3. A warning to my inner critic
I love having discussions about these newsletters. Last week’s was somewhat controversial semantically - instead of the word ‘sacrifice’ should I instead have talked about prioritisation, or ‘letting go of the things that don’t serve you’ or being ‘values driven’? If you work part time are you really sacrificing extra income or prioritising making time for fun stuff and being less stressed? Are goals simply a ‘better use of time’ than filling your evenings with cooking, personal admin and downtime? I don’t think there’s a right answer, maybe it is semantics and framing? A lot of the ‘burnout recovery’ narrative (that I mainly consume via Emma Gannon’s Substack) focuses on rejecting ‘productivity culture’. Playing video games in your pants is celebrated in burnout recovery/avoidance content! I possibly didn’t express myself very well - my point mainly being that it is actually impossible to do everything and when I dial a hobby up a notch with a focussed goal it’s nicer to be intentional about what has to give way for that rather than realising that Olympics Day 8 is the first thing on my ‘Continue Watching’ list three months later (no joke).
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I thought that I would do some research on the origins of the Flying 200 as an event BUT I’ve had quite a busy week so here are some meandering thoughts on the role of our inner voices and how I need to harness mine for my goal.
I discovered recently that group life coaching is maybe not my thing - I prefer being outside (maybe having coaching chats with friends that I feel comfortable having a deep and meaningful with)! However, I loved hearing about my friend Hazel’s experiences at group life coaching last year. One of the things they covered was ‘what is your inner critic like’. Your inner critic is the internalised messaging that tells you you’re not good enough, you’re bound to fail, you’re weak, other people are bound to be better than you etc. A lot of these are shaped by the messages absorbed in childhood and at school and it can be quite empowering to identify the source of your inner critic’s message. Is the inner critic carrying emotional weight in decision making that far outweighs the rational situation?
At the end of last year a podcast I was listening to touched on this, asking the question, is your inner voice mainly a coach or a critic? I’ve recently started going to Mountain Bike Skills and am loving trying new tricks and seeing myself start to do things that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought was possible - small steps towards my shoplifting career doing a wheelie as Charlie the coach says! But I’ve realised that stretching myself this way is also helping me rediscover my inner coach voice. I look at something like the seesaw and think ‘I probably can’t do this but I won’t know if I don’t try’ and then my inner coach takes over, sometimes out loud - come on, you can do this! Cue lots of screaming as a soundtrack to success in that mission - the seesaw is REALLY fun!
Every year I aim to try something new. I’ve always thought that it was because I have this restless energy that needs continually topping up and relentless curiosity about new places and experiences. But I’m starting to wonder whether it’s partly because it allows me to access my inner coach - and that’s a much kinder, compassionate inner voice to hear than the critic that drives me daily. In December I tried scuba diving, something I never thought I’d try because I grew up in an era of shark heavy films. I didn’t love it, although coral reefs are incredible up close, but as my little group of 4 surfaced one by one we shared 10 minutes of laughter in the shallows of the Red Sea that celebrated sharing an experience where we had to collectively dig deep into our mental reserves (that point when your mouth gets so dry you are desperately licking the regulator because you’re 10 metres under water and can’t take it off is a toughie!).
What meditating on all this has made me realise is how quiet my inner coach is in track cycling now. I’d like to label it as realism about my potential performance - being realistic feels like being mature and grown up? But it also feels sad to realise how much the inner critic comes to the fore and how much I miss those empowering days in 2021-2022 when I had no idea what I was doing and it was all a journey of discovery. I finally made it back to a track session last night after a 3 month break, almost left when the Warm Up hit 60kmph with some dodgy wheels in front of me, but stayed as I knew I wouldn’t get myself onto the turbo instead when I got home at 9pm. Sitting on the fence for the second block of Pair Sprints my instinctive thoughts were that there was no point in trying and then I remembered all my musings about my inner coach and wondered where it was. And in the third sprint, I decided to leave rushing the gap until corner 4 (which is a risky tactic in my experience because you have to push uphill with less distance to get past) and suddenly I found that coaching voice that helped me push into an effort and it worked and I had that little rush of dopamine that buoyed me through the rest of the session.
So, as I embark on a mission to do something that isn’t new to me, I’m resolving to try and find my inner coach voice more often on the track this year. It must be possible? What do you think? Where is your inner coach silent or loud? Have you quit something because your inner critic took over? Have you ever managed to recapture the magic of trying something new when doing something old and familiar?