Anxiety and fear go hand and hand.
They usually walk in the territory of where we feel our inadequacies. We all have them; those fears that show up in our beliefs…that we may not be good enough, that we are a fraud and if people really knew us they wouldn’t love us, that we have to be perfect in order to be accepted and loved, and that the world is an unsafe place and we have to protect ourselves all the time by not trusting anyone. These are a few of the negative beliefs that live beneath the surface of what we present to the world.
You are not the only one who has these beliefs, we all have some, or a variation of these beliefs. The good news is that we can work to alleviate them and land in the truth of who we are. The truth is we all deserve to be loved, seen, valued and treated fairly and respectfully. Over my many years of working in the personal growth field, I have learned that anxiety and fear are a creation of the critic. This negative internal dialogue comes from our inner critic stirring the pot of shame and fear.
One of the most important things we can do is identify our inner critic and reveal the weaponry it uses against us to create the fear and anxiety within us.
Here are some of the weapons the critic uses:
- Comparison is a highly utilized tool of the critic. It always lets you know there is someone out there doing or being so much better than you.
- Perfectionism is the critic gone really badly. It measures you against unrelenting standards that you work so hard to meet only to have the perfectionist point out the one minor thing that wasn’t exactly perfect, letting you know that you failed.
- Self doubt is another subtle but extremely effective tool the critic uses to undermine your competence. It sounds something like this, “Are you sure?” …so simple and effective in making you question your skill, ability, worth, thereby making your confidence wane.
Criticism and/or Judgment are the big guns the critic pulls out whenever the other techniques it uses to make you feel inadequate and fearful have failed. It sounds something like this, ” I can’t believe you did that!” or, “When are you going to learn, what is wrong with you?”
The critic can be very illusive, or it can blast a foghorn to rattle you. What most people don’t know is that the critic gets bigger and louder when we don’t listen and we fight it or ignore it, silencing it or by pushing it away.
It is counter intuitive to look the critic in the eyes and invite it to have a sit down and take tea with it. It never ceases to amaze me when we invite it to sit down with us and hear what’s behind all the critic’s bravado. Usually, and almost always, it brings a fear we need to address or a wound that needs to be healed, or an untrue belief system that needs to be reframed, cleared out and cleaned up in order for us to own an un-owned part of ourselves. For example a piece of our worth that was lost as a child, a valued sense of ourselves that we keep ignoring or a piece of competence we need in order to move forward in our lives.
The critic is really a bearer of goodness if you can face the fear it presents and look behind the curtain of anxiety and shame to see the treasure hidden behind it. We all need help alleviating the fear and anxiety the critic brings our way in order to own our goodness.
If you are ready to reclaim your worth and value, then yippee and yahoo for you because it only gets better when we separate from our negative self dialogue and connect with our true worth and value.
If you’re ready to unmask your critic and reclaim your value, give me a call: 303/333/5553, or email me at LizanneCorbit@gmail.com and we’ll do it together.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash under Creative Commons 0 License
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