Dr. Aziz Gazipura on Transforming Your Inner Critic

the new year. But the good news is there is so much that is in our control, and some of those things are among the biggest influencers of our sense of well being. In the one You Feed Personal Transformation program, I work one on one with people to build healthy habits and achieve their goals through applied behavior science. For example, when my client Janine started working with me, her focus

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When we say we can't handle something like the loss of a loved one or the loss of a job, what we're saying is, I'm not going to be able to handle the feelings that I imagine I'm going to experience, and if we don't fight it and run from it, it actually is something that will powerfully transform us and deepen us. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.

Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend towards negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,

and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr Ozzies Gasi Pora, a clinical psychologist in one of the world's leading experts on social confidence. After being stuck in shyness and social anxiety himself for almost ten years, he

became determined to find a way to social freedom. On this episode, Assise and Eric discusses book On My Own Side Transform Self Criticism and doubt into permanent self worth and confidence. Hi, Azse, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to have you on. We're going to primarily be discussing your book called On My Own Side, Transform Self Criticism and doubt into permanent self worth and confidence.

But before we get into that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grand utter stops and she thinks about it for

a second. She looks up at her grandfather and she said, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Yeah. I think gets so fitting for this idea of being on our own sides, and that in our own minds we have a voice or a perception that can focus on the good we bring, the value we bring, our winds, what we can contribute, and then we all know that we have another voice in there that can dismiss us, are just completely undermine our value, our sense of worthiness, and it can run

a pretty active campaign against us. And that is the wolf that many of us unconsciously and almost as if we've lost power and influence on our own minds, that's the one we feed. That's when we we go along with and sort of submit to. And so I think in the service of becoming our most free, confident selves, we must start feeding that other wolf, the good wolf, as it were. Yeah, and I think what you're talking about, that voice is what we would often refer to as

our inner critic. Absolutely. Yeah, there's many different names for it. And as soon as you say that, people like, oh, yeah, yeah, I I know what you mean. There, and yeah, it's a whole stance, it's a whole attitude or orientation towards ourselves that can really determine our confidence and then ultimately how much we can thrive and succeed in life too.

Write and being on our own side. I love the title of the book on my own Side, because I think that's such a powerful idea to like be on our own side, to take our self as important and worth supporting. Yeah, and even that can feel uncomfortable totally for people. I mean it's like, oh, that's that's selfish. That's a bad thing. That's gonna make you egotistical or

arrogant or disconnected or uncaring about others. And I think that just shows the misconception of what being on our own side is, what being more loving and kind with both ourselves and others are and all that. So, yeah, that the title is meant to in itself carry a message. So we'll get into how to do this in a minute. But I think you just touched on something that's important there, which is when we get into this stuff about being

on our own side, Uh, loving ourselves self. Compassion is a term that's in in use a lot these days. When we hear terms like that, or someone will say we'll go a little easier on yourself, or variations on that, we often think, well, that's going to cause a problem. And as you mentioned, one of the types of things we think it might be as it might make us egotistical. Another thing that we often think is it will make

us soft, it will make us not motivated. So before we go into how to do this, let's talk a little bit about how not only being on our own side is a much more enjoyable internal experience. It actually does make us better in the world. Well, I love this, Eric, I mean, I feel like, Okay, which part of the book do I talk about now? Because yes, there's this

fear or mistrust of being on our own sides. And before we kind of make a case for it, I just want to zoom out a little bit and think, Wow, Okay, if I was in a relationship with someone else, a lover, a family member, a child, and I thought, I gotta be really hard on this person all the time. I got to point out what they're not doing right, or else they're gonna get complacent and lazy and I gotta be on them. If you just like sense that in

a relationship is like, is that is that loving? Would you want to be in that relationship or you kind of maybe grimace or think. And so I want to use that comparison because so often we think it's different with ourselves, but it's not. And there's a there's a way to be with ourselves that is loving and attentive and still can hold a standard and still can find motivation. And I think what it requires is an upgrade in

our way of being. And we think, no, the only way to be is to is to you know, use the whip and withhold self worth and then I'll feel so bad that I'll be motivated to do it. But if you look at that from a relationship standpoint, it's very dysfunctional. And so we can do better. Yeah, it's

very dysfunctional. And You've got a chapter kind of all the way at the end of the book that I love because you use the analogy of an engine burning clean or dirty fuel, right, And I think that that being really hard on ourselves or being motivated out of a place of pain is a certain type of fuel. But as you make the analogy, it's a kind of a dirty fuel that seems to burn. Okay for a while, and then everything starts to shut down. And I see a lot of people in the coaching work I do

