inner critic – Grow Mindfulness

The Final Stages of the Hero’s Journey for the Frontline Midwife

In a previous post, I discussed the story of Anna Kent as a midwife volunteering in South Sudan in terms of the first 8 stages of the Hero’s Journey. What I will discuss now is her Sudan story expressed in terms of the final stages of the hero’s journey (Stage 9-12). I’ll be drawing again on her book, Frontline Midwife: My Story of Survival and Keeping Others Safe, in which she tells her story in graphic detail.

The final four stages of the hero’s journey – stages 9 to 12

The final four stages of her hero’s journey in South Sudan were deeply formative and life-changing and enabled Anna to develop a new perspective, skills and determination to help others in need wherever they were in the world:

9. Reward – there is no doubt that Anna emerged a stronger person as a result of overcoming personal challenges, including self-doubts and questioning of her obsession with volunteering. The reward, too, that she experienced involved saving the lives of mothers, children and babies. However, she had to deal with the sense of guilt she felt for the death of baby Mariam. James tried to reassure her that she was not responsible for the death of the baby – in his words, “it was everyone in the world’s fault”. She accepted intellectually that “every aid worker has a patient they carry in their conscience”. Emotionally, though it was a continuous challenge to overcome the sense of guilt which pervaded her nightmares as she relived the traumatic event. Unfortunately, our brains carry a negative bias – we see the negative much more strongly than the positive. For a time, Anna found that her negative thoughts overwhelmed her rewarding thoughts – her personal satisfaction that she had saved many lives who otherwise would have died without her skilled and brave intervention.

10. The Road Back – this is both a physical journey and a metaphorical one. On the physical level, it involves returning to her “ordinary world” – life with her boyfriend Jack in their comfy home in Nottingham. The metaphorical aspect relates to being comfortable with her new self in an environment that is starkly different on every dimension to the one she was leaving in South Sudan. It also meant dealing with the grief of leaving her mentor, James, her colleagues and the Sudanese people who she grew to love and admire for their courage, gentleness and stoicism. Her short recreation spells during her volunteering in South Sudan forewarned her of the pending difficulty of the “road back”. She found on her brief recreation trips that she could not share with Jack the horrors and traumas she had experienced and realised that she was totally lacking in libido. Friends would ask about the exciting bits of her story but all she could share were her stories about snakes, not the reality of the poverty, harshness, and deprivation of the basic rights of women in South Sudan. She found that she and Jack had so little to talk about, and their time together involved lots of silence as Anna tried to come to grips with crossing the threshold back into her former life.

11. Resurrection – on her return home Anna broke off her relationship with Jack and moved to her parent’s home. This created significant stress for her as she was unable to talk to her parents about her Sudan experiences or her reasons for breaking up with Jack – both these topics were too raw and traumatic. In speaking with James her mentor, she shared her angst and he informed her that he had experienced similar dislocation and disorientation on his return from volunteering abroad. James suggested that he made the mistake of “trying to be the person I once was when that person has gone”. Anna recognised that everything changes with overseas service in a different culture and land where deprivation is rife – your values and perspectives change and you see “luxuries” and waste with new, intolerant eyes. The way home for her involved a dying to the old person she once was and becoming a new, stronger, values-driven person.

12. Return with the Elixir – another phase in Anna’s transition to her new persona began with entering a share house with two other nurses. What she found was the ability to party together and share their experiences in a way that was cathartic. Out of this period came a very strong resolution by Anna to build on her newly acquired midwife capabilities. She enrolled in a midwifery degree at Nottingham University and had a very rewarding and enlightening work experience in Ethiopia as a student midwife. She felt stronger and better prepared for subsequent volunteering missions involving Haiti following the earthquake in 2010 and Bangladesh working with Rohingya refugees – and these experiences entailed different journeys with new challenges and companions (as discussed in her book).

Reflection

Throughout her hero’s journey in Sudan and beyond, Anna had to face her traumas which had “many heads” and in the process develop her resilience. An experienced volunteer nurse, Anita, had told her “you’re gonna have to work out how to sit with these painful feelings without reacting to them”. Like James, Anita suggested that meditation would be helpful as well as focusing on what has been achieved, not what her inner critic perceived as a “failure”. James even suggested that Anna meditate for “an hour every day” and often encouraged her to be in the moment and experience what was before her – e.g., children playing with kites made from sticks, and the earth glowing from the setting sun.

