Promote Your Best By Removing Your Inner Critics
Do you find yourself contending with negative thoughts and self-doubt? If you do, you may not realize how much you’re holding yourself back. In this video, we discuss how trust, in oneself and one’s team, can lead to more success and better results.
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Transcript
Today’s video will be about how to tame your inner doubts, your saboteurs. It is about how you promote your better and highest self, the best version of you, and get set up for great successes.
Evaluate Your Needs and Build Trust
Any big meaningful step in life comes with critics and doubts.
- Are we going to be up to the task?
- Are we going to make it?
- Are we going to find solutions?
- Are we going to find a job?
- Is that too risky?
Those are classics. Any normal human being will experience, at key moments of choices and transformation, a series of inner doubts. When you are offered a promotion, the news can just be thrilling as opposed to hard and scary. And yet you might have all your inner doubts awakening and raging through you when you’re about to take a new job or embark on the new challenge.
Inner voices are normal, they make you evaluate your risk and assess the situation. When they overtake your brain, when they overtake your body, when they are an overflow among you, they can also become perilous for you. There is a proverb that says you are your own best enemy. It happens at times when you let those critical inner voices be too strong, keeping you from being your best. That is what we don’t want. We want to be able to direct those inner voices. It is hard to suppress them, but you can lower their volume.You are never going to completely get rid of your inner critics, making it even more important to learn how to deal with them.
Understand Your Inner Critics and Deal with Them
Any kind of inner critic that you see coming through you, raging through you, is sure to have a deep root in a lack of trust. It can be in yourself, it can be in your system, it can be in your company, it can be in your team. It might be even the mix of all those different kinds of internal - external lack of trust. It is all about deciding to work on the trust piece. There is no miracle if the lack of trust is the root cause of all those inner critics. You need to spend some time in this space. What do you need to be trusting yourself more? What do you need to be trusting your environment more? What are your needs? How can you start somewhere small, so that it’s not too dangerous? Try to experiment and learn from it. Then build trust. Trust is built through proof over time. I try something, it works well and I realize “Oh I can trust it now. I know I can walk, so I start walking and I trust I can do two steps, so I do three steps.” That is how kids learn to walk because they start trusting that they do two and they can do a third one.
The same holds true for trust at work. You would build trust with your team, you will build trust with the bigger entity, your company, your division. In all these instances, you will start from a human being standpoint, the purest level is always trust in a person. It slowly infuses into the trust of the organization. You will rarely trust an entity first. People are the element that are going to make you trust a bigger entity like a company, a team, a division. People are embodying a bigger idea.
Trust is essential. It is like a gym, a workout. You start small. When you haven’t exercised for a long time, you don’t start by running a marathon. You run maybe five kilometers, then ten kilometers, and eventually you’ll get there. Trust works exactly the same. If you are interested in the topic of trust and the impact of trust throughout the managing teams, I highly recommend you The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, I cannot speak enough about it. It is not a new theory, but it is absolutely fundamental in trying to understand the dynamics of teams.
Confident Leaders Build Trust
Back to the inner critic, which is especially important to build a relationship with as a leader. You are responsible for the impact you create. You want to hold yourself composed, which does not mean you don’t express anything. Rather you don’t show panic or an overflow of emotions when you’re together with your team. That is what you inspire in your team and that is a way to create trust. The more that happens in a fairly fluid way, the more the team will build cohesion and would be very strong at addressing challenges. That is why I think it is so important for leaders to be really reflecting about their own internal self-talks, because what you don’t want as a leader is that your self-talks become your narrative. When it becomes your narrative, you make it happen in reality.
If you are shaken by your inner critics and you don’t deal with them, at some stage you will become them, which transpires to your team and you will find it in the dynamics of the team. It will keep you from being your best and from producing the best work. You want your team to thrive because they have a safe space, because they have a trusted environment, and because trust is fluid among the various individuals of your team. I cannot encourage you enough to be identifying your inner critics, your own saboteur. You will become a role model, you will impact the relationship within the team and you will have the biggest gifts you can give them so that they can really blossom and be their own best. Together, you will achieve wonderful things.
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