where that's happened. They've been really hard on themselves a lot of their life and it actually worked for a while until it just all of a sudden stops and doesn't. Yeah, that's absolutely right, And I think that metaphor really fits. Is this the source of fuel? And so you know, someone says, yeah, but it works, or it got me to here, It's like, okay, and what is the quality

of that? And is there just because something works, does that not mean that they're would be something even better that allows you to move forward, allows you to achieve things, or put someone else first, whatever you think you need to do in the moment, but to do that from

a place of kindness. And and I think what people don't realize is that not only does that better fuel feel better for you for those wondering the better fuel is to be on your own side to find that optimal source of motivation, but it actually works better for others and for business and for relationships. Because if you think about this, let's say, Okay, I gotta go do this thing, but I'm telling myself do it or else do it? You're you're lazy? Come on, like, are you

tense inside? Are you resentful? Are you scared? Like? Are

you really going to perform at your best? Are you really gonna give your most when there's that critic in the corner of your mind, Just like waiting there with a with a belt, you know, if you better do well and it just it doesn't bring out the best in us, right, And a lot of times when we start to think about this being on our own side, being kinder to ourselves, the thing that most people think of often are affirmations, and oftentimes what we think of

as we think of something like Stuart Smalley from Saturday Night Live. You know, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and doggone it people like me right, sitting in front of a mirror and doing that, which is both makes us really cringe and some people may have actually tried this before and found, well, that didn't really work. Why do these not work? We're not tend to work so well? Yeah, fantastic. I mean, I think affirmations are a tactic, and there

are thousands of different tactics. On face value, they make sense they're sort of logical, like, okay, yeah, talk better to myself, But we're not logical creatures. And the tactic and which tactic you use doesn't work. Nothing will work because we need to do something much much different first,

and that's we need to make a fundamental decision. And I call us in the book the decision of a lifetime where you must decide, Hey, the way this is going me being subjugated to this inner irant and living as if I'm a on the bottom of the hierarchy

of worthiness of life. And if I just achieve one more thing and just look a certain way and just get this approval, that I'll be okay, Like when I really get how insane that is, how I'm living this life without fulfillment and love that I could be experiencing until some magical future date. When you really get how bad that feels, then you hopefully have a sense of uh compassion awakening you aversion that says, you know what,

I'm gonna do something different. I'm gonna decide to be on my own side, and I don't know how to do it all. Yeah, I'll figure out the tactics later. Just like if you decide to stop drinking, or you decide to get healthy. You don't know the whole journey, but you know that something's gonna shift, and you know to relate it to the parable I'm gonna decide to feed that other wolf, and then you start might start to realize, you know that the bad wolf that things

a beast. I've been feeding that thing a lot over the last twenty years of my life, and so I need to make that shift. But once we've made that fundamental decision, then we can start to find tactics that work. Specifically the affirmations and why I think those are problematic. Again, think of your relationship with yourself as a relationship with

another person. And imagine you're in a relationship with another person and you're sitting there with your say a lover or a spouse, and you you follow them around the house and you say like, I love you, I love you, I love you. You're great, you're so smart, you're so handsome. Okay, and you you know the mirror exercise, right, You get face to face with them and you say, for ten minutes, I love you this, I love you that. The person is like, it's a little much, it's a little weird.

It's not the kind of communication that actually resonates and works, and so it's a bit mechanical. It's a bit insincere in a way, and I think what we have to do is we have to make that fundamental decision and say, Okay, I really want to figure out how to sincerely treat myself better, treat myself like someone that I actually love and care about. Yeah, I love that. Tactics, aren't it, And so let's dive into the real issue in the

deep work here. But I think before we do that, it would be useful to talk about a concept that informs some of this work, called internal family systems, and briefly just maybe explain to us what that is, because the inner critic is just one of the members of that internal family, and I think it's helpful to talk about that to frame up the rest of this discussion. Yeah, fantastic. The easiest way to think about that is that we are a collection of parts. You might think that you're

a singular person because you have a name. I'm as ease, You're Eric. Okay, there there, I am. But actually it takes just a little bit of observation to realize that it's not the same. You're the same person at every moment. You know, maybe you are more courageous at one moment and more fearful. In another moment, you're more loving and generous and giving, and another moment you're a little bit

more you know, hard, or withdrawn or other things. And we have these different parts that are moving through us, and so a way to think about those parts is to think of them as an internal family. There's different versions of you, different family members, as it were. And many of us have certain family members that we give all of the attention to. They drive the ship, as it were, and other ones we keep out. We don't want to listen to them, we don't want to deal

with them. And for many people, their inner critic is actually a dominant force in their life. It's kind of like a patriarch or the matriarch. It's the one that you know, it holds the most sway and makes the decisions, or at least it must be consulted with and and must be placated and pleased. And so unfortunately we have this inner family, and then at the head of the