Anna demonstrated that as we grow in mindfulness through meditation (no matter how difficult we find it) and other mindfulness practices such as being in the moment, we can learn to regulate our emotions, deepen our self-awareness and develop resilience.

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Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Calmfidence: Developing Calm Confidence to Face Life’s Challenges

In the interview podcast with Tami Simon of Sounds True, Patricia Stark discussed some of the exercises and tools covered in her book that provide ways to develop Calmfidence – calm confidence in the face of life’s challenges. Patricia’s book Calmfidence addresses barriers to confidence including personal past history, perfectionism and the issue of negative self-talk (or the “inner critic” as she calls it).

Her book tracks her own journey to achieving calm confidence as well as provides very practical approaches to creating Calmfidence in our own life. The focus of her book is on situations where we are placed in the limelight such as public speaking, presentations, being interviewed for a job or performing in a public arena. While these situations are the primary catalyst for her book, the principles and practices she shares are relevant to challenges in everyday life. Fundamentally, in her view, you cannot have genuine and sustainable confidence without inner calm.

Exercises and tools to develop calm confidence

Patricia discussed several exercises and practices that could be used in a variety of situations to be able to approach the inherent challenges with calm confidence. Some of these are:

Managing nerves – Patricia like many other authors and commentators contends that nerves help you be more aware and to prepare properly so as to reduce (but not eliminate) the unknown and unpredictable. Nerves indicate that you care and care enough to be worried about the outcome for the people you are helping. When we are not nervous, we may have stopped caring which may be the result of ”compassion fatigue”. Even highly accomplished professionals become nervous before an event. Alfie Langer, an Australian Rugby League legend, used to become quite nervous and nauseous before a match, even in his latter playing days.

So the challenge Is to manage your nerves, not eliminate them altogether. Patricia recounts the comment of a professional performer who told her that “our job is to get the butterflies flying in formation”, not to do away with them. Patricia maintains that what is necessary is to have the courage to reflect on the uncomfortable feelings and what they say to you and about you. She suggests that failure to address the fear and discomfort will “work against you”. In her words, you have to “start to feel the butterflies” which can help you to become “desensitised” to their presence.

Simultaneously, with facing your nervousness and its bodily manifestation, it is important to reaffirm why you are undertaking the public activity and what people can gain from it. You can reinforce this positive thinking by being grateful for the experience of helping others through utilising your unique mix of experiences, acquired skills and resources.

Snow Globe exercise – during the podcast, Patricia led listeners in this exercise. Basically it involves envisaging your mind as a snow globe and viewing your troubled thoughts as the snow flakes descending slowly to the bottom so that they appear as “fallen snow”. This can be accompanied by taking a deep breath and holding it briefly and releasing it in time with the falling snow and the settling of your troubled thoughts. Patricia asserts from her own experience, that this exercise can clear your mind and slow your heart rate so that you can “think straight” and respond to challenges more appropriately.

Visualising Success – this is not success in materialistic terms but with regard to achieving what you set out to do in terms of helping people. Patricia suggests that you start with deep breathing and as you breathe in envisage absorbing calmness and confidence and as you breathe out envisage letting go anxiety and stress. The next step is to visualise your public activity going really well and people providing feedback that is very positive and affirming. She suggests too that you envisage our voluntary audience as ”allies” who are “eager to learn” rather than uninvolved critics with nothing better to do than critique your offering and/or performance.

Sack of potatoes exercise – with this exercise you envisage your body as a “sack of potatoes” with each lumpy potato (uncomfortable feeling) confined by the sack (the mind) that holds them together and contains them. The next step is to envisage taking a pair of scissors and cutting open the lower part of the sack so that the potatoes (uncomfortable feelings) fall out “one by one”. Then you can envisage the sack of potatoes crumpled in a corner, empty of its ingredients. Tami from Sounds True reinforced the value of this exercise by sharing her own experience of undertaking the “sack of potatoes” practice.

