When Your Inner Critic Becomes Too Negative, Replace It With A More Polite Voice

Your inner critic can motivate you to improve your skills and get stuff done, but usually, negative self-talk ends up working against you. We’ve told you to beat your inner critic by visualising it, and the School of Life offers another solid suggestion: replace it with a gentler voice, whether that’s a friend, a therapist or even some motivating text.

When you repeatedly tell yourself that you’re a failure, it becomes second nature. To undo this habit, it helps to replace it, and that means enlisting the help of someone who can offer polite, constructive support. The idea is sort of obvious, but the School of Life breaks down exactly why and how it works, which is interesting.

At such moments, we need an alternative voice…to remind us of the strength we have latent within us…which means encountering equally convincing and confident, but also helpful and constructive, voices over long periods, and taking care to internalize them. They might be the voices of a friend, a therapist, or an author. We need to hear them often enough, and around tricky enough issues that they come to feel normal and natural responses, so that eventually, they come to feel like things we are saying to ourselves.

Inner criticism almost always turns into beating yourself up, and this suggests looking for external encouragement so that learning to be kind to yourself (but still constructive) comes naturally. For more insight, check out the full video.

Overcoming Bad Inner Voices [The School of Life (YouTube)]