family is this force that's pretty toxic for us. You describe the inner critic at one point by saying, it has the emotional energy of a tantraming child, you know, but it's all so like ten ft tall and enormous. Yeah, yeah, it's it's the Theodore Reuben, a brilliant analysts called it the omnipotent screamer. You know, it's like you should have

known that. Why did you make that mistake? You're so stupid, you know, And it's like demanding these unreunrealistic things, and actually seeing that can be so helpful because you know, it's loud. You've given it a lot of authority over the years, and so it seems like such a dominant force. But then if you really listen to what it's saying and it's attitude and it's petulance, it has much more similarity like a four year old than some you know, authority that you want to base your life on. What

was that, the omnipotent screamer? Yeah, that's great. So we've got these different parts of ourselves inside of us. This is obviously a model of of looking at our psychological experience. So we've got these different parts of ourselves, and one of them is the inner critic, which in some of us takes on a very outsized role. It's the most outspoken,

loud member of the family. But this inner critic has something that's trying to tell us, and and most of your work moving forward, and this is where the conversation will go is about we have to allow that inner critic. We have to see what it's doing and work with it more skillfully than either trying to agree with it or shut it up. You really summed it up very well there, because you know, at the beginning, perhaps someone's

not even that aware. I certainly wasn't When I struggled with a lot of social anxiety and self loathing, I I wasn't aware I was maybe even vaguely aware of an inner critic. My thoughts felt true. If I thought I'm a loser, that person is like I want to talk to me, I can't speak up here, and they're not gonna like me. Was like someone narrating reality. Then I became aware of, oh, there's an inner critic, and

maybe everything that says isn't true. Wow, liberation. And then I think once people hear that, and some people discover that at different ages in their life, then there's a sense of like Okay, well you just get rid of it. If you just get to that thing, then then problem solved, and then you know, you get the campaign of the affirmations. People will just kind of get angry, like I want to kill this part. I would get rid of this critic.

It's awful, it's terrible. And that makes sense. You know, someone wakes up to something abusive and there's a sense maybe of like wanting to leave or get rid of it. The thing is, though, you can't just leave wherever you go, there you are, so it's not like a relationship with someone else you could get out of it. It's in your head, it's in your patterns of your psychology, and it's serving a function. Great thing I love to do with clients to say, okay, where is the propaganda campaign

of your critic? Where is it steering you towards? It's telling you, you know, you can't do that, you're not attractive enough, you mess that up? What's wrong with you? And usually it's trying to steer you towards something. And when you start to get curious and say, what's going on with this part? Where is it trying to steer me? Then something starts to open up and you realize the critics function primarily is to keep you safe from harm, safe from pain, safe from emotion, you know, because it

says you should have been more perfect. It was like, if all it was more perfect than I went to Gott and rejected, they would have liked me more. Well, you should have made that mistake. Well, if I hadn't made that mistake, maybe I wouldn't be having to face this challenge in my life right now. And so it has this fantasy if you just did everything perfectly, then

you would avoid all emotional discomfort. And then from that place, when you really get to see that, then you can start to work with that critic, because then what it becomes about is about being able to tolerate a much wider range of emotions. The critic is just trying to stop it all and and one of the primary ways is also stopping all actions, stopping all risk, and so then we can start to take real risks in our life,

feel more emotion. And to do that we have to learn how to work with this critic so it doesn't just scream and throw tantrums and stop us in our tracks. Before we go into how to work with that critic. Let's talk about the two main ways that are not helpful in working with the inner critic. Sure, so one is going to be to just ignore it and say, you know what, it's whatever, it doesn't bother me, or I don't even need to think about that or worry

about that. And generally what's going to happen then is you're going to be steered by it unconsciously. So there's that opportunity to put yourself out there, speak up in a group, or do something that maybe feels risky socially or emotionally, and then you just, yeah, I just don't take the opportunity. I just don't feel like it. I just don't want to. I'm just afraid. I don't know, And we don't realize that behind the scenes, behind the curtain is the voice saying like it's not gonna go well,

and then we just sort of follow it. So you can't just ignore it. And at the same time, sometimes people turn and try to say, you know, shut up, get out of here, I hate you, I hate this part I want and they create all this intertention, and then any part of us wants to keep going thinks it has a function, thinks it's going to try to keep us safe, and so it's gonna get louder and

it's gonna get bigger. And then people get into these long battles with their critic, or sometimes people get super hyper intellectual with their critic, you know, and this is you know, well, technically that's not true, because I have this evidence that shows that. And sometimes that can work. But often times, no matter what evidence you bring, the critic just comes back with something else or just shifts

topics entirely. So you're like, hey, listen, actually I am going to perform well at this work project because look what I've done in the past, and maybe you really stuck it to the critic. Then the critic goes, oh, yeah, well it doesn't matter because you're never gonna have love