Retreating when you hit a rough patch – Patricia describes a period during the pandemic where she was feeling overwhelmed by the book commitments/deadlines and the need to “protect herself and her family”. She decided that she would “have to retreat” in order to “keep her head above water”. She consciously made the choice to give herself some slack and “do nothing”. Patricia was then able to emerge from this period with renewed energy and heightened insight.

Reflection

I have found in the past that what helped me to calm my nerves before a public activity such as a presentation or a workshop, was to revisit a successful prior event and recapture the positive feelings and audience response and use that as an anchor for a forthcoming event. This taps into your sense of self-efficacy – your belief, based on experience, that you are capable of competently undertaking a specific task.

I also found when I was writing my PhD dissertation that I needed to take a break from it in the latter stages. I achieved this by going away to Stradbroke Island with my family for a few weeks. It was while I was sitting on the bank of Brown Lake, watching the boys play in the water, that I gained new insights in to a model that would effectively integrate the focus and findings of my doctoral research. There are times when we need to take a break, change our focus (from self-absorption to other-focused) and absorb the calmness and healing power of nature.

Patricia’s book contains many personal stories of how “Calmfidence” has played out in her life and offers other exercises and tools besides those mentioned here. If you access her book’s sales page, you can view and download the first 10 pages of her book (in PDF format) where she explains six “Calmfidence Boosters” to help you develop the calm confidence needed to manage life’s challenges.

As we grow in mindfulness through nature, meditation, reflection or other mindfulness practices, we can achieve a calm confidence, gain increased understanding and insight and manage life’s challenges more effectively.

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Image by Ana_J from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Mindfulness and Creativity in Our Life’s Work

In a recent presentation for The Contemplative Care Summit, Seth Godin spoke about, Mindfulness & Creativity at Work. He stressed the importance of being mindful about self-talk and taking intentional action if we are to be creative in our life’s work. Seth writes a daily post for his creative blog which he has been writing for more than a decade. He is the author of 20 world-wide best-selling books such as The Practice which is about creative work. He is also the initiator of many creative projects. You can find his videos on YouTube, including his five TED Talks.

Self-talk: a barrier to creativity

Seth has previously written about what he calls “the lizard brain” – the amygdala, the part of the brain driven by fear. He maintains that this is behind our negative self-talk and can be disabling if we let it control our thoughts. He challenges the myth of “writer’s block” and suggests that it is a blockage in our thinking created by our fear and perpetuated by self-stories. He suggests, like one of my early mentors, that a way forward is to write, write, write. Eventually, our not-so-good writing becomes good and then great – especially if we have a constructive, critical friend who is commenting on our writing out of understanding, comprehension, and good will, not out of ignorance or inanity.

Creative people such as Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, speak extensively about how fear and self-talk can block our creative genius. Clare Bowditch – singer, songwriter, and author of Your Own Kind of Girl – describes in detail (in this autobiography), the power and pervasiveness of our inner critic. Worrying about whether our creation, our work, our project, our song/performance or our presentation will be “good enough” sets in train a series of self-stories that can lead to procrastination. Tara Brach offers the R.A.I.N. meditation – incorporating the steps of recognise, accept, investigate and nurture – as a compassionate way to deal with our self-generated critic.

Seth talks extensively about a specific fear, the “fear of failure”. We tend to catastrophize the outcomes if something “goes wrong” or “does not work out”. He points out, however, that we do not have control over the outcomes and focusing solely on them leads to inertia and stifling of creative endeavour. Seth maintains that “failure” and creativity go hand-in-hand and he talks about his many failures. He argues that if you are doing something that you have never done before or that has not been done by anyone else, then the chances of failure are always present – this uncertainty about outcomes defines the essence of creativity and we capture this in our language, “going out on a limb”, “going outside our comfort zone”, “leaping into the unknown” or “exploring new terrain”.

Seth suggests that we need to stay in the present moment and enjoy the process of creating something new – of bringing our creation into the world for the benefit of others. Focusing on process in a mindful way creates freedom from fear, space to explore and openness to new ideas. He also argues that we can overcome the nagging concern that we are an “imposter” (posing as a good writer, performer or facilitator) by accepting that you will act as an imposter if you are being creative – you are taking action with uncertain outcomes, you cannot guarantee success, and you are hoping that it will “turn our well” without any “iron-clad guarantee” that it will do so.

