Inner Critic vs Inner Coach

During lockdown and the challenges it brings, I think a message on our ‘inner critic vs inner coach’ is so important. One thing I’ve found during this pandemic is that there is no where to run and hide from ‘myself.’ Put simply, it’s me and only me day after day after day.  With this reality, it’s sometimes easy to get in to a place of criticism and not appreciating or valuing ourselves. That’s when the heading of this blog comes in.

A classic way to explain myself is to describe a moment when I was away on holiday over Christmas. There was an incident where my son went surfing and I wanted to go and watch him, but between where we were and the place where he was going to surf were some quite challenging rocks for a blind person to get over.  My son kindly said “let’s go together and I can help you.”  However, that didn’t happen and the surf drew him to forget about his father! I then found myself up in my room feeling angry with myself and my disability…. But I stopped and asked myself the question, “how can I do this?”  I decided I simply needed a pair of shoes so I didn’t slip on the rocks and my watch word was going to be to go very slowly (this is the inner critic becoming the inner coach). So off I set and to my surprise I effortlessly overcame the rocks in front of me and it was not long before I was trying to ‘watch’ my son surfing.

I think in these tough times we must constantly ask ourselves ‘how can I best approach this’ and not immediately lean on the self condemning and negative approach.  Let’s coach and train ourselves rather than criticising and condemning.

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