Give a F**k

there are times when being a sensitive, caring human being sucks.

s good. Trust me, I’ve tried.

This life is harsh enough without you turning on your own sweet self, too.

Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like you’re moving at all, which can be frustrating if, like me, you love seeing progress.

Life feels more like a game of snakes and ladders: sometimes you roll the dice and move forward steadily; at other times, you roll a few ladders and breakthroughs happen rapidly.

Some days I wake up and feel so bad I think, ‘Wow, it’s going to be pretty easy to beat myself up today’. On those days, I make a vow – I say I won’t tell myself a single bad thing about myself. It’s surprisingly difficult. By the way, this doesn’t mean being completely unself-conscious or, to use a well-worn phrase, ‘blowing smoke up your arse’; it means committing to reframing situations in a way that serves you and whatever you’re trying to do better.

inner voice is a process. When I’m making lots of changes in my life or doing something new, this voice of self-doubt sometimes shows up again. I think it’s just a side of me that gets scared and wants me to shrink back into a place that’s more comfortable. Now I speak to my inner voice and say, ‘I know you’re just trying to protect me, but actually I’ve got this.’ Other times I just say, ‘F**k off, will you? I’m sick of you crowding my brain!’

It was clear that I needed a different way of motivating myself.

At some point I gave this voice a name and character: Mr Peanut – an unbelievable perfectionist. Naming him something silly helped a lot. Sometimes I give him a Scooby Doo-style voice, too. It’s hard to take a cartoon dog seriously. Doing this helped distance the critic from me as a person – and it gave me a bit of breathing room to be a human being, and do what I want sometimes, instead of constantly being nagged about what I should do.

After a while, I started to hear another quiet voice that came in response to Mr Peanut. This new voice told me that I could do this, that I was brilliant, that I did have the ability and I would get there in the end. It ended up being much more worthwhile for me to tune into that voice (I’ve called her Angelica, because she’s an absolute godsend) and motivate myself lovingly forward.

Even if you aren’t convinced you’d succeed without your inner critic, let me put it this way: if you aren’t getting where you want to go in a way that feels good, what’s the point? Yes, you might end up changing your circumstances to something apparently richer, better looking, or cleverer – and you might complete that project in record time. My guess, however, is that your success will feel pretty hollow if you’ve had to flagellate yourself into the ground to get there, hating every minute of it. You can’t hate your way into a life that feels good. Trust me, I’ve tried.

This life is harsh enough without you turning on your own sweet self, too. There are enough battles worth fighting in this world – waging war on yourself is not one of them. Someone will let you know if you’ve f**ked up, I promise you.

That leads me to the second reason I put up with Mr Peanut for so long: protection from all those real-life critics. Somewhere deep down, I had this idea that if I could be really mean to myself, then no one would be able to hurt me, because I’d got there first. If I could just pre-empt everything bad about myself I could toughen myself up, or I could change it or hide it before anyone noticed; then I would be safe. This just wasn’t true. It actually stopped me from seeing the more immature parts of myself that needed attention.

The less savoury sides of yourself won’t come out into the light if your internal landscape is so full of judgement and shame – it’s too painful to confront them. Your inner critic just ends up weakening your self-worth to such a low level that you can’t cope with hearing or seeing anything else about yourself that might need attention – either from outside or inside. You can end up living a life in retreat – from yourself and the world; all because it’s got thorny in your own head.

Adjusting your

It was clear that I needed a different way of motivating myself.

At some point I gave this voice a name and character: Mr Peanut – an unbelievable perfectionist. Naming him something silly helped a lot. Sometimes I give him a Scooby Doo-style voice, too. It’s hard to take a cartoon dog seriously. Doing this helped distance the critic from me as a person – and it gave me a bit of breathing room to be a human being, and do what I want sometimes, instead of constantly being nagged about what I should do.

After a while, I started to hear another quiet voice that came in response to Mr Peanut. This new voice told me that I could do this, that I was brilliant, that I did have the ability and I would get there in the end. It ended up being much more worthwhile for me to tune into that voice (I’ve called her Angelica, because she’s an absolute godsend) and motivate myself lovingly forward.

Even if you aren’t convinced you’d succeed without your inner critic, let me put it this way: if you aren’t getting where you want to go in a way that feels good, what’s the point? Yes, you might end up changing your circumstances to something apparently richer, better looking, or cleverer – and you might complete that project in record time. My guess, however, is that your success will feel pretty hollow if you’ve had to flagellate yourself into the ground to get there, hating every minute of it. You can’t hate your way into a life that feels good. Trust me, I’ve tried.

This life is harsh enough without you turning on your own sweet self, too. There are enough battles worth fighting in this

spitting the kind of bile that no one in real life would do or dare say to me.

It sounded a bit like this: ‘Your stomach looks massive in that – really ugly. People will be repulsed by you. Look at those stains on your teeth. You shouldn’t be smoking. It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting. You have no self-control. Why haven’t you done that project you said you’d do? You’re useless. You need to do it now. You’re not allowed to enjoy anything until you’ve done it. I bet you can’t do it anyway. If you can’t do this you’re worth nothing.’

Really charming. You can’t win either – you tell yourself you can’t do something, and at the same time that you have to do something. Living with this voice has at times made me defensive, irritable and unable to relate to people well. I was walking around buried in shame half the time; tight and angry from fighting off the other half. So what was the purpose of this voice? And how could I turn the volume down?

Well, once I tuned in, I realized what was going on. As much as this inner critic made life hard for me, I’d assumed it was what motivated me. If I stopped feeding this bully with worry and attention, I believed I would end up doing nothing and then be proved right by it; if even beating myself up didn’t force me into action, then how unproductive would I be if I let it go?

In reality, I was achieving in spite of this self-criticism, not because of it. And the things I didn’t want to do? I still didn’t do them – whether the critic dialled up the abuse or not. All that happened was that I felt much worse about them, making myself feel bad. What’s the point in that

HOW YOU TALK TO YOURSELF

What does it sound like inside your head?

Most of us have an internal commentary chatting away as we go about our daily business. It can be judgemental: ‘Those pink leggings make you look like a flamingo.’ It can give us pep talks: ‘No, don’t worry – your outfit is salmon and you look great!’ It can muse: ‘I wonder if he was put off by your clothes?’ It can curse: ‘Why are you always stuck walking behind the slowest people in the universe?’ Sometimes, mine sounds exactly like my mother: ‘Yes, she is dressed badly and so are you, darling – it’s why you don’t have a boyfriend. Now hurry up and get to work.’

This inner voice differs for each of us. (I hope no one else has the dubious pleasure of hearing my disembodied mum.) Some people think in scattered words – the subconscious fills in the rest (late – bus – twenty-five minutes – work). Pictures – or visual thinking – can sometimes dominate or even decorate the self-talk. We all have a slightly different inner landscape. Getting to know the voices in my head has been a significant part of transforming my mindscape, from something resembling a volcanic Mordor, to more of a luscious and only occasionally rainy forest.

See, somewhere along the way my internal monologue turned on me. The inner coach always driving me on, asking me to do better, became a bully. This self-critic was brutal and destructive to my confidence