Intentional action

Intention provides the impetus to initiate and sustain creative action. Diana Winston offers a meditation process to help us to bring mindfulness to our motivations and intentions so that we can achieve clarity of purpose, align our energy and strengthen our motivation in the face of obstacles. Leo Babauta offers a three-step process, incorporating clarifying intentions, that we can use to start doing the meaningful work that we have been avoiding. He also offers a daily practice to overcome the avoidance that we experience when confronted with difficult tasks.

Ricardo Semler, entrepreneur and author provides a more fundamental approach to access our underlying intentions. He suggests that we ask our selves “why” three times to get to the fundamental question, “What am I doing this for?” Unfortunately, our busyness becomes the greatest impediment to accessing our creativity and opening our selves to wisdom, clarity, and fulfillment. Taking time to be still and revisit our intentions can enable us to achieve alignment with our overall life purpose and access the resonance that this alignment brings. We can then begin to experience inspiration and intuition – the seeds of creativity.

Reflection

To fully access our creativity, we need to be aware of our negative self-stories, our fear of failure, and our imposter concerns. By not facing up to the self-critic and the “lizard brain”, we can numb ourselves into inaction and procrastination. As we grow in mindfulness, through meditation, reflection, and reframing, we can increase our self-awareness, develop self-compassion to deal with our negative thoughts and bring intention and alignment to our creative actions. The stillness and silence of mindfulness meditation acts an “incubator” for creativity and innovation.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Using Mindfulness to Help Ourselves and Others

Tara Brach was recently interviewed about her course, Integrating Meditation and Psychotherapy, and the interview, Holding a Healing Space, is available as a free webinar at Sounds True. While Tara introduces elements of the course for psychotherapists in her interview, she also provides sound advice and processes that we can use to help ourselves and others (even if we are not trained in psychotherapy). She explains how meditation and awareness practices can reduce our reactivity and help us to develop calmness. Tara also provides a short practice of her R.A.I.N. process that can be used by anybody anywhere.

Dr. Tara Brach is a highly regarded author, psychologist and meditation teacher with her own psychotherapy practice. She is a significant member of the Inner MBA faculty and co-creator and facilitator with Jack Kornfield of the online Power of Awareness Course. Tara explained that she was conscious of the upsurge in the need for psychotherapy in these challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic and this motivated her to re-offer her course looking at ways to integrate meditation and psychotherapy.

Tara stressed that in these turbulent and traumatic times, we need to be able to engage in meditation and other awareness practices “to calm the nervous system”. When using these attention-developing approaches in psychotherapy, it empowers the patient to take control of their own lives and gives them a sense of agency – personal control over their inner and outer environment. Mindfulness and self-compassion have been shown also to build and strengthen resilience.

Reducing reactivity

A key outcome of mindfulness developed through meditation and reflective practices is reduction in reactivity – through developing both self-awareness and self-regulation. If we are aware of our harmful response to specific negative stimuli, we are better able to self-manage. In reducing reactivity and inappropriate responses to stimuli, we can also reduce our sense of shame associated with our hurtful words and actions. Self-awareness needs to be supported by self-compassion, otherwise we can activate our inner critic through solely focusing on negative self-evaluation.

The R.A.I.N. Process

The R.A.I.N. process, refined over time by Tara, brings self-awareness and self-compassion together. It is a process that is accessible to anyone at anytime and does not require psychotherapy training to use it to help ourselves or others. In the video interview, Tara leads a guided meditation using the four steps of the R.A.I.N. process:

