Change your internal voice to be 5% more positive - so you can thrive in work and life. Sign up today! Current cohort launched 20 Mar 2025; next cohort likely to start in June/July - send through your details now.
UPDATE 3 Mar 25: Results are in – a delightful 5% improvement in mood for participants in the first round. And I have a shiny new approach for the next cohort: interactive web app and email reminders – more interactive, and more flexible, and still free for joiners in March. Add your details below to be part of it!
Lovely feedback came through from participants, such as: “… it changed my mindset” and “it’s slowly changing how I perceive or think about things, which is really helpful.”
Background: What is the Inner Critic?
Most of us have the Inner Critic. The nagging voice inside that points out every potential problem, highlights our flaws, and focuses all its attention on the negatives. It’s the human condition – being aware of threats helps us survive; being aware of positive things doesn’t. So if you had one slightly negative piece of feedback to fifty positive ones – guess where your mind will focus its attention?
Often – it’s useful and somewhat right. Maybe you should do more exercise, spend less time scrolling socials, and have a healthier diet – most of us should. But if it’s constantly nagging you, no matter what you do; if it’s more hurtful than helpful – then quietening it would be good.
Can you imagine having a friendly, supportive voice inside?
Sound nice? Sign up below
What is the Inner Critic Programme?
This programme is devised to help people retrain their brains to disarm the inner critic and feel more positive. It’s a simple process, taking just a few minutes daily to try out different techniques and answer questions to improve your ability to be nice to yourself – and feel better inside.
I’ve previously written more detail about the origins and context of the inner critic, and gave an overview of my ROAD framework. This programme builds the framework out into a longer self study programme, iterating and deepening each step – Reflect, Observe, Assess, Disarm – and enables you to use multiple tools and practice ways of improving your inner voice.
The ROAD Framework:
Who is the programme for?
- Leaders, managers and many folks in senior roles – who are driving themselves hard, and are too tough on themselves. If you tend to overwork to try to get things perfect, or feel you have to do everything yourself; if you’re feeling impostor syndrome – it’s probably your inner critic driving you.
- Women generally tend to have harsh inner critics holding them back. Maybe it’s a judgy voice carping on about your appearance. Maybe it’s warning you not to try new things. Maybe it’s saying you should stay in a bad situation or relationship. And – maybe you deserve a better voice and life.
- Younger folks – from their teens to the early thirties – can often lack confidence and can feel anxious and stressed. The teenage years are particularly notorious for social anxiety – but the twenties with all the changes in education, jobs, and trying to find a life path in often-toxic environments, are also pretty tough. Reducing the negativity of what you’re saying to yourself can help you thrive.
If any of the above resonates – even if you’re not any of these groups – come on, try it out.
Overview of the programme
- Benchmark survey – done at the start and the end, to assess in more detail how bad your critic is, and what impact it is having – and compare how you feel at the end with the start.
- Step by step progress – each step has exercises which focus on a different stage of the ROAD framework. The last part of each step is a review or ‘synthesis’ of what you got from that step’s work – reflecting on what worked, and what you’ll want to continue in future.
- Step 1 – Reflect – questions to help you figure out the sources and history of your critic.
- Step 2 – Observe – questions to help you notice when the critic is causing your negative feelings, and how it talks to you.
- Step 3 – Assess – questions to consider the accuracy of what the critic says and how it says it.
- Step 4 – Disarm – questions to decide which tools work best for you in disarming the critic
- Exercises – the exercises just take a few minutes. Do them more or less daily over the course of a month or so – participants started to notice a difference even after just a week of daily practice. Doing it fairly frequently helps to retrain the brain to more positive thinking – if you do just one exercise every few weeks, it’s less likely to have impact.
- Question – one or more questions for you to respond to each day.
- Tool – a ‘Disarm’ tool to use – sometimes you’ll use the same tool for a few days; sometimes it changes daily.
- Check-in – just one question to capture how your inner narrative was that day, so you can see how it’s changing over time.
3 Mar update – Results from first Cohort
The results from the first cohort are in! And they are… positive! Cautiously positive – it’s from few people and few data points. But – still – decidedly positive.
Just 5 people did the survey more than once a week over the month, with 70 ‘daily survey’ submissions – so not a statistically significant data sample .
But of those 5, when comparing the first half of the month with the second half – there was an average improvement of 1.5 over the course of the month – an impressive 5% improvement. Not bad for a month of occasionally spending a few minutes, some of the days. (More about the numbers at the bottom). I wish my muscles improved at the same rate.
In addition to this quantifiable change, there was a lot of positive feedback along the way.
- “As I progress with it, it’s slowing changing how I perceive or think about things which is really helpful.”
- “Too early to judge the results, but I definitely notice that I am able to go back and to think about why I have certain emotions.” (participant after first week)
- “Looking for the positive throughout the day changed my mindset”
- “I’m finding the daily prompts to focus and remind me to work on this useful”
- “I think the program is really good, I got a lot out of week 1. …. I did like the questions, some of them really made me think about things.”
Learning: daily surveys and exercises for a month are – not realistic. (Sorry, guinea pig cohort!) My ‘MVP’ approach was bit too intense. The big change I’m making for the second round is to make it all far more flexible, so it’s easy to pause for a few days along the way, without the gloomy feeling of Things Piling Up. I’m also going to simplify data collection a lot – less frequent, and fewer questions!
Sign up to the Next Cohort Programme now
The programme has been free to participants, while I’m gathering data on its success – I wanted to quantify further how much positive change participants can expect.
Questions? Get in touch.
Sign up today
Numbers
How’d I get to that 5% better number?
- The Daily Survey for the first cohort, asked people how often over that day, they had felt good / bad. (I’ve simplified this a lot for future rounds – you won’t have to answer this level of detail daily!)
- The ‘how often‘ ranged from “0” – not at all – to “5” – all the time.
- For the good/bad, I assigned a weighting to each of the 4 variants: Extremely negative: -3; Slightly negative: -1; Slightly positive: +1; Extremely positive: +3
- So a daily score could be calculated by adding each emotion*frequency together. For example, one day’s survey might have had these results:
- extremely negative (-3) occasionally (1) = -3
- slightly negative (-1) very often (4) = -4
- slightly postive (+1) fairly often (3) = +3
- extremely positive(+3) occasionally (1) = +3
- = The daily score for this day would have added up to -1
- I then averaged all the daily scores for everyone for the first half of the month (-0.5 average) and the second half of the month (+1 average) – a difference of 1.5.
- The range of scores had a max of 16, and a minimum of -17 – a range of 33 – so 1.5 is 5% of the range.
- Feedback from folks with more statistical expertise is welcome!