3 Ways to Quiet the Inner Critic and Embrace Self-Trust
Today we’re talking about something every writer I know is intimately acquainted with—self-doubt. I’ll be sharing some of my self-doubt moments from the past couple of years (of which there were many examples to choose from!) as well as three ways to move myself out of this space when I find myself here.
We know that with self-doubt, one of the big triggers is comparison. We’re so good at doing this too—comparing our writing journeys, our book sales, our successes, and just seeing where other people are and then turning the narrative into ‘we’re not doing enough’ or ‘we’re not good enough’ or what have you, and it’s sort of like this self-induced shame cycle that’s perpetuated, in part, by social media.
When all we see are these little squares it’s incredibly easy to think someone has it all figured out and this person got a book deal and this person has a new essay published in this journal but what we always forget in these moments is that we don’t know the backstory. So while we automatically turn on ourselves and start doubting our worth as a writer, we don’t know that their essay was rejected by twelve publications before finding a home. We don’t know that the first draft of their book didn’t sell so they spent another year or two working on it. We don’t know what their family dynamic is—who they’re caring for, or how they might need care—in order to do this work. We just see a filtered photo and suddenly lose our footing.
I’m not immune to this and used to do it a lot more often than I do now, mostly because I’ve erected some boundaries around social media in particular that I didn’t have in place years ago. And if you’re someone who identifies as a highly sensitive person, an HSP, or anywhere on the sensitivity spectrum, it’s even more important to insulate yourself to a certain degree so that you can spend your limited amount of time and energy on projects that light you up instead of wrestling with your brain about whether or not you’re even worthy to type up your poem.
How the Inner Critic Showed Up During the Pandemic
When it comes to the pandemic, self-doubt wasn’t the first thing to show up for me. It was more a progression from discontent to grief and liminal space, to rallying to figure out how to get through the day, to bringing my body into the conversation… and then to self-doubt. It’s been a slow burn.
As I reflect, I can see places where I faltered, especially falling down social media rabbit holes. Creatively, I had a hard time focusing, which almost opened a window for self-doubt to fly right in because when I’m not rooted in the confidence of my project and just “in it,” it becomes easier to start doubting the whole thing. Whether or not I’ll finish. Whether or not it’s worth doing. Whether or not my story is even worth sharing.
I noticed that working on my book in a pandemic brought up its own flavor of self-doubt, and this ties into the social media discussion a bit because the thing about writing a book is it’s basically the opposite of creating social media content in the sense that a book is this long arc of a project that can take months, usually years, and even though you can talk about doing it, there’s nothing concrete about it until publication day. To put it in more industry terms, this is long-haul content creation. It’s a labor of love.
When I realized I needed to be off social media in order to write, I doubted that decision briefly too. Social media is fast-paced and reactive and urgent by nature, and even though that’s not the kind of energy I like to swim around in, it can also be really hard to walk away, even temporarily, because we have all these questions about what the implications might be.
So I had a choice point. I ultimately decided that I needed to prioritize my creative work offline, full stop. That was the only way to make progress on my manuscript, but I struggled with the decision and doubted it initially because only a year or so earlier I’d enthusiastically come over to Instagram and had been working to re-build my community there after closing down my long-running Facebook group.
My energy was genuine. And then the pandemic wore on and lots of personal things were happening behind the scenes and my son wasn’t back in school and my book beckoned and one day, before I committed to taking a longer social media break, I was expressing all of this to my mastermind and someone just looked at me and said, “What if you told everyone that?”
That reframe to being open and honest with my community was all I needed to finalize the decision. I felt that electricity of deep inner knowing, and suddenly had the energy to create the last handful of posts I needed, which had felt almost impossible to do for weeks. And that was that.
3 Ways to Cultivate Self-Trust in the Writer’s Life
Self-doubt can make you feel like a version of yourself you don’t recognize. That’s been my experience, at least. On the flip side, every time I move through a period of doubt and uncertainty, whether it was a fleeting afternoon or a month, it always feels so good to feel that alignment with myself, and it’s reminded me that self-doubt belongs.
Self-doubt is one of the shadow sides of the writer’s life. It’s part of us. Sometimes we like to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t affect us, but I think to walk the writer’s path and to walk it well, it requires that we not only invite self-doubt to join us on occasion, but that we understand it more deeply. Working with self-doubt is an act of personal inquiry that’s essential to doing this work.
At the core, doubt, in the context of the writer’s life, is simply not trusting ourselves.
01 | Break Down Your Creative Process
My favorite approach—and this might sound really simple—is to understand how I work. And I mean this on a deep level—really taking time to excavate aspects about yourself that reveal how you work best, how you respond to different situations, how your creativity shows up in your life.
