If you are like me, your inner critic is frequently yelling at you. Are you judging others, yourself, and situations, and do you want to stop?
If you can relate, read on for some tips. Then contact me so we can shut down and weaken the Judge Saboteur together, and you can finally be free of thoughts racing through your head!
Everyone has a Saboteur. The question is, “Have you weakened it?” Chances are, you haven’t, don’t know how, or aren’t aware you even have one.
The Judge, a highly powerful Saboteur, is indoctrinated in us at an early age. We judge our performance in school, on the playground, and at home; we judge others for the same, and we judge our circumstances or situation in life.
Have you ever said to yourself, “I should have done better on that project. I’m such a loser when it comes to details,” or something similar?
Maybe you’ve judged a co-worker; “What a slacker he is; he always takes extra time on breaks.
Or you’ve judged your circumstances in life as getting the short of the stick; you weren’t born to the right parents; there’s always a wrench thrown your way to mess things up.
“We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
According to Shirzad Chamine, author of Positive Intelligence, the Judge is the universal Saboteur that beats you up repeatedly over mistakes or shortcomings, warns you obsessively about future risks, and gets you fixated on what is wrong with others or your life. Your Judge is your greatest internal enemy and causes you much of your stress and unhappiness and reduces your effectiveness.
So, what can you do, and how can you weaken the Judge?
First, ask yourself why you’re judging.
Is it because you need to belong or feel part of a group?
Is it because you need to feel “better than” or superior to someone?
Is it because you don’t want to see those aspects in yourself?
Is it because you want to know where you fit in, who, and what you like?
After becoming aware of why you’re judging, pause and feel the emotions and the bodily sensations that occur. Are they pleasant, or are they distressing?
Negative emotions are only helpful for one second as your alert signal, just like the signal you get from putting your hand on a hot stove. You don’t keep your hand on it; you remove it quickly.
You can become aware when judging by being curious and listening to what your body tells you. Change can occur when these alert signals are heeded; judging can be transmuted into discernment.
When using discernment, you are curious and search for understanding and insight from a situation enabling you to make an intelligent decision. You can see clearly and respond with empathy, compassion, creativity, and laser-focused action.
To weaken your Judge Saboteur, strengthen your discernment; it’s your key to success.
Strengthening your discernment isn’t easy, but you can increase your abilities by focusing on your business. Where do you struggle?
Do you always talk, or are you quiet as a churchmouse? If you’re perceived as a know-it-all, people will shut you out and may cause your working relationships to suffer.
On the other hand, if you never speak up, no one will recognize you as having anything to offer, which could be detrimental when working on a project.
Learning when to speak up and when to stay quiet strengthens your discernment.
Are you are perfectionist and late with your tasks? When you need to have everything perfect, you’re judging your work. Find colleagues with similar projects and watch how they complete them. Use this knowledge with your wisdom to discern what is necessary to hand in.
Do you hold onto constructive feedback as criticism from your boss? Taking time to consider and assess what value you can find in the feedback rather than getting annoyed or angry is a step in improving your discernment resulting in greater success.
If you find your Judge Saboteur is showing up frequently and blocking your success and potential, begin practicing the virtue of discernment.
Walk Through Your Fear and Step Into Your Confident Self
How often have you been confronted with a challenge to grow but lacked the confidence to walk through your fear?
For me, there have been far too many times when I stunted my development and lost power by making choices that sabotaged it. I lacked the confidence to go out and share what I have learned over the past twenty-plus years. Sure, I wrote a book about all the lessons I learned, but to go out and promote it? No, I can’t do that because I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me. Give a talk or a speech in front of more than two people? Uh-huh. No-can-do. What if I messed up? Then what? How about doing a live stream or recording a video to post? Are you nuts? What if I make a mistake? People will think I’m stupid, and I can’t let that happen.
They were my thoughts and feelings when I tried to do things but couldn’t.
And then I discovered why.
