[00:00:00] Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:22] Hello, my friends, this is Dex and welcome to this week's episode, which is Power Tool number three to overcome burnout, working effectively with your inner critic. Which is most likely on fire if you're burning out, probably the Olympic champion of hate speech. Am I right? Anyway, if you missed the previous three episodes of the podcast in the Power Tool series, this is the fourth episode in the series.

[00:00:51] That you need to empower yourself to find your way out of burnout and start kicking it again at work, like you know deep down that you can. So, quick recap on the Power Tools series. The 10 Power Tools that I'm going to teach in this series are the distillation of everything I have learned, taught and coached for the last 7 years,

[00:01:14] condensed into the 10 tool sets you need to recover from burnout. For a deeper dive into any one of the 10 Power Tools, see the additional resources in each Power Tool episode's show notes, or visit the Power Tools page. There are exercises you can try right now today, plus worksheets and other aids and resources to get you started on burnout recovery.

[00:01:39] So back in episode number 155, I introduced the 10 Power Tools to you. So if you want, you can go back and listen to get up to speed. In episode 156, Power Tool Number 1, it was about relieving suffering, a critical concept that is, in fact, the core of every power tool and everyone's recovery from burnout. Episode 157, Power Tool Number 2, you're going to learn how to start feeling better.

[00:02:10] And in fact, all the tools in this series are designed to uplift your daily life experience, so you can recover your energy, mood, enthusiasm, motivation, and finally your zest for work and life. Today, power tool number three, taming your inner critic, will again help you reverse the trend of negative experiences that comprise burnout and help you lift your mood, find a little more hope.

[00:02:38] And feel some momentum start to gather as you learn new skills to beat burnout. You might have noticed that Power Tools 1 to 3 are all about feeling better and restoring energy because this really is what will inspire you to continue your journey to banish burnout altogether. If you listened to those earlier Power Tools episodes and you have not yet started to use the exercises that I offered to you, I will say this.

[00:03:06] At some point, you have to ignore the voice in your head that tells you not to bother. That you don't have time or energy. That they won't work for you, or you'll start later. Because a word to the wise, you will never want to start until after you've started. So, in episode 156 Power Tool 1, I gave you some really simple, quick exercises to reduce anxiety that I can highly recommend.

[00:03:33] You can understand them, you can do them, and they do work. But of course, if you're reluctant, a brain addicted to anxiety won't want to do them. And in that episode's Power Tools page, you're going to see a Commitment Worksheet. You might want to download this and give yourself a reason to start practicing the exercises.

[00:03:56] Find ways to reward yourself for taking that action. Find compassion for any imperfect attempts and love yourself towards a better future. So, however you do it, go back to episode 156 after this, on reducing suffering, and actually do the exercises and reduce a bit of your suffering. To recover from burnout, you must change your MO.

[00:04:20] And to do that, you're going to need to take persistent small actions towards your goal. Persistent, small, but cumulative. You must use your analytical faculties and your professional discipline to take steps towards your goal, until you hit that tipping point of recovery and motivation becomes easier.

[00:04:44] Of course, if you come and work with me one on one as a Burnout Recovery Coaching Client, I will for sure keep you moving and help you motivate yourself and change your mind about what you're capable of and help you stay on track to recover. If you're doing it all by yourself just with the power tools, you'll have to find a way to do the simple exercises you learn, even for just a few minutes every day.

[00:05:09] Even if yesterday you didn't do them, perhaps especially then, you'll have to find a way to do it today. Because you're a professional, I know you have the capacity to dig deep, but really dig deep to get somewhere better, not just to catch up on stuff you didn't get done yesterday. Yesterday's gone, right?

[00:05:28] But please, for the love of all things, if yesterday sucked, don't repeat it again today. You don't have to. I'm reaching out to you with an olive branch from your future. The past is forgiven. Look forward. Create the future that you actually want. Choose it. Because of all the clients I've ever met where professional burnout is their problem, all of them have been capable of recovery.

[00:06:01] Because if you don't take action now, if you do nothing, what then? You're not here listening today presumably because your life is a marvel of deep joy, contentment and reward, are you? So, okay, there are also some burnout coaches who might be listening for coaching tips, but otherwise, no, I suspect your life is not completely peachy as you would like it to be.

[00:06:23] So, listen up. Do the exercises. Even five minutes a day starts a new habit. Read Atomic Habits by James Clear on how to overcome resistance and just start that new little embryo habit. Just start. And soon, with every tiny effort, the habit will start to snowball until you notice changes happening in your experience of life.