in your life anyway. And you're just like, oh no, she got me, you know, so we you know, I'd say that's kind of expanding to three, but it's ignoring it, just trying to tell shut up and get out of here, and with hatred and push it away, or trying to be super intellectual and rational with it as if you

can just totally reason it away, right right. I think the ways we relate to it are interesting, and you do a great job in the book of sort of making examples that when we hear them, we're like, yeah, that's absurd, you say. You know, one of the ways that we relate to the inner critic is we just agree with it. It's like you're an awful person. You're never going to amount to anything, and everything you do

is terrible. Wind go, yeah, I guess that's true. Cheez, I really feel terrible right Like, which again, if somebody else said that to us, we'd be like, well, hang on a second here. And then the other, like you said, is trying to intellectualize with it, which you know, is

to debate it, which is you were saying that. It made me think about my partner's mother, who has Alzheimer's, and she will start to get scared about something, and for a while I thought, well, I'll just tell her that what she's afraid of isn't going to happen, and then will be Okay, so winter is coming and I am going to die of starvation. And I would say, well, no, you're not going to because well, we're here every so often, and when we're not here, someone else is always here.

And they can go get food, and we can always order food and we get food delivered. But what if there's a snowstorm, well you're in Atlanta. Won't last that long. I mean, everything I try encounter, she just comes up with an increasingly bizarre scenario until like we are at an apocalyptic scenario. You know, the cell phone towers are all down, all our caregivers are dead, and there's no intellectual discussing this with her. I just have to do and this is going to lead us to what you

tell us to do. I sort of just have to turn towards her and go, jeez, I see you're scared. That must feel frightening and boom, it vanishes, you know, or it doesn't vanish, but it changes. And so if we can't ignore our inner critic, if we can't argue our way out of it, and we know it, just agreeing with it is crazy, what do we do? Yeah? Fantastic? I love that example. Uh and and just you sharing that because what you just described there is is empathy.

It's acknowledging the experience of another person. And the reason she keeps escalating or going down a more catastrophic imaginary scenario is because the reason doesn't eliminate the feeling inside of her, right and so but it's like, but I still feel afraid, So let my mind's going to come from some other danger, because if I feel afraid inside, what's the dangers that my brain is gonna be scanning for danger? And our imaginations can be beautifully creative for

pleasure and beauty or for immense pain. And uh, She's also pointing out something which is like, there is no fundamental protection from all pain, danger and loss. And I think that's kind of like just brewing right underneath the surface of our orderly society. And the fact that I can press a button on my phone and get something delivered, it's like, yeah, it's all I'm totally safe. And at some level we know like chaos is sort of just underneath the surface, right, and that's just a part of

life on this planet. But there is something we can do, which is that humans. I mean, we're we're pack animals. We evolved to be together, We're created to share and be in community. And so when there's another human that just sees us and you say like, hey, wow, right beneath the surface, there could be lost, there could be pain and you say, yeah, I know, I see that too. I know that all of a sudden, that moment of scene, a moment of connection, actually can calm our nervous system.

It can transform our experience as you described. And so that just like we know, and I high like this is a book a lot like you know, this might sound really like WHOA how do I do it? You kind of know already, you know, because you how you want to deal with your your mom, how you want to deal with your friend, how you want to do with your kid. When you're at your best, you know, when you're patient, when you're loving, And we just want to bring that to ourselves. And that's that's going to

be empathy. The critics coming at you. First thing where you gotta start to become more aware of it and to differentiate you and you're thinking or from this part. And so what an exercise I have is that people just to start to name it. You can call it the inner critic, you can call it Jeffrey, you can call it any name you want. And you say, ah, that's the critic talking. Oh, that's the critic talking. Then you want to start to say, well, what's it saying?

And that's that saying, you know, something bad's gonna happen tomorrow. I'm gonna lose my job. Something bad's gonna happen in the environment. I can't handle this. Okay. So you're afraid of losing your job, Yeah, because you're not performing well. You're you're you're terrible at work. Okay, So we're gonna lose a job mainly because we're not doing good enough. And you know knows my pronouns get weird here you I we and you're dialogue with the critic. It's just

whatever's come in your way. Sometimes it says I, because it's fused, you know, you think it's you. Sometimes it says you it's attacking. You know. I generally like to start to relate to it like a we like okay, so you're scared that something is going to happen to us, and try to bring it in. But it's really just basic empathy, like let me get you here, what are you saying? What are you saying? And that's the first step is just to start to move towards it, become aware,

and move towards it with that empathy. Yeah, And I think that makes a lot of sense. It's just being heard. It needs to be heard, and when it's heard, it can relax a little bit. And I like that idea of naming it. The example I will give for myself is not for my inner critic. Um. My inner critics seems to have gotten relatively quiet in my later years. But what I do have is an inner e or you know, And so I I will imagine myself, you know, I'll just imagine your and and talking in your's voice.

