Whose voice is in your head?

Notes on silencing the inner critic

My wife and I have the same argument around 10:00 pm every evening.

“What’s the temperature set at? I’m freezing!”

“It’s set to 70.”

“Can it please be 72?”

“Babe, it’s HOT.”

“BABE, it’s not hot! YOU are hot! There’s a difference!”

If you were a fly on the wall, you’d see me through your bug eyes bundled up in sweats and socks, with a barely functioning thyroid, shivering to death while my wife perspires and curses in her underwear. This has become our nightly ritual, our hell.

And while yes, I am cold, the real issue I have with the thermostat is the extravagance and the cost. I can’t believe her audacity to just crank the AC down every single night to sub-zero temperatures with reckless abandon! Th energy! The money! She doesn’t seem to care!

[Note: I just asked her about our thermostat argument and she said, “I don’t care if the bill is $400, I’m not sweating in the Louisiana heat in my house. My A.C. will be on what I want it to be on. And you need to see an endocrinologist.” Fair enough.]

When I assess this any further, I am transported back to my childhood home where you can probably guess what my parents’ number one domestic dispute centered around: the thermostat. 

My menopausal mother would be trying to sneak down the digits on the thermostat, and my dad would be right behind her, raising it up, complaining about the electricity bill being SKY HIGH.

Sure, we’re all destined to turn into our parents, but I think something more is going on here. Because when I really examine the thermostat wars in my house, it’s not entirely about temperature. 

There’s some very young part of me that hears my dad’s voice in my head reprimanding me for touching the thermostat. I hear him bitching about the energy costs and how wasteful we are.

At 32 years old, in my own home where I pay my own bills, there is a piece of me that is afraid to get in trouble for putting the air at a comfortable temperature. 

My dad’s voice, specifically, tells me other things. That spending any money on anything at all is a sin punishable by death. That having a job with benefits and health insurance is the only measure of success. That my role is always to “keep the peace,” even if it means violating my own boundaries, even if it means lying. 

I love my dad. But so many of the stories he passed down to me were never meant for me. They no longer serve me. Perhaps they never did.

I know I’m not alone because I see this same pattern play out with many of my clients in my creative coaching work. Usually, there’s a moment during that first session when a client will share their own limiting beliefs, the thoughts that hold them back and that keep them up at night.

“If I pursue my creativity full-time, I won’t make any money. I’ll be homeless.”

“I’m an imposter. My work isn’t even that good. I’m not as talented as my peers.”

“I’m afraid of putting my work out into the world. If it’s not immediately successful, I’ll never recover from the embarrassment.”

This is always a heavy, emotional moment, and if appropriate, I usually followup with this question:

“Who was the first person to make you feel this way?”

Who told you that pursuing your dreams would render you a “starving artist”? When did you first hear the message that you weren’t good enough? Who first made you feel that your worthiness was tied to your success?

Whose voice is in your head?

More often than not, these voices and these narratives are not our own. They are family heirlooms, passed down by well-intentioned parents or caregivers. Sometimes they came from professors and coaches, from friends and lovers. Every time, they burrow in deep, and if we’re not careful, we adopt these stories as The Truth, inarguable facts that we cannot move past, stumbling blocks placed in our way by people we loved and trusted. 

In one of my earliest coaching calls, it was a wedding photographer whose cartographer father was her first creative critic.

In a more recent call, it’s the cookbook author whose father encouraged her to go to a state school instead of the artsy college of her dreams. 

Every night, it’s me, stressing over the thermostat and the energy bill, carrying on the family legacy, I guess.

It’s not always the high achieving daughters of pragmatic fathers, but in my experience, it often is.

Our dads tried to protect and shield us, they tried to toughen us up, they tried to prepare us. But in the women I work with, and in myself, I see the ways this protection became a prison. 

But it’s not a life sentence.

While these limiting beliefs were easy to implant in our impressionable young psyches, they can be extracted. And once you start pulling the thread, you’ll be surprised at how quickly the whole thing unravels.

You have the power to tell yourself new stories, to invent new narratives that support you. They are just as true as the ones that have been holding you back. Their only power lies in the belief you imbue them with.

When you rewrite the narratives, you replace the other voices in your head with your own voice, clear and calm and true. You transform limiting beliefs into possibility.

You have the power to turn a scarcity mindset into one of abundance.

You have the power to transmute imposter syndrome into self-trust.

You have the power to define success for yourself and embrace your innate worthiness.

I know because I’ve done it for myself. I know because I support other women doing this work every day. 

The next time your inner critic pops into your head, I encourage you to be curious. Examine it. Turn it over like a stone in your hand. 

Ask yourself, “Where did I first hear this message?” and “Is this story helping or hindering me?”

And in your journal, in your Notes app, in your brain, on a walk, rewrite a narrative that is rooted in your truth, a story that supports where you’re at now.

I’m dying to know: what old stories are you leaving behind? What new narratives are you excited to embrace?

Hope this helps.

<3 Syd