Dream deferred–it’s never too late!

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Managing the Inner Critic after you’ve lost your job.

In the last few days I have been in touch with many friends and readers of this blog who have lost their jobs. While having lunch with an extremely talented friend who was laid off from a job she loved, she described how the Inner Critic had more power over her than ever before. With every emailed resume she didn’t get a response to and every minute she waited for the phone to ring, the Inner Critic leapt into the communication void to whisper in her ear.

Do any of these phrases sound familiar? “You don’t have the right experience. You’re too old! You suck at interviews! You’ll never find a job! You’re not talented enough to get a job in this tight economic market!”

If you’ve lost your job, or are a freelancer like me and have to create jobs on a daily basis for a living, then we must battle that Inner Critic minute-by-minute. My Dad always use to say, “It’s easier to change lanes when you’re in the traffic than when you’re stopped at the side of the road.” True. But what if you are stopped on the side of the road by forces outside your control? Here are some things I’ve been stewing on lately.

Get dressed. I’ve written about this one before, but it’s so important. Put on the clothes you would wear to work so you’ll feel more confident. If you’re in your pjs or sweats, it’s easy to slip into inaction. Right now? I’m in my pjs. Whoops. One moment please.

Persue every lead. How do you figure out which opportunities to take? I believe it’s my job to put myself out there in as many ways and as often as I can. What comes back to me, is not up to me. So when doors open, I walk through them to see where they lead. Even if it wasn’t necessarily the right thing for me, I always learn some valuable lesson that serves me later in unexpected ways.

Face the worst-case and plan for it. What is the absolute worst thing that can happen? You’ll lose your house? And then what will you do? Lose your car? Then how will you get around? Though your circumstances may change in unpleasant ways, there is always a way through. Sometimes you have to change your career or your attitude, or your living arrangments. But there is always a way.

Be proud of yourself. Make a list of the moments in your life when you have been most proud of yourself. What did you do? What did you achieve? How did you handle a situation? Remember those moments now.

Do something that makes you feel confident. Make another list of moments when you have felt the most confident. What were you wearing? How did you walk? What are you really, really good at?

Find allies. If you have people in your life who take energy from you instead of helping you feel courageous, then ditch those friends or family members for a while. Call up the confident people you know and align yourself with them. Instead of hanging out with people who are scared and in fear spirals, find those who are scared and are rallying themselves for the fight with optimism and hope.

Use this time for self-exploration. Last week on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, they ran a story about a 40-year-old woman who was in the financial industry and lost her job. Instead of returning to the same industry, she decided to go to school to become a chef. These stories abound during times like this. But if you view this time as an opportunity, then you will not only survive this turbulent era, you will thrive.

How about you? Let me know how you continue to smackdown your Inner Critic while you hunt for work or have to make a scary transition so we can all benefit! And please remember to do something kind for yourself every single day. This is especially important right now.

Hope is a slippery slope.

You can’t just have hope; you have to sustain it. Because every day is a new day, hope has to be renewed over and over again. Is that possible? Every day?

You know how quickly doubt can show up; it’s faster than the pundits on the 24-hour news networks, who are desperate for conflict and argument and fights – that’s what they’re paid for. That’s the Inner Critic’s job, too.

So how on earth do you keep hope going, especially when there are so many voices, inner and outer, who just want to keep you afraid?

Jacque and I have been doing it for ten years. We turn the slippery slope of hope into a ski resort every single day, and the smackdowns are our skis, our snowboards, our sleds, and sometimes just our good old-fashioned butts.

So about those pundits, who are already busy trying to predict the future (and of course, all they see is bad news)… one of my favorite smackdowns is just a plain, simple fact: I have no idea what’s going to happen.

All I have to do is say it: I have no idea what’s going to happen.

The Inner Critic specializes in telling you every possible, terrible thing that could go wrong, in detail. But it doesn’t really know, because you don’t know. The world is far too complex for anyone to be able to predict the future; even the next five minutes are up in the air.

If you admit that you have no idea what’s going to happen, you’re admitting that you don’t have control, and not having control is supposed to make you feel scared, right? But truth is not just powerful; it’s restful. It’s comforting.

So if you’re starting to doubt, say it: I have no idea what’s going to happen. Say it out loud.

(Listen, the world is so complex, a man who couldn’t get a floor pass to the Democratic National Convention in the year 2000, became President eight years later! Tell the truth, doesn’t that sound “impossible”?)

Smackdown Success Story: Alysia Reiner

Alysia Reiner (www.alysiareiner.com) plays the recurring role of Cindy on The Starter Wife on USA. Her latest film is The Vicious Kind, produced by Neil LaBute, and she won a Screen Actors Guild Award for her role as Christine in Sideways. She is also expecting her first child with husband David Alan Basche.  

When did your Inner Critic first rear its ugly head?

Been there as long as I can remember.

What’s the worst part of having an Inner Critic, or what’s the worst thing it’s ever said to you?

That it never goes away – you just learn to deal with it.

What have you been able to achieve by smacking down your Inner Critic?  

Not just achieving goals but living a life with more joy and peace.

What’s your all-time favorite smackdown?

Thank you for sharing, now shut the f@%& up.  

What do you do when none of your smackdowns are working?   

