Summary
Joe Hudson offers a full guide to working with the inner critic — the incessant negative self-talk that he says slows down even the most successful people he coaches, while they paradoxically believe they need it to be productive. He starts by defining it: the nagging voice that tells you what to fix, calls you no good, and rehashes the past. He then shows where it came from with a story about his daughter, who on a road trip recognized that her inner voice spoke in the exact tone and words of her grandmother and her teacher. The critic is not you talking to you — it’s an old tape of someone else, and you’re hearing it as a three- or four-year-old, not as a full adult.
Joe dismantles the belief that the critic is necessary for motivation by imagining a boss who hovers two feet away criticizing you every two seconds — a boss everyone would quit. When that internal voice quiets, energy and productivity actually increase, because your adrenal system isn’t under constant attack. He then names the core error: most people relate to the critic like a rally believer agreeing with every word, when the quickest change isn’t fighting the voice (which makes it grow) but changing how you relate to it.
The one practical word is “ouch.” Speaking the critic’s words out loud and saying “ouch” after each one engages more of the brain than silent thought and lets you hear how abusive the talk really is — talk you’d never use on a friend. Joe recommends experimenting with many different reactions to keep the critic from being your master. He closes with compassion: the voice does carry a distorted, “dirty fuel” kind of care, like the imperfect love of a parent or teacher. Seeing it as a program — even with comedy and cuteness, like a Wizard of Oz figure behind a curtain — is what frees you from the cage.
Key Concepts
- The inner critic is an inherited voice, not you talking to yourself
- You don’t need the inner critic to be productive — it drains you
- Change your relationship to the critic, not the critic itself
- Saying “ouch” out loud reveals how abusive your self-talk really is
- The inner critic is dysfunctional care, not an enemy
Key Quotes
“It’s not you talking to you, it’s somebody else talking to you. It’s like an old tape of somebody talking to you and you’re talking to yourself like you’re three or four years old.”
“Imagine you’re at work and your boss shows up and hangs out about 2 feet away from you… Most people would say, ‘No, I’m quitting if I have a boss like that.’ But somehow or another, I need my internal boss to act just like that.”
“Trying to resist the negative self-talk actually typically only makes it grow. It is to change the way you relate to it.”
“Holy crap, that’s abusive as shit… I would never talk to a friend like this ever.”
“God is a comedian playing to an audience that’s too afraid to laugh.”
“I don’t have to live in this cage that I’ve made for myself with this little tyrant in my head that I don’t actually have to listen to anymore.”
Transcript
In all my work with some of the most successful people in the world, one of the things that completely dumbfounds me over and over again is how much their internal critic slows them down and prevents them from having the life that they want. And I see this ubiquitously across almost all humans that I work with, whether it’s the thousands of people in our courses or the dozens of people that I get to work with in person, this internal critic has become something that is just stifling their life. and weirdly at the exact same time they think they need it to be productive. So this video we’re going to go into where that critic came from, what it is, what’s actually going on there, how to work with it, and how that relationship with your internal critic can completely change if you do a few simple things. So before we get into it, let’s first define inner critic. So you can call it negative selft talk, you can call it um critical voice in the head, you can just call it negative thoughts that you’re having or thoughts that are telling you you have to do something to be better. It might say, “Hey, don’t forget to do this. Don’t forget to do this. You got to do this. Don’t forget to do this while you’re doing something.” So it’s literally nagging you to do something else while you’re doing something and it’s incessant or it’s telling you, “Oh, you’re no good. You should die. What’s wrong with you? Why did you screw that up?” or it’s constantly going back over the past saying, “Why didn’t you do it this way? Why didn’t you do it that way? Why didn’t you do it this way? Or you could do this better? Why are you 40 years old and you don’t have a job? Why is it that you’re 40 years old and you don’t have a house? Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” And so it’s just whack, whack, whack over and over again with this negative self-t talk. So that’s the thing that we’re talking about. We’re talking about having that voice in your head that’s constantly riding you. I was driving with my daughter and she was like nine or ten years old and we’re driving along and we do these road trips every it used to be every six months I would take each one of my daughters on a road trip just the two of us so that we could have this time to connect and we were listening to the podcast on the voice in the head and I had to listen to it to see if it was okay for publishing and she was listening to me and she goes I know where my voice in the head comes from it comes from my teacher and my grandma her grandma and her teacher were the people she spent spent the most time with besides her mom and I. And their voice, their criticism landed in her head and she could identify it because it spoke like the grandmother. It spoke like the teacher. It had the same tone. It had the same words. So if you really want to like figure out where yours came from, just like one day sit down and write everything it says to you for like 30 minutes and then say, “Who said that to me as a kid?” And that’ll give you a pretty good flavor of where it came from. which means you’re listening to the voice in your head thinking that it’s you talking to you, but it’s not you talking to you, it’s somebody else talking to you. It’s like an old tape of somebody talking to you and and you’re talking to yourself like you’re three or four years old, right? You’re not talking to yourself like you’re a full- grown adult, which is amazing when you think about it that way. Now, now the next thing that happens is once you kind of see where it’s coming from, then you say, “Well, I need it. I need the negative selft talk because who would I be without it?” Like if I don’t have this negative selft talk, I’m just going to hang out on the couch and drink beer and watch television. I need it to be motivated. So let me prove to you that that is just absolutely not the case. So imagine you’re at work and your boss shows up and hangs out about 2 feet away from you is like, “Oh no, don’t do it that way. Do it this way. No, you did that wrong. Oh wait, be careful for that. You know, you should also be fixing this light over there and talking to you every like two seconds, giving you another little bit of criticism. Don’t forget this. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget this. So, do you think you’d do a great job? You think that would make you more productive? Do you think that is the kind of boss you want? Most people would say, “No, I’m quitting if I have a boss like that.” But somehow or another, I need my internal boss to act just like that. I couldn’t have a bossless consciousness and be able to be productive. But what actually happens is when that voice starts changing starts slowing down even can go away that negative selft talk all of a sudden you have so much more energy because you’re not constantly under attack your adrenal system isn’t constantly oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh I’ve done something wrong I’ve done something wrong I’ve done something wrong and so you get a lot of energy you become much more productive now the next piece is to see how you’re typically reacting to the talk to the negative selft So, typically, think about it this way. Think about the politician you hate the most, right? There’s a politician you hate the most. And then that politician has like 500 believers at a rally and the politician talks and the believer is like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” That’s how most people relate to the critical voice in their head. The critical voice in the head said something and they’re like, “Yep, that’s true. Yes, I should remember to do that. Yes, I should be doing the plumbing and the electrical at the same time. Yes, I did make a mistake. Yes, I could have said it better. Yes, I They’re just agreeing with everything that the negative selft talk is saying, which is ridiculous when you think about that. The negative selft talk is talking to an eight-year-old version of you or a four-year-old version of you. And it’s not even you talking to yourself. It’s a programming that’s talking to you. And so the quickest way to change how the voice in the head works with you, it isn’t to try to change it. Trying to resist the negative selft talk actually typically only makes it grow. It is to change the way you relate to it. So here’s a simple experiment you can run at any time. It’s really easy is you can just say ouch. If you can sit down, close your eyes, listen to the voice in your head, speak whatever it says out loud, and then just say ouch after everything that it says that’s at all critical. And that does two things. So, first is neurologically speaking, if we have a thought and it’s just inside and we don’t speak it, it only activates our prefrontal cortex. But if we speak it, it activates other parts of our brain. So, when we speak the internal critic, we all of a sudden can hear it in a different light. like, “Holy crap, that’s abusive as shit.” Like, you’ll just hear it and you’ll be like, “What is going on?” Like, “I would never talk to a friend like this ever.” And so, that’s an amazing thing to just speak it out loud, but then to say, “Ouch,” after every time. So, you can actually see like own how abusive this the selft talk is that you wouldn’t say it to a friend, you wouldn’t say it to your kid, you wouldn’t say it to your boss, and yet somehow it’s okay to say it to yourself. And so, but there’s a ton of ways you can relate to it. And I really recommend experimenting with different ways to relate to it. So, maybe your voice in your