then everything turned out fine? Have a little conversation with it in your brain. Otherwise, it's just going to keep getting bigger and stronger as time goes on." The third method is actually quite fun. And this is to stop treating it inner critic as if it's you, yourself. Because once you see it that way, that's when you put it on a pedestal and you think it actually has some sort of validity in its argument and what it's saying. Because you're like, "Oh, this is me and these are my thoughts." No. You start seeing it as another person, whether it be a friend, a stranger, a parent, whatever. First of all, you can detach from it more because now you know all it's not coming from me. And then second of all, when it says something mean about you or when it says is that actually a realistic job, whatever. If a friend, a parent, partner, said this to me, I would have to put them in their place and I'd be like, "Why are you putting limits on me?" Of course, it's realistic. Why would you say that to me? And you'd actually start feeling offended if people in your day-to-day life actually spoke to you the way that your inner critic is speaking to you, right? You'd actually stand up for yourself and you'd rewrite the narrative. You'd correct them in their false perception and argument of you. So why aren't you doing that with your inner critic? And the last method is all about rewriting your story and how you got to this point. Mostly because we all have embarrassing, cringy moments that like send a little bit of a shiver down our spine every single time you think about it. I know for me reading my past journals, I look at some of those entries and I'm like, "Oh my god, what was I doing at the time?" Or you'll get a picture that comes up in a Snapchat memory. And you're like, "What was I wearing? What was I doing? Why was I around this people?" Right? It's really, really uncomfortable. But the sooner that you forgive those mistakes or those cringy moments and you become one again with that past version of yourself, rather than trying to push her away, reject her and shame her, shame being the worst thing you can do, the more you shame that version of yourself, the bigger that your inner critic gets. Why? Because as you reject those experiences and feel cringy and shame and embarrassment at it, your inner critic then uses all of that as more evidence for its case to use against you every single time you want to level up. But if you show compassion and grace and self love and you're like, "Not my favourite choice, but she did the most she could with the resource and knowledge she had at the time given those circumstances and oh my god, but she's so beautiful and I've grown so much if it wasn't for her, I literally wouldn't be standing here today. She literally made me exactly who I am. I am not here without the choices that she made in her getting up and trying every single day. Go her. We love her. Do you think your inner critic can now use that against you? No, because you and your past self are besties. That's the goal. And finally, the most practical part of the video. Chapter number three, the identity homework. I'm going to give you three homework tasks you can use to implement all the advice you just learned in this video straight away so that your life can actually change and level up. The first homework task is the identity page and this is all about journaling or if you really hate journaling, maybe you can do a video diary or something. But this is about every single day, ideally in the morning because I think starting your day like this just sets you up to have the most successful day, week, month is the best thing you could do for yourself is to write in present tense as the woman that you want to be, but as if it's already happened. No more wishing, no more desiring, just talking about I am. I don't have to try. I don't have to become. I already am. I'm just being and I'm happy. I have everything I want. I'm worthy of all of my desires in its most simple form. This is basically law of assumption, which again is a page in my obsessive manifesting journal. If you want more of a guided template of how to do it, every single page in here will basically help you achieve every single thing I've said in this video. But you can totally use a plain piece of paper and just write about the fact that I'm already worthy. This is exactly how I walk into a room. This is my mindset. This is how I feel about myself when I put my outfit on for the day. This is how I approach a room full of new people and how I carry myself because I'm so at the strong and powerful. It's like affirmations, law of assumption with manifesting who you want to be and acting as if you have it right now. Not only does this help you manifest your ideal life and also give you positive affirmations in the morning, but it helps build up that portfolio of proof and positive self talk and mindset to defeat the inner critic because the more you get used to the habit of building up all the positive evidence that then will help you present the case for why you should do the scary thing. The inner critic then has a very weak argument when it presents its case for you not to do the scary thing. The second homework task is the inner child check-in or inner child work because the more you master this and the more that you develop a really close bond to your inner child and even just connect with things used to do as a child. Not only is so self loving, but also helps you build up that compassion and grace for yourself while you're doing this. So it could be writing a letter to your inner child or the things that you wish that she knew all the things you want to tell her because of her wounds or anything she has to heal. One thing I did years and years ago, this was like as I was starting my YouTube channel full time once I graduated uni and my inner critic was at its loudest, was I had a picture, a baby picture of myself actually maybe I was like three or four, put it next to my mirror where I got ready every single day and every single time I would catch a glance at this picture while I was in my room working, crying, thinking I can't figure anything out, I can't do this. Why did I not apply for a job? I'm never going to make this YouTube thing work. I would catch a glance at the picture and I'd be like I would never say these things to her so why the heck am I saying them to myself? When that inner critic gets loud, when it gets extra harsh, think of her, think about the grace, the compassion, the love that you would pour into her as if she's your own child. And if you want to take this an extra step further, you could Google inner child prompts and do some journaling. And lastly, the third piece of homework is my favourite and this is to become so effing delusional to the point where other people think you're crazy. I'm talking delusional confidence to the point that you feel like the best woman in the world. And not even in a competitive way, just the fact that you would never want to be anybody else. You're obsessed with everything from your toe to the top of your head. You feel like a goddess every single time you pass a mirror, you're obsessed with what you do with your mindset, the way that you respond to things, the way that you live your life, every single moment in your life. And in order to get this delusional confidence, your life does not need to be perfect because there's no such thing. It's literally about the way that you choose to perceive the things that go on in your life and to turn your attention to all the little moments that you're probably ignoring day to day that will help you appreciate who you are and who you have grown to be. And then think about it. you are now making a decision once you turn off this video that I am this delusually competent goddess. You then are forced to make decisions that align with that delusional confidence every single day. There's no thinking, do I post this? You just post it, you show up because you are competent and you are delusional in your value and you're in your worth. You'd have to fear posting something for other people to see on Instagram. In its most basic terms, it's just doing the f-bint thing anyway because you can. When the inner critic wants to say, "What if they don't like you? What if they don't like this?" you're going to say, "What is there not to like? I have been love myself. I think I have a macular fashion taste." There's no pausing to think, "Oh actually, but this person is a very different fashion taste. What would they think?" or, "This isn't trendy at the moment." You don't think of any of that. You don't try and have this fair argument when it comes to your own inner positive self-talk and confidence. It's just, "I look effort-in-amazing. You don't give an f-what anybody else is going to think. That's never in your argument. I am so smart. I am so capable. I can do anything I put my mind to and I always have and have because I choose to only put my attention to the experiences I've had where everything has always worked my favour because why the f-not? Why would you not do that?" And now, I want you to go be here.