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What if the problem isn’t your job, but the version of yourself you had to become to succeed in it? Corporate jobs don’t trap us because they’re evil. They trap us because they slowly teach us to disconnect from ourselves. If you're in corporate America and your life looks successful on paper but feels empty in practice, you’re not alone.
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Welcome to episode 88 of Working Towards Our Purpose.
In today's episode, we are going to talk about being hard on yourself.
But before we get into the episode, we're just going to take a moment to
check in with ourselves and see how we're feeling, see where we're at.
All righty, hopefully you got a second to do that. Uh,
for me, feeling a little behind right now. I feel like I, I do this
every episode where I'm rushing to get like get recording,
but this morning I picked up my guitar and, uh, got
distracted for a bit. With writing something before getting here.
So feeling a little rushed, but we're here.
So yeah, I can try to take a
breath and ease into the episode. But yeah, so today
I want to talk about being hard on yourself.
This is sort of an important topic for me.
I feel like I'm always trying to do better with being hard on
myself, always realizing different ways
in which I am. And yeah, so today is
going to be about that. And it's sort of inspired by
a day I had this week where, yeah,
I had like a big time chunk to like get something done that I like
was working on and I was trying to get done. And I
like, one thing led to another and it kind of just like, I felt like
I wasted the whole chunk of time that I had. With
basically just sitting there being hard on myself, and I wasn't able
to do anything. And I kind of just,
yeah, made myself feel bad, kind of went down that spiral of negative
self-talk and self-pity and all that. So,
but this one was a little bit different though, because at the end of that
time, after I had just done that, I got a really nice
text from a friend. That was like sort of
pinpointing on something that like I was worried about. So it
kind of like snapped me back out of the
self-critical spiral that I was in. And I was able to see like,
oh, I just literally spent that whole time
like being upset with myself for something.
And like, I created that. Like I created that
sort of, the mood that I was in and
the inactivity, the not getting something done and the making myself feel bad,
it was all sort of self-created and not in a
harsh way, but more in like a, wow, I don't want to do that.
I don't want to do that anymore. I need to
think about how maybe to not fall into those traps as
much or I don't know, it was just sort of
like an A-B, like seeing, being self-critical and then being
snapped out of it and being like, oh, that was all because of your harsh
self-judgments in your head. So I don't know if you can relate with that,
if you feel like you're hard on yourself, but yeah, it's this weird
thing because you always try to trick yourself into thinking you just have to do
better. If you just did better, then you
would've got more work done. If I had just been more disciplined or more hard
on myself, then I could have been better. And I think there's this misconception that
that if you're harder on yourself, then you'll be successful. And the
harder you are on yourself, the more successful you'll be.
And I think that's just such a myth. And at least for me, in my
experience, I don't think I've ever been hard on
myself enough to be successful. And
there's certain aspects of being hard on yourself that's maybe helpful,
but I don't know. Something that I was thinking about
recently was, what does
success mean? And if success to me means
being happy and joyful and content with your life,
and if you're being really hard on yourself to
get whatever success or achievement thing that you want, but you're making
yourself miserable, then that's not really success. So for
me, I think I Thinking about it in that terms can kind of like help
break me out of that cycle of like, you just have to be harder on
yourself to do better or to be successful or to make more money.
Because I don't think that like being— I don't know, for me in my experience,
that's never been the answer, but I always like trick
myself into thinking that that's the answer. So yeah,
curious what others think about that. But yeah, I just,
I keep having to remind myself like being hard on yourself is
not the answer. In fact, it's the opposite. It's being
compassionate with yourself and allowing yourself to feel your feelings and getting
through things instead of just like putting up a wall and
trying to not feel them and making yourself numb.
So, yeah. So I wanted to talk about it more because I think
it can be this thing for me where like it happens and I forget about
it and I don't I don't even think about it. So then when it happens
again, I'm almost not realizing that I'm doing it. So I
kind of wanted to talk to this
feeling of being hard on yourself and then recognizing that you're being hard on yourself.
And I kind of broke it up into 3 stages that I think
happens when you're being hard on yourself, or at least it is for me.