head tells you 20 times a day you should be skinnier. So, one time, one day, every time it says you should be skinnier, tell it to go [ __ ] itself. And then next day, every time it tells you to be skinnier, you can say, “Oh, I see how scared you are. I’m right here with you.” And then the next time it tells you to be skinnier, you can be like, “Should I be skinnier or should I be fatter?” You know, like whatever. I don’t really care what you do. Just react differently to it. Realize that you have flexibility with the negative selft talk that it isn’t your master. It isn’t something that gets to control what you are and what you do. You get to relate to it in different ways. That’s a really great way to start working with the voice in your head. Another thing that’s really important to see is that you are not the voice in your head, right? That your the voice in your head is caring for you. It’s very dysfunctionally caring for you. It’s caring for you in a way that’s really really not good. It’s like really really dirty fuel, right? But it is there is care. If it’s saying be careful of that thing, it’s because it doesn’t want you to get hurt. If it’s saying you could have done that better, it’s because it wants you to improve. Like it it’s it’s got love in there somewhere in there. Just like your parents had, there was some love. Just like the teacher had for my daughter, it had some love, right? There there’s something there. The grandmother, there’s there’s care. It’s just all fakata, right? And you took on that voice from your teacher or from your parents or whatever because you were trying to figure out, oh, how do I not get in trouble? How do I survive? But now you can’t really get in trouble that same way. Like, yeah, you get to make mistakes. Like, here’s the crazy thing. Your voice in your head has probably told you that you’ve made 2,000 mistakes this year, and yet here you are watching a video. Life seems to be pretty good. How’s that happen? Like, how does it happen that all those mistakes that you made and still you’re doing okay? We don’t ever think about it that way. And so, it’s really critical for you to just be able to see through the voice in your head that it is not you. It is a program. And though it cares for you, though it’s trying, it’s not effective. One of my favorite ways of reacting to the voice in the head is just to say, “Oh, wow. That’s a really horrible way to manage me. That just doesn’t work very well.” And I can prove that it doesn’t work. You’ve been telling me to do the same thing for a decade and I haven’t done it. Like, you know, you’ve been telling me to get skinnier for a decade and I haven’t done it. You’ve been telling me to be smarter for a been telling me to like not speak. so much and I haven’t done it. So like you suck at managing people like so let’s not do that. So really important to take this whole thing like lightly. It’s it’s like oh it’s just there’s actually a comical nature to it. One of my favorite quotes is Voltater and he and he says God is a comedian playing to an audience that’s too afraid to laugh. Like if you really take a look at the voice in the head for a minute, you’re like, “Okay, I am listening to something that was programmed into me when I was 7 years old, four years old. And I am still taking the advice of that person even though I wouldn’t put up with it in a boss, even though I wouldn’t speak to anybody else like that. I’m taking that advice and I’m buying it all wholesale. and I feel like I’m oppressed and I have to do the thing that it says even though I don’t do the thing that it says. I’m actually being passive aggressive with it and telling it like quietly. You’re giving it a quiet little I’m not going to do what you say to do. You have this whole rebell like that’s hilarious if you really think about that for a second. It’s it’s it’s comical. And if you can see the the self-t talk is comical like, “Oh, look at you. Look at you. I see you’re trying to not get in trouble. I see that it’s like there’s this deep care and at the same time it is like watching like a three-year-old try to explain to you why the moon exists. It just it’s there’s a there’s a cuteness to it. There’s like a there’s a comedy to it. And if you can start seeing the voice in your head that way, then there’s so much progress that can be made in your life. so much so many ways that you can see that like oh I don’t have to live in this cage that I’ve made for myself with this little tyrant in my head that I don’t actually have to listen to anymore. And the cool thing is we get to see this all the time like when we we do something even in the connection course we one of the things we do is we start addressing the voice in the head and it is so cool to watch people go oh crap like they they Wow. I’m like, that’s how I’m treating myself. I would never treat anybody else that way. And to have that felt experience of it because you’re doing the voice in the head with somebody else. It’s an amazing experience to just watch so many eyes light up. It’s like the Wizard of Oz that at some point this big thing that’s huffing and puffing and blowing smoke and there’s just this little thing behind the curtain. And when people see it, the freedom that they get is it’s just amazing.