![]() Not long ago, I was running a workshop on creativity for a group of about 30 adults who, for a variety of reasons, had lost the free spirit of creativity they’d had as children. And there’s always another point of view available if we choose to look for it. But I’ve since come to see that the inner critic only ever promotes a point of view. Until then I had assumed – like most people, it seems – that when a negative thought popped into my head it was just an accurate reflection of the way things really are. (The company that trained us both, Coaches Training Institute, did indeed turn out to be Californian.) But I trusted my friend, and found the experience so helpful that I decided to train as a life coach myself – not a therapist, any more than a football coach is a therapist, but a conversational partner who uses insights from psychology occasionally to be supportive and challenging at the same time. At the time, I thought life coaching sounded a bit odd and – well, Californian. I knew nothing about my inner critic until a couple of years ago, when a friend was training as a life coach, and asked me to be her guinea pig. And in the privacy of my own head he says things like this: You’re not ready. Whenever I’m about to do something exciting – that’s when Uriah pops up. He’s determined to keep me that way, too. And having determined his appearance, I gave him a name: Uriah, because like the Dickens character my inner critic is “ever so ‘umble”. The description is based on drawings I’ve made of him. He generally looks worried, and avoids eye contact, but sometimes he stares boldly, his face contorted into a disbelieving sneer. I don’t know what yours is like, but I imagine my inner critic as small with a shaved head, and dark shadows under his bulging eyes. And it seems I’m not the only one who likes working that way. By doing that, I externalise the thoughts: they’re no longer coming from me. The first step is to become aware of your automatic negative thoughts – and for me, anyway, that’s much easier (and more fun, actually) if I personify the inner critic, with a sketch, and give him/her a voice. So we can learn to stop our thoughts travelling down the well-trodden neural pathways by creating entirely new ones. Brains don’t stop developing in childhood, as was previously believed: studies of London cabbies doing “the knowledge” of the city’s layout have found a redistribution of grey matter, and individuals who sustained massive brain damage have been shown to develop workarounds using undamaged parts. Happily, increasing evidence of the brain’s plasticity suggests that we can disrupt this poisonous cycle and put in place something much more healthy. ![]() We get stuck in the same old neural pathways, having the same negative thoughts again and again. In the 1960s, one of the founders of cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck, concluded that ANTs sabotage our best self, and lead to a vicious circle of misery: creating a general mindset that is variously unhappy or anxious or angry (take your pick) and which is (therefore) all the more likely to generate new ANTs. ![]() Psychologists use the term “ automatic negative thoughts” to describe the ideas that pop into our heads uninvited, like burglars, and leave behind a mess of uncomfortable emotions.
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