For the month of March at Mindrise, our theme will be: Silencing your inner critic and escaping perfectionism.

If that sounds like a tall order, we will be focusing on four phases of silencing your inner critic:
1. Awareness
2. Getting to the Root
3. Creating a New Narrative
4. Compassion

We are kicking things off at the very beginning with awareness. The truth is you can’t change ANYTHING unless you are aware of what needs to change. This doesn’t mean that you roll through your life with a checklist documenting all of your inadequacies but rather being aware of where you have been hard on yourself.

Awareness is identifying when and where your inner critic shows up—is it when you’ve made a mistake? Is it a running monologue in your mind? Does it come from outside opinions for others?

When we can see what our trigger is, it opens up our mind to shifting it from being an internal broken record and into the power to change our inner narrative, behaviors, and accompanying habits that can shape our every day.

This is a process that we work on in our 1:1 coaching program, Own Your Power Mastery, it’s called, “Observing + Catching.” In this exercise, you spend a week identifying your negative beliefs AND where they come from. We look at both the belief and the trigger that brings on the belief. When we become aware of our head noise, we can change it because our inner narrative, AKA self-talk, dictates our emotional state and the feelings that we have in turn call the shots on our behavior. That is called the “Self-Talk Cycle.”

Even as we become aware of our inner critic, this can help us to illuminate what we are making our head noise mean about us. We get even more in depth and free from the weight of our narrative when we deepen our introspection and ask ourselves: Who would I be without this thought?

Raising our awareness allows us to make a change to the way that we talk to ourselves.

We need to show up for this life, part of showing up fully means to be aware of our inner critic and take responsibility for changing what is no longer working for us.

Just WHO will you be AND how will you speak to yourself along the way of this life?