So the first stage is confusion and just being confused and
For me, it comes out a lot like frustration, like I'm frustrated with myself for
not getting something done or not understanding something
quick enough or like having this idea that it should take
1 hour, but it took me 6 hours. So even if I got it done,
I'm like frustrated with myself that it took so long. So there's always like a
frustration or like a confusion. But a lot of times when
I'm able to like pause and to think about like, why am
I being confused? And why do I feel frustrated?
It leads me into a deeper thought of like, oh, okay, you were having
these expectations of yourself. It leads to like the second stage of
awareness of being aware that I'm hard on myself.
And this awareness can also come, for me, it's also come a lot through like
other people of other people saying like, oh, you're pretty hard on yourself. Or
just realizing that like, This is a big one for me,
realizing that my inner world doesn't really match
the outer world that's existing, or at least other people's perceptions.
So for example, I went to open mic night last night
and I performed and I didn't really
like how I performed. I thought I did bad. I was being critical of myself.
And then you go back and people are like, oh, I liked that thing you
did, or this was good. And then it just, it makes me question like,
what lens am I looking through? Like this lens that I have is a
super hypercritical,
super, what's the word I'm looking for?
Like not much room for forgiveness and perfection. It's
perfectionism. It's like this perfectionism filter and other people don't look
through that. And so when you get feedback from other people or when like other
people reflect or mirror yourself back
to you, you can kind of see how you're
viewing it in a different way. So that kind of made me
realize, which I've done multiple times, I always had this
realization that I'm hard on myself and
I can be inhibited by that
a lot of times. Yeah, if I was going by
myself, for example, at open mic night, and I just like went and
then left and like didn't talk to anybody, I easily could fall into a
trap of like, oh, I suck. I should never go do this. Like,
there's no reason for you to keep doing this. Other people are way better. You're
not meant for this. Like, and just lead, have that lead me to never
doing the thing that like I'm desiring to do.
So yeah, I think it's tricky like to find the awareness of
like where you're being hard on yourself and And yeah, I don't
know, is there an area maybe in your life that you feel that,
where maybe you're being really hard on yourself and you're not letting yourself
do something? I guess I always try to ask myself that question.
But then this leads me to the third stage of
sort of being aware of, or
being hard on yourself. I don't know what these stages are for, but
basically, realizing it's like the circle
of self-criticism, like doing it, not realizing
that you're doing it, and then being aware of it. And then the third stage
is like practicing it, I think, because it always ebbs and flows.
It always— I realize it and then I don't realize it, and then I
realize it and I don't realize it. So I think practice is like the biggest
piece of it, is to try to practice and to try to remind
yourself that you do have this skewed perception
of like yourself as, you know, this negative perception.
Um, so, so yeah, like, you know, at open
mic night last night, like I was thinking in my head like, oh, that wasn't
good. That wasn't good. And then when people are like, you know,
giving you good feedback, um, I have to like try to stop
myself from being like self-deprecating and being like, oh no,
I sucked. Like that was really bad. Cause like, yeah, I don't know.
It's, you don't have to make excuses for yourself. You know, like, like I almost
feel like I have to make an excuse for myself for not being good enough.
Which is wild. It's like, that's such a, that's such a weird
thing to make an excuse for yourself. But that, you know, that's how it feels
for me. Like, I feel like I have to excuse myself. Sorry, I was so
bad. Like, sorry, you guys had to hear that. Sorry, I took 10 minutes.
So, but that's what self-criticism is. Like, it makes you feel like that. It
makes you feel like you're an inconvenience or a burden to somebody.
So yeah. And so I forgot to mention
earlier, but the point of this episode is
I sort of had a little insight that I think can help
me think about inner criticism in a different
way. And yeah, so
I'll get to that insight now. But
hopefully those 3 stages made sense and like that, maybe that resonates with you or
not, or maybe not. But so the insight that
I came to, or the thought that I came to, is that
like inner criticism is, or can be a lot like
inner child work. And with inner child work,
you're, you know, kind of taking something
that is affecting you present day as an adult, like maybe you're afraid of
something or maybe you fear something, Or maybe you have like
a belief about yourself or a limiting belief about yourself, and
you sort of like dive into it and try to see where it came
from and try to see like how old that feeling is. And if it's like,
you know, a fear of something, you can sort of trace it back to like
maybe the first time that you felt it, or at least like
a time that's like far from now, like far, far in the past. And
And sometimes you can realize and try to get
back to the experience that made you feel like that.