It all boiled down to a defining moment in my young life. Growing up, I was a force to be reckoned with; I was a tomboy and needed to be seen. I was also very competitive, so when I was 12 years old, I tried out for and won the lead role in our class play. Everything was great. I played the part beautifully for our school and the A. I. DuPont Children’s Hospital. But when it came time for the CYO competition, I failed miserably. by flubbing my lines after my father took a flash Polaroid photo of me. I was humiliated!
At the time, I didn’t realize that failure and humiliation had been the catalyst for my lifelong lack of confidence.
That fear blocked me from being the person I wanted and knew I could be. Instead of directing my life myself, the fear of being humiliated was the driving force. My confidence was shattered, and the need to be perfect was the justification I needed not to move forward.
Are there times when you feel like that, too? If yes, know that you, too, can walk through your fear and step into your confident self.
Here are some ways that you can do that:
Identify and Learn About It
What are you afraid of? Is it humiliation, like me? Or is it something else, like rejection, making a mistake, or failing? The only way to begin to walk through your fear is to know what it is and face it. What are your trigger signs? Do you get a tightness in your chest? Does your heart race? Does your stomach church? When you can identify a fear pattern and learn the cause, you can lean into it and find a walk to counter it.
Use Your Imagination and Visualize a Positive Outcome
You already imagine the worst possible scenario when you fear something, so why not imagine having a positive result instead? Bring an image to mind of what you want to do that you’re afraid of doing now, and visualize yourself taking every step necessary to complete it. For example, I imagine myself at an event with an audience of over one thousand. I then visualize myself walking out onto the stage, microphone in hand, and giving a great Ted Talk or some other presentation. Your mind does not know the difference between visualizing and actually doing it.
Consider It and then Believe It
When you’re about to make that move into the unknown, allow yourself to consider the worst-case scenario. What is the worst thing that can happen? Will you lose your job? It’s not likely. Will you lose your family or home? I don’t think you will. Will you die? Definitely not! Maybe you won’t do as well as you thought. Ok, I’ll do better next time. Maybe people will laugh at me. And? Have you never been laughed at before? Next time, I’ll show them! Once you’ve decided you’ll survive the worst thing that can happen, believe you can do it! Because you can! Walt Disney was right when he said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
Start by making small steps into small fears and gradually build them into more significant actions. Eventually, you’ll be able to walk through all your fears and step into your confident self!
“Healthy habits are learned in the same way as unhealthy ones—through practice.”
~ Wayne Dyer
The last step in the transformational coaching process is to form new habits. You’ve almost completed your journey, where you began with a problem and a desire for change. After identifying the issue you wanted to
resolve, you set a transformational goal that was so powerful it would keep you going through the digging and excavation work necessary.
The next step was to search and find the underlying pattern of your paradigm that prevents you from living the life you desire. The exploration of your beliefs and assumptions, along with your needs and goals, identified the strategies you created that caused your actions. Those actions gave you the unfavorable outcomes that transpired in your life.
You identified your First Order problem, which is the problem you presented. It led to uncovering the Second Order problem, which was the cause of your presenting problem. And finally, you recognized the Third Order problem, which was the pattern that kept your Second Order problem from being faced; it locked the paradigm in place.
You then courageously owned the pattern and learned from it.
Taking the bull by the horns, you actively engaged in your healing and transformation by completing learning tasks where you observed your thoughts and behavior, acquired insight from them, and experimented by taking new and different actions.
The fifth step was to question and release the paradigm. You recognized your paradigm, and the strength of your ego may have accelerated or hindered your change. Working through to thoroughly understand your paradigm, you discovered how your paradigm served you in life, how it limited you, and most significantly, how it was your teacher, allowing you to release it.
After this discovery and “letting go” process, you experimented to find a more expansive paradigm that supported your transformational goal. You did this by using your imagination and role-play. A new paradigm map was populated, starting with the strategies necessary to produce your desired results. As you filled the map out, you began to see your transformational goal emerge.