If I find myself sort of being gloomy, which is a disposition I tend towards, I'll just suddenly be like, oh, there's my inner ear or again, you know, everything seems really hard today, and you know, and all of a sudden, my experience with it is I am, as you said, differentiated from it, or as they would say in acceptance and commitment therapy, I have cognitively diffused from it a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And when you do that, especially when you the voice, I mean, that guy's pretty adorable.

It's like, oh, can give you are a hug here? That's right, that's right, Yeah, that's funny. It's uh, it's fascinating too. I just love to play with this stuff and this goes maybe outside of the critic conversation, but just you know, one of my passions is his confidence and how do we bring our best selves to each day and feel inspired and charged the next That's the next book I'm writing right now. And one thing is

so fascinating. It's just to start to see how off those predictions are from ere, you know, because he'll say, whatever's the er or the catastrophe part or something. Give an example in the Book of My Son. You know, we just had this really fun day. We were out camping on a mountain and really great time. And then the next day we're waking up and he's like, nothing fun is going to happen today. Today it's just nothing fun.

And we're like in this beautiful camp spot, you know, but that's his way of saying like, oh, I don't want to leave. I don't know what we're gonna do today. It's gonna be bad. And so we have this like super fun day hike and you go to this get ice cream on the way home, which they love. You know. It's like just a fantastic day. And so at the end of the day, I was like, what was your experience of the day, And he's like, oh, we did this and we did that, and it's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

but nothing fun is going to happen tomorrow. And I just love playing with it and highlighting it with him and helping him see but seeing that in him help me start to work with my own inner you know, negative predictions and just how repetitive it can be. But when we really start to see how temporary it is, it's just a passing thought. It's actually more of a reflection of our current energy state than it is any sort of reality when you start to see it that way.

And same thing with a critic. Critic is usually a reflection of an inner state of fear. Almost always uh the e or is usually it's some sort of low werk. We're kind of maybe we're feeling depleted, we're a little tired, you know. So we start to see that, and then we can focus a little less on everything that that voice is saying and a little more on like, oh, or oh, I guess I'm a little tired right now? How can I take care of myself? Or oh, critic,

I must be afraid of something right now. I wonder what I'm afraid of, which is really like The next step in the process is you start to dialogue with the critic. But you know you have a little like uh decoder ring, and you know that the critics coming at you. That means I'm afraid of something. The critics afraid of something, and my job is to to go

beneath the surface and help address the actual fear underneath. Right, And so I'm gonna just read these steps up to where we are just to sort of frame it for listeners. So you've talked about these five steps to tame you're in a critic, and step one was identify when we're being self critical. Step two is to move towards your critic. We just talked about step three exploring the root fear and empathizing, and so step four. Now we move on

and we're regrouping in problem solving. So let's talk about what we're doing there. That's where you judo chopped the critic and you say, oh, I get it, I get it, and then it calms down and you get strike hard, strike fast, you know. But um, so regrouping problem solve is to get to the root fear is actually a really interesting thing where you really want to be very curious and just be like, Okay, I'm I'm afraid of something. Because the critic might not initially say that you're afraid.

It says like, you're ugly, I don't like you, you're bad, you know, no no one will ever love you. It's like, okay, that just sounds angry and sort of denigrating. But underneath you could say, wow, you are really angry sounding right now. And sometimes you can do it describing about yourself that might sound a little strange. Let me give an example.

So let's say the critics saying you know, you're unattractive, no one's gonna want to be with you or love you, or your partner's gonna leave you because you're getting older and all these things. You could say, wow, you're really afraid that someone's gonna leave his ease, like as ease is not worthy, is these is not good enough? And that's another layer of kind of cognitive fusion, as you call it, like stepping back and sort of saying this

thing play out. And so at first the critic might say, no, I'm not afraid, you're just ugly. It's like, okay, I know, so if if disease is ugly, what are you most afraid might happen. And it's like, eventually, if you really are empathizing, they'll start to be a softening and whether it's a critic or another part underneath, because you know, internal family systems has all the names all these different parts. But I sometimes find that that's a little complicated for clients.

