Help Employees Rise to the Occasion By Managing Their Inner Critic

Our personal inner experiences are pretty much taboo to talk about in our society and certainly not on the job. Sure, we tell our therapists and coaches, if we have one, and maybe our closest BFF, if we have one of those. Generally, most of us keep the darker aspects of our inner life to ourselves, adopt a DIY attitude about our inner life and shop online for tips and techniques.  The Internet is full of advisors, including this one, who are ready with sage advice for almost all forms of personal suffering.  In the meantime, we suffer quite silently, until we run into significant change in our relationships, our job, our finances, or our health.

We’re in an era where it’s becoming necessary to be more authentic about the most difficult issues of our inner experience because we all share common features of the human psyche, namely, the inner critic. Exploring it fully and understanding the inner critic, is in our opinion, the clearest and most empowering path to individual growth, to connecting more authentically in our relationships and to the evolution of our society’s collective consciousness. We’ve got to quit the social habit of looking good and start empowering ourselves and not our inner critics. This article is a modest beginning to have the subject of our inner critic as part of our nation’s narrative on dealing with self-doubt.

We are committed to having discussions and inquiry into this phenomenon of the superego, called the inner critic, so that it is illuminated in our national discourse. We believe that having authentic and open dialogue about the inner critic may lead to greater inner peace and liberating joy for all of us, for our communities, and hopefully less violence in our society.

Valorie de Leña is a Senior Partner at Integral Partnerships, a leadership development and management consulting firm in Oakland, California.