[00:06:50] And those changes will build and build. So I highly recommend, if you are stressed and anxious, go and listen to episode 156 Power Tool 1, and try the five quick exercises in there about anxiety. There's no magic bullet, because probably it took years, maybe even decades for you to drop into burnout.

[00:07:12] But happily, restoring good function is a lot, lot quicker. And you will enjoy being you a lot more as you go through it. So the program is all about incremental change, compound interest, inching your everyday experience away from stormy and towards sunny. So if you're burning out, I think this is the most urgent project.

[00:07:35] What about you? I really would love you to connect with the good that remains inside of you and get your mojo bouncing back. So okay, I started today's episode on fire. Please do the exercises. So now today, really one of the ways we're going to help you improve your experience is to deal with your inner critic.

[00:07:56] This is the how of it. So first, what is the inner critic? Well, it's the sadistically self flagellating voice in your head condemning you for any trivial error you've made in your lifetime or any that you might make in the future. Sigmund Freud offered that it was us internalizing external criticism that we received during our childhood and to me that does kind of make sense because how we stay alive as children is by keeping our caregivers on side.

[00:08:31] In other words, by trying to behave as they direct. And additionally, up to age seven, we don't have any critical faculties, so that we can't discard any negative judgments that are not true. We think everything that we're told is true. So by the time we're seven, we have the habit of doing what people have told us we should do to be good people.

[00:08:55] Unfortunately, for those of us in burnout, for those of us who have overactive inner critics, and possibly we had judgmental caregivers as well. We start to believe that we're terrible people. This is the imposter syndrome side of things. And that belief is very dangerous to our comfort and our prospects for survival at work.

[00:09:21] We constantly fear rejection. We tend to feel vulnerable, exposed, on edge, fearful, as if everybody else knows how bad we are. So, to compensate for that, we escalate the level of self criticism we apply to ourselves, in an effort to control the paranoid fear of failure that we're experiencing.

[00:09:45] And the brutality of this self condemnation rises out of all proportion to the facts about us, and it becomes self sabotaging. Inaction, shame, guilt, fear, inadequacy, and particularly self rejection, pop up. And these are the seeds of many later behaviours that don't support us and in fact cultivate a state of burnout.

[00:10:10] We fail where we don't need to. We procrastinate when in fact we're able to do the work. We unnecessarily avoid people, conversations, deadlines simply from our oversized fear. We're hypersensitive, snapping back at people we think might have joined in the criticism party. We distrust people who are trying to help.

[00:10:34] In fact, we build a lot of evidence that people are against us. So we block them out. And thus in burnout, our fears really become self fulfilling prophecies. So let me ask you this question now. If you're burning out, do you have a fear of rejection? Do you think that others will not like, value, trust, respect, cherish, or support you?

[00:11:02] And have you withdrawn socially as a result? Do you keep your thoughts to yourself more than you used to? If any of that is true, listen on, because this episode is for you. So let's get into the inner critic. The number one concept that I'd like to share is that your inner critic is not the truth.

[00:11:22] It's really a propaganda machine, trying to keep the child version of you alive in a world perceived as hostile. It's actually trying to protect you from harm, to save your life, if you like. It just has a very misguided, caustic, and deluded way of doing it. It's the only way a child knows. It shouts at you.

[00:11:47] It uses a whip on you, instead of giving you the gentle love, acceptance and care that you really want and need, that will help you spread your wings and flourish as the full, generous, loving version of you. So think of your heart. Reflect on the inner moments when you're stressed and worn out, something's gone wrong again.

[00:12:11] When really, inside, you still yearn to support your loved ones better. To be a better partner, worker, parent, sibling, friend. When you wish you were nicer and stronger, more loving and relaxed. Because my friend, here's the thing. Since you're here listening, wishing to find a better way,

[00:12:34] you're showing a demonstration of intention to heal, right? Not just heal your work, but also your life and relationships. You have a desire to be a good person, a good citizen, don't you? Your heart, I would suggest, is still good. If burnout's your main problem, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with you.

[00:13:00] You're just running like a diesel car with petrol in it. Your problems are perhaps overwhelming, excruciating and ongoing, but they're still superficial. They're fixable. They're not who you are. You're still a good person, and I believe in you 100%. And that goodness can be brought back to the surface, stronger and more resilient than ever, once you break free of burnout.

[00:13:25] So let's go back for a minute. If you can agree on a couple of things, I'm gonna just go through, in fact, three things, and you see if you agree or not. The first one is that your inner critic is not the truth. At minimum, it exaggerates and speculates, gravitating as far towards the negative as possible, as forcefully as it can, and its data is often obsolete or irrelevant, biased or inaccurate.