So sometimes there's a specific event as a child that maybe
something happened and you were afraid of going outside, and
now maybe today you're agoraphobic and you really
are scared of going outside. But if you can think about it from
being a child and
seeing things through your child's eyes, because kids are a lot more
innocent and they don't have any
control or authority maybe over their life. And I
don't know what I'm trying to say here, but I'm doing a bad job
of explaining, I feel like. But basically what I'm trying to say is
when you're a kid, things are more scary. Things are more,
they feel bigger. It's similar to when you
go somewhere and As a kid, this place seems so huge and
so grand, and then you go as an adult and you're like, oh, it's not
that big. I was just like small and it seemed really
big to me. It's kind of like that. It's like these feelings that we have
now, they still feel big as an adult, but
if we can go back and like put ourselves in childhood and
see like, oh, we were a child and that's why it felt so
big and that's why it felt so scary. We can sort of
like remove the fear part of it and realize like we're an adult now
and we can protect ourselves and we don't have to have that same
fear anymore. And then once that fear is removed, it doesn't
have to drive your decisions anymore. So yeah, I'm thinking
about applying this inner child work
tactic, I guess, to your inner critic. And I think that like,
those of us that grew up with hypercritical parents or guardians or
teachers, or I mean, even just in the society that we live in,
it's sort of made to make you feel hard on yourself.
Like people are always sort of hard on kids 'cause they think that
that's the way to teach them. And you make a mistake and you're punished.
And it's just,
it's no wonder that I think a lot of us suffer from
the harsh inner critic, because when we were a kid, we were kind of judged
harshly, and we took that in and we
internalized it and made it feel like everybody's sort of
judging us. And maybe everybody's not like this. I could be
exaggerating, but if you do feel like that, for me, it
just made so much sense that, okay, that's why I think
very critically of myself because as a kid I was judged pretty critically.
But now I'm an adult and now I can
choose what I do with my life. And most people aren't
even watching you that critically anymore. And
yeah, it just, it made me think about how I'm still
acting out of my kid brain when I'm being critical of myself.
I'm still afraid that a parent's going to yell at me,
or a teacher is going to scold you, or you did something wrong.
I think that maybe that's part of inner criticism too, like the always thinking
that you're doing something wrong, or like,
yeah, I won't go down that. But anyway, so the insight is
like, how can I look back and
when I notice my inner critic, showing, be like, okay, yeah, but
that makes sense. You know why, why you're thinking in that way,
why you were conditioned to think in that way. But now that you're an adult,
you don't have to play into that. And, um, and
hopefully that, that can make— take some of the power of it away, take some
of like the, the bigness that
it felt when you were a kid away. Because, because now I'm an adult and
I don't have to fear it in that same way. I don't have to fear
making a mistake and being punished for it.
So I don't know if that made any sense. It made sense in my head.
I'm not sure I articulated it great, but hopefully you get what I
mean. And yeah, so just thinking about
how, I guess, how this inner critic started
and how I can
change the way that it has power over me.
And yeah, so I'll leave it at that. And I
will close with, so I
have a PDF that I've created. It's called Softening Your Inner Critic. And
it's specifically about this, about trying to not have your
inner critic be so powerful over yourself. And I just finished
an edit. I know I just released it end of last year,
but I basically re-went through the whole thing and tried to make it more helpful
and more simple and like took some of the fluff out.
So the new version of this will be live when this podcast publishes.
So if you're interested, if this episode resonated with you, if
you feel like you're hard on yourself, you can go ahead and download it in
the show notes. It's free. It's just a PDF and it's like a 7-day guide.
Which basically just gives you sort of different journaling prompts and
things to do. It's like less than 30 minutes a day and you do it
for 7 days in a row. And hopefully by the end of it, you have
like a better control of your critic and better understanding
of it. And it's not like a quick fix or anything, but it's things that
you can implement and practice and yeah, and
try to get better at over time. So If you're
interested, that's in the show notes of every episode. And thanks for
listening. Thank you for being here. I appreciate all the support and I'll
see you on another episode real soon. Take care.