Welcome to Happy Monday. Every Monday, I share a selection of curated content to brighten your day and an action item to motivate you for the week.

Here's what I have for you today...

For your mind

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For your inspiration

There are 21 people with EGOT status, which means they all won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. Yep, all of them.

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For your career path

​This tool allows you to compare opportunities and find the one that is more impactful and fulfilling.

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For your ears

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Challenge your inner critic

We tend to suppress our inner critics, or worse still, surrender to them. What if we think of them as persistent childhood friends? They knock on our door when they are least welcome to bring us down with their pessimistic views.

Similar to old friends, our inner critics have countless shared memories with us. They won’t just disappear from our lives in the blink of an eye, even if we want them to. And they persist, shamelessly reminding us what we want to forget.

To silence them, we need a strategy. Instead of trying to ignore that pushy personality, we may need to convince them that they are wrong. So they’ll accept the fact that their opinions are misguided and their influence on us will be reduced over time.

So how can we do that?

Personify your inner critic.​
Separate your inner critic from yourself by giving it a name. This allows you to distinguish yourself from the negative thoughts it spits out. Bonus points for choosing an insulting nickname.

Question its thoughts.
​Whenever it shows up, ask it to expand on the argument. Your inner critic and all its arguments are full of emotions, so the only way to beat it is by being logical. Converse back and forth until you understand its reasoning.

Punish it for being unreasonable.
​If your inner critic ends the conversation with a tantrum, send it to its room and shut the door. You can’t take someone who throws tantrums seriously, can you?

Exercise: A quick exercise to challenge your inner critic is revisiting your limiting beliefs, as they are the arguments that your inner critic has previously won.

1. Pick an area in your life or business (e.g. making new friends, raising your prices, posting content)
2. Make a list of your limiting beliefs in that area (e.g. “I’m unlovable”, “My work isn’t worth that much”, “People will see my incompetence”).
3. Ask your inner critic to expand on each list item to understand where that belief comes from, who caused it, why it’s still holding onto it, and if it’s still relevant today.
4. Follow up with counter-arguments to challenge the existing ones.
5. Finally, summarise the result of each argument as a final statement (I hope you win them all). Place those sentences somewhere you can see every morning. Starting your day with those new statements will slowly create new thought patterns. Like building muscles with exercise, you need to tear up the existing structure to let it grow.

The purpose of this exercise is to find out if your inner critic has a good point or if it’s bullying you with decade-old emotions.

Do not surrender to your inner critic every time it surfaces. Instead, understand where it’s coming from, challenge it with counter-arguments, force it to be reasonable in today’s conditions, and if it refuses, prove it wrong.

Imagine what you can achieve when there are no pessimistic voices holding you back.

Happy Monday, Reader

Merve Goulding

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