[00:13:56] Feel free to pause and give yourself examples of your own inner critic talking a little bit of ****, yeah. If you can, it can be a great idea to write down any blatant and farcical exaggerations that your inner critic comes at you with. Sometimes we need a friend to help us with this.

[00:14:14] Sometimes in burnout, it's hard to detect the lies, they're too up close to our face . So don't worry if you can't see them, but if you can then write them down. So number one, just check if you're willing to believe that not every single word uttered by your inner critic is true. It's up to you.

[00:14:34] Second idea, your inner critic's core intention is to spare you danger and harm. It actually has a protective energy that sadly got perverted and comes out like an acid bath. And this really is because your inner critic was born when you were born. It learned its tricks from your parents. And like them, bless them, it wants you to have the best success and happiness in life.

[00:15:01] So it shouts at you to make sure you do. But still, at its root, it's a force for good. So ask yourself, if I could turn my inner critic into a benevolent and loving mentor, trying to support me in my natural abilities to create a better life, what would I think about it then? If it actually could be sensed by you as that force for good, instead of the shouty.

[00:15:30] Okay, here's number three concept. Your inner critic has a terrible track record. All that shouting isn't causing you to thrive, be popular and achieve success, is it? I think one of the most compelling arguments against believing the inner critic is that it doesn't help. In my personal view, beating a donkey with a stick will get it over a ditch, but beating it all day every day will kill it.

[00:16:00] If shouting at yourself made your life better, I think you'd probably know by now. So what's the verdict for you? Is your inner critic making your life better?

[00:16:11] And for me, when I heard and understood those three ideas and agreed that my inner critic is not the truth, but it does basically want to help me have a better life, it's just crap at that. If I believe all those things, then it begs the question, Is it time to rewrite the script of my inner critic?

[00:16:30] Because it's just a voice in my head. It's just thoughts. Inner critic thoughts come from seeds in my past. They're subconscious, automatic. But I can also, at will, as an adult, have conscious thoughts. I can make one any time I choose. So how about, when my inner critic's knee jerk response to something pops up in my mind, I just say to myself, oh no, I don't believe that anymore.

[00:16:56] I don't say mean things like that to myself anymore. Now I say, and then I would substitute in what my guardian angel would have said. I offer myself a kind and encouraging thought. Let me give you a simple example. I missed a deadline. My inner critic lets off a tirade of abuse about this, and I gently pause the inner critic and counter it with, Oh no, I don't believe that.

[00:17:23] I do think I've made a mistake, but that's all right. I caught it, and I can call them right now and work out a solution. So in that situation, if I don't let myself get away with insulting and abusing the hide off myself, and instead I'm compassionate, and I still believe in myself as decent, then I don't feel bad.

[00:17:47] No shame, only mild guilt, and no self hatred. And if I don't feel bad, I also don't feel threatened and unsafe, and I don't need to be aggressive, defensive, avoidant, or argumentative. I can respond in a friendly and relaxed way that will contribute to a positive outcome. And that sounds kind of trivial, but in burnout, it also sounds impossible, huh?

[00:18:16] That you could let up on yourself, confidently and calmly stand by yourself, and smoothly resolve the issue, when in fact you're jumping up and down, hopping mad. And of course in the past, for you, it will have been impossible, because you've habitually been drowning in vitriol at this point. It's been too painful.

[00:18:37] So now, okay, we need to change habits . It's time to create a little bit of space in your head when the inner critic is talking, and let your heart speak. Because your heart is still good, even if it's sometimes overlooked in all the shouting. So try this . Give yourself permission. If you believe, as we said, that the inner critic is not creating the life that you want, Give yourself permission to change the script, to advocate for yourself, as if you were giving the child you a second chance to get things right.

[00:19:12] If you practice one of the deep breathing exercises in episode 156, it will help you make space to listen to your heart voice, and then offer yourself whatever compassionate advice a wise old spiritual teacher would offer you, or your best friend. Changing habits starts just like that. That's how we do it.

[00:19:34] So for those of you who listened to last week's episode, 157 power tool number two, starting to feel better, I'm going to share with you a self coaching model for that example I just gave you. And to grasp it fully, you might want to listen to that episode, because I'm just going to do it in brief here.

[00:19:52] But essentially, we use a self coaching model to change how we react to something that happened in our world, so that we can create a better feeling and a better result for ourselves without needing to change the thing that happened. So the example is this. The circumstance, the thing that happened out in the world is, I missed a deadline two hours ago and I noticed that.