Recognize – Once you have adopted a comfortable position and focused on introspection rather than visual distractions, you can begin the process by taking a number of deep breaths, using the outbreath to let go of pent-up tension. This can be complemented by a body scan designed to identify and release any physical tension in areas such as your forehead, shoulders, arms or stomach. Try then to capture a recent interaction in detail that you are feeling unease about. Recognize any complex emotions that emerge such as resentment, envy or anger. You can give recognition to these emotions by naming them accurately (even in a whisper) – in a way that Karla McLaren describes as granular. Naming your feelings as accurately as possible helps you to acknowledge their depth and intensity and gives you a greater sense of control over them – it enables you to tame them.
Allow – This is letting that emotion be, not denying it or pushing it away. It’s facing the emotion in all its rawness and strength – with whatever courage you can muster. Honesty about your emotions is itself an act of courage.
Investigate – The investigation is not a cognitive process but a somatic experience – feeling the emotion in all its intensity in your body. It involves identifying how and where in your body that emotion is manifested – Tara describes this process as “feeling into your body”. You can also access your beliefs about yourself and others involved in the precipitating interaction. This stage can leave you feeling vulnerable, open to shame and disappointed in yourself. However, the next step of “nurture” conjures up self-compassion as a powerful form of self-healing.
Nurture – Your nurturing can begin by a light touch on that part of your body where you sense your complex emotion the most, e.g. your chest, throat or arms. Offer loving-kindness to that part of your body. You can also imagine kindness being expressed towards you by someone you respect or love.

Reflection

Tara’s video interview highlights the key elements incorporated in her course that focuses on embedding meditation and awareness practices in psychotherapy and reinforces the need for such an integration particularly in these challenging times when everyone is affected, including psychotherapists. Her explanation of the benefits of these mindfulness practices, also provides motivation for us as individuals to engage in self-care through these processes, especially the R.A.I.N. process.

When we adopt R.A.I.N. with openness and honesty, we can achieve a new sense of presence and calmness in our lives that, in turn, can impact positively the lives of others. People can experience our calmness and peace and we can feel a strong desire to take compassionate action towards others.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, reflection and mindfulness practices such as R.A.I.N., we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, a greater degree of self-regulation and increased empathy and compassion for others. We come to recognise that we are not “better than”, but the same – with our own faults, impatience, sensitivities, unfounded beliefs and unkind words and actions; all existing side-by-side with our thoughtfulness, generosity, loving-kindness, gratitude and our inner richness.

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Image by Mammiya from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution, Non-Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Self-acceptance and Overcoming Negative Thoughts

Tami Simon of Sounds True interviewed Professor Steven Hayes co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). In the interview podcast, Steven focused on Self-Acceptance and Perspective-Taking. Fundamental to the ACT approach is the capacity to “step Back” from the inner critic, notice the negative thoughts that are being generated and listening to those thoughts with a sense of curiosity to understand what is going on. It involves being vulnerable to, rather than hiding away from, the hurt entailed in negative self-evaluation. Added to this facing up to the inner critic are defusion techniques, such as perspective-taking, designed to create distance from the thoughts by seeing that they are not facts, only “streams of words” or momentary sensations.

Acceptance of thoughts and sensations

Steven explains that “acceptance” in the context of ACT involves acknowledging these negative thoughts as a gift to be explored, not something to be accepted passively or tolerated as if they were true and readily verifiable. It involves recognising the wisdom embedded in our difficult emotions because they serve to illuminate something that we care about deeply.

This involves the flexibility to acknowledge the gap between our thoughts and our inner awareness of them and the capacity to take what is useful in those thoughts to motive us to act on them to achieve a positive outcome that we value. It is about regaining control over our inner world so that we can live our life “with meaning and purpose” – the core theme of Steven’s latest book, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Towards What Really Matters.

Steven illustrates this acceptance approach by discussing negativity around body image and how to turn this into effective problem solving – rather than being trapped in the unfounded message of the inner critic that relates body weight to ugliness or lack of attractiveness. He suggests as a starting point to revisit your past to see where the mental connection between body weight and ugliness originated, e.g. it might have had its origins in bullying at school by other students who were jealous of your academic or sporting success. Following this exploration, you can use one of the many defusion strategies in ACT that can take away the power of this autosuggestion. Russ Harris, ACT practitioner, provides a great set of defusion strategies in his humorous, illustrated book, The Happiness Trap Pocketbook – a very readable and accessible guidebook for personal change.

