3. Cultivating creative compassion
When you show up to write, who's setting the course for the journey—your inner storyteller, or your inner critic?
We all have an inner critic, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a manifestation of the same cautionary voice that tells us some basic truths like “Hey, you do know that if you go around doing a bunch of stupid shit, you might literally die, right??”
The inner critic has its place. But it’s a uniquely terrible storyteller. You can't play and explore with somebody who thinks you're going to literally die if your first draft has too many adverbs in it.
Here's the good news: To write transformational work, you don't have to kill off your inner critic. You just need to stop writing in partnership with them.
This month, we're exploring how to write in partnership with our curiosity—with a version of ourselves who’s always willing and eager to see what comes next. (Even when the inner critic thinks there's danger out in the forest.)
Tune in to discover two key shifts to create deep, lasting change in your relationship to your inner critic:
And don't forget to check out the writing praxis tips for some concrete ways to apply these shifts in your creative practice!
Writing praxis tips
When it comes to ending your creative partnership with the inner critic, there's one sticky element that can easily trip you up: Simply deciding you don't want to listen to the critic doesn't make them go away.
It's the classic "don't think of a pink elephant" problem. The harder you try not to heed the inner critic, the louder that voice is likely to become.
To stop capitulating to the critic and start building more compassion into your writing practice, you need an approach that's about allowing new possibilities, not just giving yourself one more thing to fail at.
Read on for some actionable tips to set yourself up for creative compassion both before you show up to write, and during your writing session.