The Inner Critic

Sometimes the gremlins come along and bite you!

If you have been reading blog posts here over the last couple of months, you would be forgiven for thinking that everything is flowing beautifully and I am in a state of flow. I read recently in a blog post by Steven Pressfield a comment he made where he said that the inner critic is never totally banished, always just a breath away – always waiting to pounce when we are off guard.

Now Pressfield is well on with his writing career, so it surprises me that he still struggles with this. And Seth Godin also talks about it – he describes it as the lizard brain – almost like it’s a survival mechanism turning in on ourselves and attacking our ability to do anything.

It’s there – and it gets us when we think we have found new ways to write – new approaches. When our bright and shiny techniques look like something special – that’s when he is lurking, just waiting to tell us that what we have written is rubbish, unoriginal, nothing to write home about.

The cure – I wish there was one. The only way up and out of it I have found is to do what I am doing now, open a page and just write. Anything. Anything at all. It’s a passing through!