Call and email friends to help me whip um into shape, put on great music & dance it away, go to kickboxing class

Over time, does it get easier to smackdown the Critic?

Absolutely – it’s a muscle, ya gotta work it.

What keeps you motivated?

I wanna live my dreams, be happy and at peace – the more I do the less the Critic talks.

Acting is one of the toughest careers you can have. How do you handle the Outer Critics?

Don’t read reviews while you are working on something. Period.

Are you scared of raising a kid? If so, how do you smackdown that fear?  

It’s a mix of educating myself, choosing what to use (i.e., choosing supportive, not fear-based, books, videos, classes), and listening to my intuition and heart more than ever.

What are your favorite sources of inspiration?

SO MANY! Nature, music, meditation, yoga, love, art, notes from the Universe, my friends & family, sex, laughter, being of service.

What advice would you give to someone who was stuck in fear and inaction?

Go do something! Get your ass out of bed or out of the house and:

Volunteer somewhere

Go to a museum

Make a list of goals, start with tiny ones

& take one action today – just one.

Recruit a friend to be action buddies

Anything else you’d like to add that I haven’t asked?

Action and Smackdown with faith/hope/belief in yourself are muscles – ya gotta work um. And sometimes they get sore when you first learn to use um or are getting stronger… Work through the pain. Pain is weakness leaving the body. And damn it feels good to be strong, believe in yourself and live the life of your dreams!!

Smackdown Success Story: Stephanie Watson

Stephanie Watson is the author of Elvis & Olive, a children’s book that was published by Scholastic in April 2008. She knows plenty about smacking down her inner critic. And she does a helluva job at it, too. Besides her first novel, she has two more books she’s working on and a busy career as a freelance writer. Here she talks to us about her strategies for smacking down The Heavyweight.

Do you have an active inner critic?

Who doesn’t? Mine works over time. Really diligent. A very hard worker.

When things are going well the critic likes to say things like, “This won’t last,” or “You’ll be discovered soon.” And when it’s difficult and the writing is not coming as easy as I like it to, then the critic says, “See what did we tell you before?” So yeah, it’s something that will always be with me and I feel will always be a companion but it’s about finding a way to trick the critic or somehow leave him behind. There are all kinds of things that do seem to work. I like trying a bunch of different things. No one thing works forever. It seems like the critic gets wise to your strategies. So trying a lot of different things can work well.

I really love reading books. I don’t know if you’d call them writers’ self-help books, but they are for writers, like The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes and The Writers Book of Hope. Mostly they are filled with stories of how other writers or artists of any kind have struggled. There’s something about reading about other people’s journey through fear that gives me courage. If I hear that some of my favorite writers are battling the same demons, it makes it seem possible to get over that somehow or at least to temporarily escape the critic in order to be able to write something.

I think if you keep moving that helps. There was a big critique of this new book I’m working on and it really flattened me for a week. And I felt like if I can start moving again it will be okay. Even if the writing is difficult or not coming easy there is something about getting back into motion that seems to help a lot. The critic seems to be a slow moving beast. So if you can run fast enough… That’s something I am doing right now. I am waiting for feedback on this piece, and I decided I’m going to do this crazy thing. I’m going to write a picture-book manuscript every day for two weeks, just to be totally reckless, and like I don’t care! They can be garbage, I don’t care. Because I feel like if I stop there is too much silence and I start hearing the critic’s voice: “You suck.” It’s a lot of fun to write a picture book every day and it does seem to quiet that voice. And also at the end of two weeks hopefully I will hear back by then. If not at least I will have escaped two weeks of worrying, and I might have at least a couple of workable manuscripts that I can edit into something I can sell. Out of fourteen manuscripts there’s got to be something good. That’s a new trick.

It’s like the national novel writing month, It’s the same principle. Just run like hell, and the critic can’t keep up.

Has your inner critic kept you from doing something before?

Yeah, I think so. I think that’s what keeps me going. It’s more scary to think that I might miss an opportunity. I don’t want to ever look back and say I think, “I should have done that.” When I was in college, I was in a comedy improv group. I don’t think I knew enough to be scared about it. It was something I fell into. It was only later that I was realized that was a really scary thing to do. A few years ago I was thinking back on that and I asked myself, could I do that now? And the idea that I would not do it now because it was scary made me feel like now I have to do it. So now I’m in a comedy improv group. It’s terrifying. We perform on Tuesdays at the Brave New Workshop. It’s so scary. Every Tuesday I’m like why am I doing this? But I just want to do those things that scare me so I don’t feel bad about not having done them.

You feel very alive when you do something that makes you feel afraid. In this book I read it talks about the gifts of fear. Fear makes you very alert and anxiety makes your mind very sharp. So you approach something you’re afraid of with anxiety, but it makes you act quickly and be clever in a way that maybe you couldn’t be if you were super relaxed about it. I like that idea that maybe being afraid is not only okay but maybe you want to be a little afraid so that ultimately you do a better job and give it more concentration. That’s another thing that helps the critic. “Yeah, I’m afraid. So?” That’s what I say to myself when I’m about to go on stage with the comedy improv. “Yeah, my hands are shaking. So?” It’s uncomfortable and my inclination is to run out the door, but I’ll just stay here and be here with that fear and do it anyway. And then it ends up not mattering that I was afraid. The same holds true for writing.