Perspective-taking: a defusion strategy to create space and disempower the inner critic

Steven highly recommends “perspective-taking” as a defusion strategy to enable you to step back from negative thoughts and create enough space to disempower them. There are many ways to undertake perspective-taking. Steven describes one process in his interview podcast that he asserts will work even when you lack knowledge of mindfulness, ACT or any other related modality. The steps he describes are as follows:

Picture yourself struggling with the negative critic you are confronting (with your eyes closed or looking downwards to reduce distractions)
Notice that it is a part of you that is noticing your struggle
Now take that part of yourself that is noticing and tune into your body seeing yourself watching the struggle (you can even tune into the earliest occurrence of these negative thoughts) – in the process show self-compassion towards yourself
Then ask yourself, “Is this person loveable, wholesome or empathetic?’
Picture yourself sitting there observing this loveable, wholesome person from a short distance – as in a movie
Imagine remembering 10 years from now how you looked as you struggled with the inner critic – picture yourself sitting in a chair or on the floor still struggling the same way
You can ask yourself then, if you were observing this struggle in this future time, “What words of wisdom would you offer yourself?”
Then bring yourself back to the present by grounding yourself in your body.

In this interaction, your wisdom will emerge, and you can offer yourself encouraging words such as “you can move on”. According to Steven, research shows that “human intelligence in inherently self-compassionate” – the thought processes above enable you to tap that self-compassion. He maintains that this form of perspective-taking is itself “very healing”.

Reflection

We can become overwhelmed by our inner critic if we give it free play, without challenge. So often, we avoid facing up to what is painful. The Inner MBA, developed by Tami Simon and colleagues, provides one avenue to explore our inner landscape, and defusing strategies offer many ways to break the hold of our inner critic. Mindfulness practices provide a further avenue for facing up to our negative thoughts and related disabling beliefs.

As we grow in mindfulness through these processes, we can break the hold of the inner critic, gain a truer self-awareness, embrace self-compassion and emerge with a sense of freedom and alignment with our life purpose.

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Image by NickyPe from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Leadership as Resonance

Ginny Whitelaw, biophysicist and global leadership coach, understandably frames leadership in terms of energy and resonance. She explains that as humans we are made up of matter and energy – matter in the form of blood, skin, bones and energy in the form of our mind. Ginny notes that the leadership function entails concentrating energy, your own and that of your followers, to create an organisational vision (capturing emotional as well as intellectual energy); develop the culture of a team (through energy alignment); and promote innovation (turning creative energy into new products, services and structures). She explains that energy is always on the move, in constant transformation and continuously vibrating. Her new book, Resonate, to be released in 2020 explores these concepts in depth and their many leadership applications.

Resonance – synchronous vibration

One way to define resonance is synchronous vibration. For example, a room or a musical instrument is described as resonant when it amplifies sound vibrations and extends them by vibrating at the same time. Ginny provides the example of making a loud sound over an open grand piano and noticing that some strings vibrate, and others do not – the strings that vibrate match the vibrations in your voice. When things operate synchronously, we say that they are “in synch”. So, in Ginny’s perspective, leadership is about creating real change and making a difference by achieving synchronisation of energy, our own and that of our followers – in other words, generating resonance. She describes a leader as an “energy concentrator”.

Blocks to leadership resonance

Through her study of biophysics and martial arts (5^th degree Aikido black belt), Ginny came to realise the very close connection between mind and body and the role vibration and energy play in human consciousness (the resonance theory of consciousness). Her role as a senior leader in NASA, coordinating the 40 groups that supported the International Space Station, enabled her to understand that coordination involved energy alignment and resonance (vibrating “in synch”).

Ginny’s experience with martial arts and Zen philosophy heightened her awareness of the mind-body connection. For example, she explains that fear holds back our achievements as leaders because it distorts our resonance – blocks our energy emission and reception. She suggests that as leaders we need to go beyond our triggers that create fear in our mind and body. The fears may have their origin in adverse childhood experiences or the negative self-stories that arise through our inner critic.

Ginny likens the effect of fear to the dampening of resonance created when several socks are placed inside a bell. Even a bell designed especially for resonance will sound dull and clunky when the socks are inside it. The socks are metaphors for our mental and physical blockages – the things that stop our personal resonance. Our challenge as leaders is to remove the blockages – so that our voice is “as clear as a bell”.

Removing the blocks to leadership resonance

Ginny discovered through the impact of deep breathing on her asthma that clearing blockages requires being still, mindful breathing, and other mindfulness practices such as meditation, Tai Chi and yoga. Reconnecting with nature and the multiple sources of energy in the environment also help to rebuild personal resonance. Ginny explores relevant practices and exercises in her book The Zen Leader.

