Eleven Clever Ways to Quiet Your Inner Critic

Your Inner Critic is not invited. This is your writing party, and you’ll write if you want to. Here's how to be mindful, stand firm and live more lightly with imagined and real-life critics.

Image by Aurora Müller from Pixabay

When you’re working on a writing project and the writing is slow-go or no-go, the problem may be you have an Inner Critic hanging around. Your Inner Critic is the internalized voice of all of your imagined and real-life critics. 

One way Tara Mohr, author of Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message, helps women who want to speak up and lead by recognizing that Inner Critic is there and gaining skills to quiet that voice. 

Many of these skills draw upon a foundational practice of mindfulness—noticing through meditation, journaling and new habits of mind that the Inner Critic has shown up. Noticing the particular strain of the Inner Critic’s voice. Noticing what “gets” you—makes you turn away from creative, inspired thoughts and focus on the negative. 

Some of these skills are ones that, in the somatic acting out of them, have more effect than if you just thought your way through.

But the most important thing Mohr offers is that you don’t h…