So just like just keep connecting and seeing what comes up next. You don't have to know exactly who it's coming from. But something comes up next, and there's there's gonna be a soft underbelly there. That's like I'm afraid of my husband leaving me. I'm I'm afraid of you know, my sibling is sick, dying, whatever it is, right, it's something more raw and real, and in that moment, that's when we want to empathize with that. That's the step three. And then we're gonna start to be able to problem

solved with that. And sometimes there is a specific solution to that problem, you know, for example, like let's say it's a fear about speaking up in a workplace situation and says, no, your ideas are stupid, No one's gonna you know, don't share, don't share, and eventually say what I'm most afraid of is I'm afraid of being judged. I'm afraid of people thinking I'm not smart or that I'm not worthy of speaking up. Okay, well let's solve this problem because we want to speak up and you're

afraid of that pain. And the way that I love to think about problem solving is this idea of collaborative problem solving, And so it's really fun to actually ask the critic, what do you think might help solve this problem? And instead of saying, well, here's what we need to do, shut up is this and say well, what do you think? And then you start to actually work with these different parts of yourself and see what ideas come, see what

solutions come. Is there a way to speak up where we don't necessarily have to feel like it's such a risky thing? Is is there a way? In another way is to also say, well, what if there's a way for you to feel totally held and safe as we do it? And you start to explore with this, and sometimes there's an active solution like oh, we're not We're

gonna do X and more. It's just like, hey, we're working together, and all of a sudden it just shifts people's experiences and a lot of that fear just dissolves. Got it. I love the idea of the problem solving. I love the idea of the internal dialogue too, because if you except that the inner critic has a role to play, then you can accept that it might have solutions. Also, Yeah, that's where we sort of I'm going to hate it away or just get rid of it. Is actually we're

missing something. We're missing some message, some value. Every single part of us has something valuable to offer. It's just a matter of you know, are we the head of the household inside of there? Are we able to hear from each part? Because you wouldn't want the four year old running the household in a in a real household, you know, so same thing, but you still want to

hear from the four year old. And if you don't hear from the four year old, and you say, shut up, your opinion doesn't matter, get out of here, You're gonna have some acting out on your hands. That's right. And so I think it's Earth at this point saying, well, in this idea, if I've got these different parts, who's the head of the household? I love that that's a that's the deep question that we could we could take

off the edge of the earth. I'm gonna try and keep it within the realm maybe of inner critic and internal family systems and not the the ultimate existential inquiry into who I am. Yeah, and you know, I mean, I think it all kind of blurs together in a way. But basically, okay, so you could think on one level, which is ego has such a sort of a bad rap you know in the last whatever years, like get rid of your ego, man and egotistical and all these things.

But you know, there's another concept of the term that's like a healthy functioning interface with the world. Like uh, you know, you can say I'm a cosmic consciousness, you know, and there's no self and on some spiritual level these things are true. But okay, now I'm gonna go talk to my boss. Now I'm gonna go interact with my kids, Like how am I gonna I gotta go to the store and pay for this, Like there's some level of we need to be able to interface and function with

the world. We need some self. We need to take in the data of what's coming our way. Does this feel good to me? Does this not feel good to me? Do I want to be treated this way? What do I value? What do I love? What are my passions? What doesn't work for me in a partnership or in a workplace like So there's a very level practical level, and so you might call it the real self and I f s internal family systems. I love the concept

of a captain of the ship. Now, I know we're mixing metaphors here because we just talked about the head of the household. I am the captain of my ship. It's a mantra that I do with people at my online and live events. It says, I am the captain of my ship. I determine my destiny. It's like a reclaiming of a healthy version of ego, which says like I'm going to steer and it's the head of the household.

It's the captain of the ship. And it's like I just visualized this part that can that can hear all the other parts, that is some sort of arbiture and ultimate decider of what we're gonna do and is able to you know, here a part, but also say okay, okay, hold on a second, Hold on a second. You're getting a little lot of line here because we're not able to hear from this person because you're yelling so much. So give me a second. We're going to hear more from you, but I want to hear from this part.

So it's it's got like a dominance, it's got an authority in the room. And that, I'd say is one way to think about your your real self. It's able to observe all the other parts. It's able to influence, it's able to steer, it's able to guide, it's able to listen. And I think that's a very practical sense of self that we can operate from on a day to day basis. We could go into the deep aspects of there is no self, and I talked about that from time to time, and I've had some experiences of that.

And yet day to day we have to interact with ourselves and with others. And I think what we call it is open for debate. I like Captain of the Ship in in on my own side, you call it core self. But I think describing it can be helpful.

You describe it as the witness, the watcher, and then you also say it is centered, present, curious, and grounded, And I love that idea of it's it's that part of it that centered present, curious and grounded, and that grounded I think and centered speaks a little bit to the authority you're talking about as an ability to say, Okay, this is what we're doing. The other thing that you talk about is that there are core self is capable of handling any experience in life. It can handle any emotion.