When you can achieve a level of integration between your thoughts, emotions and body you free up yourself to become your more “resonant self’. Ginny explains that by achieving this integration we can emit a “clear signal” and “bring our one clear note to achieve our purpose” as a leader.

Reflection

I can relate fully to the concept of leadership as resonance having been involved in many minor and major change endeavours as a leader in organisations and in community. The concept of energy emission and reception resonates strongly with me. I also find that as I grow in mindfulness, I am better able to tap into my creative energy, enhance my ability to tune into others’ focus and energy and contribute to a purpose that is greater than myself. Removing the personal blockages to my “one clear note” is a lifetime pursuit – a journey into mindfulness through meditation, Tai Chi and other mindfulness practices.

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Image by Valiphotos from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Dealing with the Inner Critic through Self-Compassion

Clare Bowditch – singer, storyteller and actor – recently released a biography titled, Your Own Kind of Girl. In the book, which she had been attempting to write since she was 21, Clare discusses how she dealt with her inner critic which was all encompassing and destructive. Clare writes that the book is “about the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when we believe them”. She lived in hope that someone would tell her that she was “more than” her grief, her failures and the negative stories about herself that she constantly carried in her head. Clare explained that the title of the book is drawn from a song she wrote in 2008 and, to this day, she is immensely moved by the lyrics in the second verse, including the words, “You are fine, you’re more than enough”. The book is about her painful journey to come to this realisation – a journey that is a common story for many people, particularly women.

The debilitating effects of the inner critic

In an earlier blog post, I spoke about the negative self-stories that we perpetuate, partly because our brain has a negative bias but also because of social pressures and the materialistic values that are propagated on an hourly basis through intrusive advertising and image making in videos and films. Our self-stories can undermine our self-esteem, entrap us in a sense of helplessness and create a negative spiral leading to anxiety and depression. These stories, often based on irrational fears, can become deeply ingrained and extremely difficult to shift. They can blind us to creative options, block the realisation of our potential and harm our interpersonal relations.

Self-compassion to overcome the inner critic and negative self-stories

Tara Brach recently released a book titled Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and the World with the practice of R.A.I.N. This meditation practice involves four basic steps – recognise, accept, investigate and nurture. Tara provides a brief example of this process in a 9-minute, guided meditation, Reflection: Healing Self-Blame. Below are some of the key points in this meditation that is based on the R.A.I.N. approach:

The starting point is to recognise some aspect of your life where your inner critic is active. It does not have to be a major example of self-denigration – it could be some relatively minor self-critique, e.g. focusing on your failure sometimes to really listen to someone or diverting a conversation to establish your credentials. The important thing is to have a focus for this meditation. More complete self-awareness can grow out of recognising even a small aspect of the inner critic in our life – this can puncture a hole in the wall of self-protection that blocks our self-realisation.
As we progress in the meditation, we come to a point of self-acceptance. This involves acknowledging what we say and do but also accepting that we have an innate goodness and that we are not defined by our thoughts – that we are “more than” our negative self-evaluation. In Clare’s words, “You are fine, you’re more than enough”.
Our investigation of the impacts of our inner critic extends to recognising bodily sensations as well as feelings that flow from the inroads that negative self-stories make on our sense of self-worth. We can experience tension in our muscles, pain (e.g. in our arms, neck and back), headaches or a nervous twitch when our inner critic is running rampant in our thoughts. A body scan and progressive tension release can help here. The key thing is to experience the impact of our negative self-story in a holistic way – this builds awareness and increases our understanding of the negative impacts of our inner critic.
Lastly, we reach the stage of self-nurturing in the meditation process. This can be expressed physically by placing your hand on your heart or mentally through naming the self-criticism and countering with expression of self-forgiveness, acknowledgement of your positive contributions and achievements and gratitude for all that you have in life – opening yourself to what is good in you and what is wonderful in the world around you.

Reflection

Our inner critic is deeply entrenched and can be very damaging to our self personally, and to our relations, both at work and at home. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and especially the R.A.I.N. meditation, we can become more aware of our inner critic (negative self-stories), understand its impacts physically and mentally and develop strategies to counter its inroads into our sense of self-worth. As both Clare and Tara point out, dealing with the inner critic can create a new sense of freedom and realisation of our true potential.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

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