[00:20:14] And the thought that I had about it, that my inner critic came up with is, you idiot, you're going to get fired. And the feeling that ensued from that thought is panic. When I felt panicky, I froze up. I didn't do anything useful. Maybe I'm going to run for some cookies ; avoid making a phone call;

[00:20:33] Blame one of my colleagues. And certainly I'm going to take no action on the task I didn't complete but should have. And the result of all of that is, I increase my stress enormously and my guilt, but I don't do anything to resolve the problem. So by telling myself, oh, you're an idiot, you're going to get fired, I made the problem worse, actually.

[00:20:53] It didn't really help. I panicked and did nothing. So let's look at a better way to deal with that. Same circumstance out in the world. I missed a deadline two hours ago and I just noticed that. I'm choosing to pause the inner critic for a minute and have a new, benevolent, productive thought that's kinder to me.

[00:21:13] My thought is, oh no, I better call them to work it out. And that generates a feeling of purposefulness. I feel helpful, I feel calm. I feel like, oh, okay, now I need to do something. And when I feel purposeful, the actions I take is I make the call immediately to the people I've let down. Then I discuss the solution with them, and then I progress that solution.

[00:21:37] The result I create for myself is I arranged to fix the problem as quickly as I possibly could. So perhaps you can see that by pausing my inner critic and allowing myself to remain calm and purposeful, I actually took the best action I could to resolve the problem. If I'd have let my inner critic rip, I would have descended into guilt, shame and blame.

[00:22:02] I would have spiralled right down. I would have elevated my stress levels. Probably procrastinated indefinitely, been unable to make good decisions about what to do and got nothing done, and really allowed my inner critic to continue its rant more or less unhindered. So if you do know how to make a model or if that helped you on making a model and you listened to the episode, the last episode on how to do that, why don't you do this for yourself?

[00:22:30] Take a look at some place where your inner critic is hitting you upside the head and write a model of your own and see what happens. When your inner critic has a thought that's not very kind to you and you feel bad about that, what do you do or not do? And does that make progress with the problem that you're having or not?

[00:22:47] So here's what I'm going to leave you with today. If your inner critic isn't taking you where you want to go in this life, you can retire it by retraining your mind. As we've described today, one thought at a time, one model at a time, one exercise at a time, one day at a time. And I will report that when I learned this, it was revolutionary for me.

[00:23:12] Having a choice about how I support myself changed everything. On top of this, according to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, our thoughts give rise to our feelings. So if we can choose our thoughts, we can also influence our feelings. Good news, huh? When we look at our daily life experiences, we have thoughts and feelings all day, every day, non stop.

[00:23:37] Some good, some bad, some neutral, almost all unconscious and habitual. But let's say that we're running along and we're pretty well balanced at work. We have 50 percent positive thoughts and feelings each day and 50 percent negative. Every person, of course, is capable of feeling each and every feeling, but when I was in burnout, my ratio was more like 90 percent negative, 10 percent positive.

[00:24:02] So choosing how you talk to yourself can influence your feelings, then why wouldn't you swing it back to 50 50? How would that be for you? To do that, really, you need to look for the good in yourself. Look hard. It's there in that quiet still of your heart. And if that brings a tear to your eye, you've found it.

[00:24:23] Look for the good inside, give yourself the benefit of the doubt, and cultivate peace as much as you can within your mind and heart. Because when you feel at peace with yourself, you'll create peace in your world. Might seem like a lofty goal, but let it be your path with the inner critic. And I've found the books of Pema Chodron to be wonderful guides on how to achieve this in our crazy modern world with our overactive minds.

[00:24:52] Instead of focusing relentlessly on the negative, spend time recognising your own worth. I often give new clients and students this exercise. Every night, write down ten things you appreciate about yourself. Not about other people, about yourself. And not necessarily good deeds either, but values or qualities or gifts.

[00:25:16] Write down a different set of 10 things every day for 30 days. Then you have 300, right? And allow the essential goodness of you that you see within those to permeate your view of yourself. Look for the good and let the light shine. Since neuroplasticity is always available, simply changing the tone of your thoughts, as we talked about today, the tone of your self talk, by choice, is practicing kindness.

[00:25:48] And there is no one more deserving of your kindness than you. So, look at the Power Tools page or the show notes today for the resources that I've mentioned. Honor your soul and begin to practice them right away. Your life will change. So that's what I have for you today. If you are in burnout and want personal coaching to support you, come and talk to me for free and we can make a plan for you to recover quickly and sustainably and get back to your best performance, leadership, success, and most of all enjoyment inside work and out.

[00:26:22] You can book an appointment at DexRandall. com. If you enjoyed this episode, please help me reach more people in burnout by rating and reviewing the podcast and by sharing the podcast with your friends who are in burnout. Thank you for listening today. You can start the exercises now :)