You've got another sentence at our reason is because your heart is vast and its capacity to feel is infinite. And I love those ideas because if that core self can relate to, in this case, the inner critic and all of its fears and all the ways it thinks it's going to be hurt and says we can handle that. I can handle this, again mixing our pronouns, I we can handle this, We can feel that we will be okay. All of a sudden, we can really relax to a

certain extent. Absolutely, because in every moment, uh, if we're living from that core self, and then therefore we're able to reside in those qualities of groundedness and curious and curiosity is one of the fastest ways to become more effective with all these different parts and what we're sending though, is a message of safety to our nervous system, to all these different parts, because the other parts, you know, the critic or catastrophizing part, or something it does not

feel safe, and it's actually disconnected from reality to some degree because it's usually taking something the not a real threat and making it extremely threatening or even something that is a concern or a threat of making a case that we're not going to be able to survive. In all those cases, what we need is we need to be in that coreself where then we can say, Okay, we can handle whatever comes our way. That's a muscle to build that perception to be able to hold and

it's also something that's verified through experience. So the more you have experience in life and you don't shut down to but you open to the experience and you say bring it on. And that doesn't mean just like you do something. It also means you expanding your capacity to feel. I think there's such a flight from feeling in our culture, and I only want to feel good and I want to feel pleasure and I don't want to feel the

bad stuff. And if I feel bad, oh my god, I'm gonna get really depressed, and we just get so negative and depressive to avoid feelings. We get anxious to avoid feelings. We developed body pain to avoid feelings. And so much of my work with people is actually just increasing our capacity to feel from that core self and

just let the feeling move. And this is sort of the basic and of other guests you've had to talk about basic kind of mindfulness capacities to be with feeling, to let feeling move through you as opposed to clench down. And when we do that, we really get to see, ah,

I can handle that. Because when we say we can't handle something, an event like the loss of a loved one or the loss of a job, or you know, something with the scary stuff, what we're saying is I'm not going to be able to handle the feelings that I imagine I'm going to experience. And again, that is

a story in our minds. The truth is our capacity to feel anything is infinite, and if we don't fight it and run from it, it actually is something that will powerfully transform us and deepen us and expand us and actually prepare us for the next stage of our life and what we're meant to give beautifully said and I was talking with somebody the other day, and I think that sometimes we feel like we don't have the capacity to feel things because we're like, oh, if I

feel it, it will never go away. But it's actually our strategies to not feel it that actually never go away. Right, So the reason it feels like it never goes away is because our strategy to not feel it continues to reinforce and feed it. You know. It's the thought patterns oftentimes that we're engaging in, the mental spinning we're doing to avoid the feeling that just perpetuates it endlessly. And that's why we think, oh, I can't if I go

into that, it just lasts forever. But the reality is we're not going into it, and that's why it's lasting forever. That's right. We're thrashing around at the edge of the pool. Maybe we got our leg in there, and then we're just thrashing and thrashing and thrashing, or say, I'm in this pool forever, and it's like you haven't even gotten

in yet. You're in the water. And it's a lot people confuse like rumination and manipulation, like they're trying to change it, trying to fix it, trying to get a different perspective, and then you know, you throw some personal development in there, and they got new tools to try to fix it and change it and get rid of

it and slice it. And that's where I love the you know, the acceptance and commitment therapy stuff is so about cutting through that and just developing this like it's like a muscle, it's a fortitude, it's a life skill to be able to go into that fire of feeling.

And that's why one of the things I encourage, you know, anyone in my world and all clients to do is to get in a practice of being able to take a short cold shower every day or at least end your shower with cold, because it's like this physical training of stepping into the discomfort, and that is a it's a metaphor for our ability to step into discomfort of emotion. And then when we do that, thrash your and trying to get rid of it and say I'm okay, I'm

gonna go into it, yes, bring it on. Then we get to develop our skills in navigating the waters of emotion. And most of us, myself included, did not have skills because I spent the whole time with just one leg in the water trying to get out. But if you actually get in, then you get to learn how to navigate.

And there are so many ways to work with emotion, and there's so much nuance and mastery of how to work with a feeling, how to observe it in your body, how to dissipate it out of your skin and let it move and go to the periphery of your Body's all these powerful tools, but if we're in our head trying to get get away, we don't have access to any of them, and we never learned them. Yeah, that's great. I never know when these episodes are gonna air. But

a couple of weeks ago I interviewed whim Hof. Oh yeah, I'm a big fan of whim Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be a funny sounding interview. It's probably been out because whim is all kinds of fired up. He's basically yelling through the whole interview, and I've got my semi e or voice going the whole time. It's probably funny combination.

