the one practice no one wants to do
beyond the inner critic
The north star of my work, both in my coaching practice & my content, is to help people create what they want to create.
Creation is what we’re here to do, whether that’s creating a business, a family, an art project, or an inner sense of peace.
But creation is work, without exception. It is the hard work of taking our vision and making it into something tangible. Some parts of that work are joyful, and it is possible to amplify that joy so it becomes a bigger & bigger part of our process… but there are always those bits that we don’t really want to do: the difficult, scary, uncertain parts.
What seems to distinguish pleasant and unpleasant work is a matter of orientation. Pleasant work can take many forms, but it seems to have a rough shape: we know what we’re trying to achieve, we’re relatively confident in our ability to achieve it, and we get small bits of satisfaction along the way.
Unpleasant work, on the other hand, tends to be nebulous and messy. We don’t really know the goal, and we’re either a little or a lot doubtful that we can get there. It’s like slogging through the mud in a rainstorm. Or maybe we do know what to do, but it’s just plain tedious, with no real satisfaction along the way.
These definitions map to Csikszentmihalyi’s definition of flow, as being the proper balance of challenge & ability:
What seems to characterize pleasant work is an abundance of positive feedback. We know what we’re doing and we know we’re doing it well, so we feel satisfied with the process.
What seems to characterize unpleasant work is either the presence of negative feedback (we know we’re doing a bad job) or the absence of feedback.
Framed in these terms, if we want to make unpleasant work more pleasant, a clear question emerges: how can we experience more positive feedback along the way?
internal vs external feedback loops
An external feedback loop is something in your environment that tells you how you’re doing. Think of test-driven software development, or graded assignments, or boss fights in a video game, or a mentor peering over your shoulder and critiquing your work.
If there are lots of feedback loops, and the feedback is generally positive, we tend to enjoy our work. This is what makes video games so addictive (especially in times when we’re lacking other sources of achievement in our lives). External feedback loops can keep us going for a long time.
To make your work more fun, it might be as simple as asking, How can I build more feedback loops into this process?
But because my frame is somatics, my primary interest is in internal feedback loops. Internal feedback is how you feel, in the moment, towards the work. It’s the voice of your intuition, or your fear, or your joy. It’s whatever is happening within you, as you try to create what you want to create.
External feedback loops can trigger certain internal experiences, which is how they’re effective. But to create an internal feedback loop, we need to go deeper and ask, how can I give myself access to the experience I want to have? In the absence of external feedback, how can I create an experience of satisfaction & joy?
the practice no one wants to do
I’ve worked with dozens of clients over the past year in my coaching practice. Most were struggling with some form of stuckness, unable to create what they wanted to create in the way that they desired. Their inner critic was a constant presence, pointing out all the ways they were wrong or insufficient.
The inner critic is an example of a negative internal feedback loop. You start doing the intimidating task that you’ve been putting off for weeks, and the inner critic tells you exactly how you’re doing it wrong, how you’ll always fuck it up, and oh, by the way, you’re a piece of shit for not doing it sooner.
In the face of such an internal onslaught, it’s very hard to access feelings of satisfaction & joy in our work. What’s missing is a balancing force, in the form of a positive internal feedback loop.
A positive internal feedback loop is really just a fancy term for the real currency of the universe: appreciation. We might also call this celebration.
Where an inner critic tears us down, an inner appreciator builds us up. It points out the progress we’re making, the courage we’re displaying in the face of resistance, the seeds we’re planting which will someday bear fruit. Celebrating ourselves gives us the energy needed to keep going.
And yet… no one wants to do it.
resistance to celebration
Using celebration as a tool makes perfect sense at a physiological level. When we look at all the good that we’re doing, we realize we’re more empowered than we think. In other words, we have more options than the inner critic would like us to believe. “I’m good at this, therefore I’ll likely be good at other things.”
The presence of options relaxes our nervous system. When we’re in fight/flight/freeze, it’s because we perceive only one option available. A flight response means our subconscious thinks the only thing we can do is run away. Dysregulation is a lack of options; regulation is an abundance of options.
But many of my clients, especially my male clients, have resisted the idea of celebrating themselves. It feels cheesy, unnatural. It feels childish. It even feels weak, as if they should be able to get this done without needing any cheap validation.
For many of us, it feels so much easier to listen to the inner critic than the inner cheerleader. We’d often prefer to look at all our flaws, rather than taking an honest look at our strengths.
the discipline of celebration
The simple explanation for this resistance to appreciation is that we’ve been taught that a self-effacing approach is more noble & acceptable. Many of us have grown up in environments where we got plenty of material for our inner critic, but very little evidence for our inner appreciator.
But this pursuit is, in my mind, the proper role for discipline. Rather than using discipline to force ourselves to do unpleasant work with no validation, we can use discipline to build the right conditions for that work, by committing to celebrating ourselves.
Rather than hope that we will magically learn the ability to work joylessly for hours, we can start to build that joy into our process. We can keep coming back to the practice of noticing how we’re showing up and explicitly naming the positive qualities we’re displaying.
We can choose to celebrate every little milestone. Tweet for 2 likes? Celebrate. First Substack subscriber? Celebrate. Wrote a few hundred lines of code that ended up being a waste but gave you a better understanding of the problem? Celebrate.
Celebration is just about noticing & naming, over & over. Yet it takes commitment. It requires admitting that we’re human, and to be human is to seek joy & satisfaction. It requires taking responsibility for giving ourselves access to that joy & satisfaction. It involves indulging the childish, silly, weak parts of ourselves, so that we have the energy needed to do the work we want to do.
Are you ready to commit to the practice of celebrating yourself?
With love & appreciation,
Scott
P.S. if you’d like support in building a creative process based in joy & satisfaction, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