Finally, we arrive at the last step in your journey, Step 7: Form New Habits. You’re almost there, but it is here you need to commit yourself to cross the finish line by forming and practicing new habits.
Commitment to a new practice, to practice itself, is your final stage of transformation.
There’s a continuum that ranges from “I hope” to “I’d like to” to “I want” to “I intend” to “I commit.”
Commitment has significant power in one’s psyche, and from this place, a new paradigm gets reinforced, deepened, and embodied to the extent that it becomes your new and enduring way of being.
Freedom from your old paradigm comes at a price: your comfort. The more you need comfort, the more you will hold onto your old paradigm. A full, exciting life and being always comfortable don’t co-exist. It is here where you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Form New Habit and Practice Accountability
“Practice is the price of mastery. Whatever you practice over and over again becomes a new habit of thought and performance.”
~ Brian Tracy
First, you agree that a new habit needs to be formed. Then, a strategy to develop new habits needs to be implanted into your life. James Clear’s four-step process is ideal for this.
They are as follows:
Cue. The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior, a bit of information that predicts a reward. Prehistoric humans paid attention to cues that signaled the location of primary rewards like food, water, and sex. Today, we spend most of our time learning cues that predict secondary rewards, like money and fame, power and status, praise and approval, love and friendship, or a sense of personal satisfaction.
Sometimes you can influence cues, ex.: no chocolate in the house.
Craving. Cravings are the second step and the motivational force behind every habit. Without some level of motivation or desire—we have no reason to act. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.
This is the crucial part. In a transformation, you need a craving stronger than the craving for the cue (such as your craving for your transformational goal).
Response. The response is the actual habit you perform: a thought or an action.
Reward. Finally, the response delivers a reward. Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward, and the craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. We chase rewards because they serve two purposes:
To satisfy your craving. At least for a moment, rewards deliver contentment and relief from craving.
To teach us which actions are worth remembering. As you go about your life, your sensory nervous system continuously monitors which actions satisfy your desires and deliver pleasure.
These four steps can be transformed into a practical framework that you can use to design good habits and eliminate bad ones.
In James Clear’s Atomic Habits, he identifies three steps to change a habit, whether good or bad.
To create a good habit, you must:
The 1st law (Cue) Make it obvious.
The 2nd law (Craving) Make it attractive
The 3rd law (Response) Make it easy.
The 4th law (Reward) Make it satisfying.
To break a bad habit, you must:
Inversion of the 1st law (Cue) Make it invisible.
Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving) Make it unattractive.
Inversion of the 3rd law (Response) Make it difficult.
Inversion of the 4th law (Reward) Make it unsatisfying.
Old habits die hard. Commitment to a new practice and practice is the beginning of the final stage of transformation. Forming new habits is essential for solidifying your shift. Insight by itself is not enough; the process of habit formation is vital to sustaining your powerful paradigm shift. My hope for you is that you can stick to your commitment to practice which will lead your new paradigm to take hold.
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The mapping of a new paradigm is vital to your transformational journey and is exploratory. The old map is a depiction of your current or working paradigm, and the new map is your desired paradigm, one that aligns with the transformational goal you set earlier in your journey.
The following steps are instrumental in mapping your desired paradigm.
Step One
This part of the coaching session will be outlined, and an agreement will be made with you to enter this process phase. The value of mapping your paradigm is that it creates a reference point that will help you form new habits, which is the final step in the transformational process.
Step Two
You’ll be given an empty map like the example below:
Step Three
You will begin to populate the map (with assistance if needed) as you need to own the process and the content. The “Strategy” box is a good place if you’re uncertain where to begin. You would then fill in “Actions” and predicted “Outcomes.” From there, move to the top of the map and populate “Beliefs,” “Needs,” and “Goals.”
Step Four
Look back at your original transformational goal to see if and how well your desired paradigm fits your initial goal. If it works to your satisfaction, you have arrived. If not, ask yourself what you would need to change to feel more enthusiastic about the desired map.