But I have been taking a short cold shower at the end of all my showers for years now, partially because I think it helps wake me up and I can use it, and partially because yeah, it's a stepping into purposely saying I'm going to do something uncomfortable right away here purposely. But since I interviewed Whim, I have been increasing my duration of cold shower. He inspired me. So I am I'm up to a minute in forty

five seconds, which when I'm in Columbus. The groundwater temperature between Columbus and Atlanta is different, so I prefer these longer cold showers when I'm in Atlanta. So the last step is called into the roar, So tell us about what that is, or the last step in these five steps to tame our inner critic. So you know the first four that we're talking about our kind of inner work. And people love that because it's like, oh, I could

do that in the safety of my bedroom. But the critic and it's predictions about what you're able to do, and its whole story to try to keep you safe and avoiding all risk in life. There's only so much you can You can comment, you can work with it, you can talk to it, and there's a lot more nuance too. Sometimes the best thing to do is empathize it for a moment and say, you know what, I disagree. I don't. That's not how that's gonna go. It's not

how I see myself. And you know, so there's all these different ways, but at the end of the day, you've got to step into life. You gotta go do the thing. And we're just talking about the cold showers, right, you gotta go into the discomfort. Discomfort equals freedom. Discomfort is the pathway to to anything that we want to create or achieve or experience, whether it's a deeper relationship.

You gotta have uncomfortable conversations that you might want to avoid, whether it's creating a business or growing your career or being more assertive and a roomful of people that intimidate you.

It's all about capacity to leaning in that discomfort. And so you know, Into the Roar comes from this story that a friend of mine ran this gym they called a training for warriors, and it's the story about in the savannah, how they'll have all the generally the female lions that do the hunting in the in the pride, and so they're like sneaking through the tall grass going

towards gazelles or whatever creature you're gonna eat. And then they'll have the male lion stand on the other side, kind of in the grass as well, and let out this intense loud roar that rips through the air. And so the natural impulse and the animals is to run away from the roar, right into the ambush step by the female lions and the ones that survived. Though, when they hear the roar, instead of running away from it,

they run right into it. Of course, they run right past the male lion, who he's not known for hunting very much. He just watches them go. So that's the part of the story I need to know more about. Why is the male lion just lounging around letting gazelles run by. I know, it's it's an interesting system that they got. They got there. It's the lesson there is that we have to face that the challenge. So it's

basically defy the doubt. In fact, the full mantra that I got people through is I am the captain of my ship. I determined my destiny. I defied out, I defeat out, I destroyed out. And the way that we destroyed out, the way that we defeat it is by defying it consistently, and it starts to dissolve, it starts to erode, It starts to have less and less power.

And you know, you mentioned that your critic is gone down over the years, and there's probably many reasons for that, but one of them could be the fact that you've consistently over the years to be where you are, to be what you're doing, you must have devide what that voice said, you know, again and again and again and again, and so it starts to lose its power. And that's

where the true liberation comes in. And that's where people, if they wan want to be free of the critic, it can't just be done in you know, in the room or in the therapy room or something like that. We also have to get out there and take bold action again and again and again. So the critics says, no, that person couldn't possibly want to talk to you, You're

not worthy of their time. Well, you do what every inner work you need to, and then you pick up the phone, you email them and say, hey, I'd love to connect with you, or I'd love to take you out to lunch, or it's a business thing or a personal thing, and you just face that fear again and again and again and again and again. Yeah, and you saying that it made me think about the fact that the other benefit there is realizing, like it's not all binary.

The inner critic is not always right and always wrong. So like that question of that person isn't going to have time for you, right, and you get up the curve age and you ask them. Sometimes that person will have time for you, and sometimes that person won't. And so it's not that it's the inner critic is always right or always wrong. There's there's a more subtle nuance to it. It's that continuing to keep showing up that's

so helpful. And that's what I like so much about this book and your work is there's a real focus on the inner work that we have to do and the inner empathy, and then there's also a focus on the outer work and that that both those have to happen. And I really strongly sort of agree with that, and I would say, you know, so much of this show is about those two things. You know, what's the inner work that we need to do so that we can

show up and do the outer work? Yeah? Absolutely, I mean one without the other becomes uh lopsided and uh less effective from what it really could be. Yeah, now you and I are at the end of our time for this. We're going to talk in the post show conversation.

I want to talk a little bit more with you about another part of the book that I found really helpful that we didn't even get time to talk about, which is something called value equivalence, right, which is the things that we think we need to have in order to be valuable. You know, we all have our list of them if I was just this or I was just that. So I want to talk about value equivalence, and I also want to talk a little bit more

about that. A lot of these things are reflections of of an energy state that sometimes thoughts cause emotion, but oftentimes emotions and energy cost thoughts and the bidirectional nature of that. So you and I will talk about that in the post show conversation. Listeners if you'd like access to that, as well as an extra episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem, and add free episodes. You can become a member of our community by going to one you feed, dot net, slash join ziz.

Thank you so much, this has been a wonderful conversation. Absolutely my pleasure. I think these concepts are really helpful, and I think you do a really nice job of laying them out in a really clear, powerful way. So thank you, thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of

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