Because all of us are different. And that’s what we forget and lose access to in those moments when we’re comparing ourselves to another writer. We remove ourselves entirely from the narrative and don’t take our unique makeup and personality and creative process into account.
I know that might sound a little bit vague, knowing how you work—that can mean a lot of different things, so I want to share a few of the ways you can explore this for yourself. And like almost everything we talk about, a reminder that none of this needs to be done tomorrow. In fact, the practice of self-inquiry and cultivating self-trust is a journey just like everything else and is best done in small doses so everything you learn can integrate into your creative life slowly over time.
Here are a few ideas to get you started.
The first thing I recommend, if you haven’t done this already, is to reflect on a project of yours that came to fruition. In the corporate world this is sometimes called a postmortem which I don’t really love, but it’s this idea that you come together once something is done and talk about what worked, what didn’t, how to improve things next time, what have you. And I find that by essentially auditing your own creative project—it might be writing and publishing a poetry chapbook or a book, the arc of an essay from start to finish, hosting a live event or a workshop of some kind—anything at all that you can point to and say, I did that.
And you can journal about how it happened for you.
A few prompts would be…
How did the initial idea come to you?
What were some of the emotional obstacles that came up? Or, put another way, when did self-doubt show up, and what did it try to make you believe?
How did you make space in your life to pursue this project at the time?
How did you know this was something you needed to do?
What’s your writing process like? How long do you spend drafting, revising?
Do you do any research before starting, or in the middle?
Is your creative process draining, energizing, a mix of both?
How did you feel at the moment of completion?
Ideally you’ll do this for several examples because then you can start identifying patterns. Maybe the spark of every idea came to you while your brain was resting—in the shower, in the car, taking a walk. Maybe you always hit this wall that felt insurmountable and after walking away you came back refreshed and were able to finish the project. Maybe you felt exhausted afterwards. Maybe you were energized. Maybe you’re someone who gets an idea and needs to think about it for a long time before taking action. (That’s one of my examples, by the way).
You get the idea. The point, whether you use the prompts I mentioned or not, is to simply take stock of what some of your patterns and habits are, to start understanding more about how creativity shows up and how you tend to work with it.
02 | Get to Know Yourself (Even More)
Another thing you can do is explore human design. If you’re not familiar, it’s a system that combines a variety of practices and is based on the exact tie, date, and place you were born. There are 5 different types, and in an interview with Human Design teacher Lynette Hagins, she says “On the most practical level, Human Design shows you where and how to access your body’s consciousness as a decision-making tool, and ultimately, how to live as your true self. Human Design offers a map, or a manual, that indicates how you are unique as a person, and guides you in living in a manner that is in sync with who you are. When we live in alignment with our true nature, we begin to experience a level of comfort and acceptance for who we are, instead of chasing who we are not—and we’re able to live out our real purpose in the world.”
What I’ve enjoyed about digging into my type more is it has validated things I already know to be true about myself, and also gives me new language for understanding it which then makes it easier to explain it to myself as well as others.
Human design is just one of those tools, and if it’s not for you, you can also do the Myers-Briggs personality test and the Enneagram too.
In case anyone’s interested, In human design, I’m a manifesting generator. That means… a few things, like I tend to think and consider an idea for a good long while before taking action. And then when I do take action, things can move really quickly. It also means that I need to try lots of different things to see what sticks. It means I can’t always concern myself with what’s coming next, and have to trust that everything will evolve in the right way and in the right timing. It means I need to give myself permission to be excited about lots of different things, and permission to change my mind. It means I have an exceptional ability to follow through and bring things to fruition, and ALSO that I can give myself a hard time or feel like people will think I’m flaky or inconsistent if I change my mind or change direction.
03 | Understand Your Sensitivity
If you’re highly sensitive and/or an empath, this segment of the population experiences the world differently. (Read my blog post on the highly sensitive writer if you haven’t already.) If you do identify at any level with these tendencies like emotional sensitivity, stronger reactions to both external and internal stimuli like hunger, light, or noise, and a complex inner life— it’s very likely that your creative life is influenced by this really important part of yourself, and understanding it more deeply will make it so much easier for you to make choices that protect your time and energy, and also offer up self-compassion to yourself.
I hope this has given you some new ways to reframe self-doubt and relate to it with a greater sense of curiosity. Self-doubt, as Steven Pressfield says (and I’m completely paraphrasing here) is resistance helps you know you’re moving in the right direction.
So start small, cultivate self-trust as part of the writer’s path, and you’ll find that self-doubt, while not eliminated from your life, will be easier to manage whenever it arises.
