Universally Uniquely Critical

I wrote this card after having my students illustrate their inner critic. I joined them and it was a surprisingly profound experience.

One student’s inner critic was an alpha bro podcaster constantly shouting at him. One drew a bat that showed up at night to drop anvils on him. Another depicted his inner dialogue as a never ending frantic ping pong match.

I drew my inner critic as half scared teenager and half carrot trying to grow roots into solid ground. He’s constantly howling at me with one question: HOW?! How are you going to pull this off? How are you going to not fail? How, how, how how? I named him Howl and he has no arms or hands because he never lends them to help. Howl just badgers me with his fear of the unknown.

Thanks to evolution we’re all entangled with our inner critics in our own special ways. But deep down, I think they have good intentions.

The inner critic is constantly scanning our past in order to sort new information as safe or unsafe.

We’ll never be able to turn this machine off. So how do we improve our relationship with it? How do we bring new information into the sorting process? These are the questions I keep coming back to.

Because creativity requires venturing into unsafe waters. Even (especially?) when our inner critic is shouting and throwing anvils at us to keep us at bay.

The second part of the exercise was coming up with creative ways to silence our inner critic. They unplugged the podcaster’s microphone. They took the ping ball away. They made the anvils too slippery for the bat to pick up. I put duct tape over Howl’s mouth. It was silly. And it felt good.

The whole exercise was a simple reminder that we don’t have to let our inner critic operate on autopilot. We have agency. We can butter the anvils.