Through my decades of work as a coach and therapist, I found that every client I have ever worked with has an inner part, that we have come to know as the Inner Critic …
It’s twelve years now since the brilliant work of Professor Steve Peters brought the critic into our everyday language through his work The Chimp Paradox. In that book, he was starting to introduce the concept of the different parts of the Self.
The Critic is one part, they are all natural states of the mind; our minds are multiple, and we have many internal sub-personalities. These are formed in childhood as a very normal process of personality formation. When they start out these parts have valuable qualities that help us to live our lives and to survive. At some point, however, life’s happenings (invalidation, rejection, neglect, shame etc) force these parts of Self out of their naturally valuable states into roles that can become destructive and not helpful to us; in short:
“what was once helpful to us when we were young becomes outdated in our adult lives”
A large part of this is due to the fact that whilst we age, our emotions don’t, meaning that whilst we are now adults these parts do not know that we are grown up. And the more we try to override them the more entrenched and determined they may become.
I have always found resources in the work of Ken Wilber, the American transpersonal psychologist, and he uses the term ‘include and transcend’ to describe the maturation process of including these parts of us and finding ever healthier ways to transcend them. Our work at comma is to skilfully look at the role these parts play in your leadership life, and in doing so acknowledge, accept, and integrate them back into awareness so that they may become of help to you again.
It’s a truth that my (and your) inner critic will always be with us. I often tell the story, once shared with me by an elder, that my critic will be there on my death bed, harshly telling me, ‘You haven’t sorted out your finances very well’ or ‘You didn’t say a good enough goodbye to so and so’, trying its very best to protect me from the uncomfortable inevitability of my own demise. Yet in its young attempt to protect me being persecutory, attempting to shame me into immediate action.
As adults and as leaders we all carry the burdens of the multiple parts of self, not just the Critic or Super Ego. These burdens often thought of as adapted selves or false selves pull us out of shape and often, away from the human being we are most wanting to become. They pile in with their extreme, often conditional responses fully believing that they are here to protect us. They are home to our psychological defence systems such as denial, rationalisation, dissociation, and projection. They hinder our self-awareness, critical for exceptional leadership and significantly narrow our choices. They wreak havoc on relationships by significantly influencing how we perceive others, how we respond to conflict and injure our capacity to trust and connect with ourselves and with others. They are often impulsive, and we find that they have driven us before we can stop ourselves, why? Because they are so familiar to us, our automatic pilots.
Unchecked they drive the way that we operate in the world. When these representations of self are conditional, we become very fixed.
So many of us are walking around living less of a life, or more of an unhelpful life because of the dominance of these parts. We don’t get the opportunity to live with our full and positive life force. Depth Coaching works with leaders ready to do their inner work, to help to reintegrate these parts, catch them up with our lives now and access more of our resilience, vitality and wisdom – so needed in today’s uncertain world with the challenges of our time.