Having a breakthrough requires more than mapping out your desired paradigm and gaining insight from it. It requires support from your community, reinforcement resulting from success, and practice and repetition. You need to hold yourself accountable to enact what you know will be more effective. It is where Step 7: Forming New Habits, comes into play.
schedule your free 15-minute discovery call today to learn more!
Step Six: Experiment and Find a More Expansive Paradigm
You are now at a point where a shift in your paradigm can occur. To move on, you need to have gratitude for the paradigm you’re releasing. When you’re grateful for something, you smile. When you smile,
there’s no judgment.
“The way to move out of judgment is to move into gratitude.” ~ Neal Donald Walsh
Two factors prevent transformation:
Lack of ownership
Self-judgment/high inner critic
You most likely have a limiting paradigm because your success strategies have been reinforced by justifying them, believing you’re right and everyone else is wrong or having blind spots.
Exploring Alternative Paradigms
Four factors that can ignite a paradigm shift:
The current paradigm doesn’t work anymore
General dissatisfaction with life
The discovery of a better way
An environment of diversity
Most people don’t choose to change their paradigms mainly because they aren’t aware of them, and they’ve held onto them their entire lives. Plus, they don’t live in an environment conducive to change. As your transformational coach, I hold the setting for change where you can recognize and detach from your paradigm.
Posing specific questions begins the process of examining other paradigms where you are encouraged to become open and curious. You may be offered a different way of looking at things rather than a recommendation. The point is that you will be invited to take a broader view of how things could work differently in your life to give you the desired outcomes.
The Elements of a More Expansive Paradigm
According to Keith Merron, in his book, The Art of Transformational Caching, a more expansive paradigm has the following five characteristics:
Spacious and expansive: It is, by definition, more holistic. It considers all the relevant variables and seeks to create a win-win-win outcome—I win, you win, we win.
Generous: It has the feature of being in service to others and the whole system.
Generative: It tends to help you and the people around you to learn and grow.
Life-affirming and life-giving: It leaves you more encouraged, vital, and alive.
Sustainable: It takes into account the long view.
In this framework,
you might be asked to reflect on how you could stretch and expand a new paradigm to make you more spacious and expansive and what would leave you feeling more generous and effective.
Our Strategies are Self-Sealing
Because your success strategies work in your eyes, releasing them is challenging. You may justify them in various ways, think you’re always right, and find ways to deny they are there. Blind spots are buried deep in your paradigms.
Your personal paradigm is so strong that it causes you to bend the truth to adapt to how you view yourself and the world. You unconsciously pick and choose the indicators to bolster your views and throw out conflicting facts. It is how a blind spot becomes self-sealing.
Methods for Breaking Out of Self-Sealing Paradigms
Three methods that will help you explore, experiment, and break out of your self-sealing paradigms are:
Through imagination
Through role-playing
Through trying it out, experimenting with it
Imagination
You can construct an alternative way of seeing your paradigm using your imagination. What would it look like? What would it feel like? What would it feel like if you were
operating from a different paradigm?
In the safe space of your mind, you can then start to explore what that would look like and find other possible choices. It involves identifying and adopting new assumptions and thinking more broadly.
Essentially, if you want a different outcome in life, it will require different thinking, which results in a change of behavior and produces a new outcome. Through imagination, you can create a fresh paradigm.
Role-Playing
Role-playing encompasses practice, exploration, and deeper learning. Think of it as a form of play and discovery where you can expand your self-awareness and how you relate to the world.
An example might be: “Can you think of anyone in your life with whom you constantly have problematic situations that you would like to examine?” As the coach, I would not perfectly play this person’s role, and I would begin by asking you how you might look to respond differently when provoked by this person.
As the role-playing progresses, there are pauses to reflect and discuss what you noticed about yourself and what you experienced. We would continue to role-play, pausing and reflecting until you feel complete.
Trying it Out
Trying it out or experimenting with it is just that. There are somatic forms, such as dance, movement, and action. An example might be: “Can you ask someone to do something for you instead of you doing it for them?” How do you feel when you think about doing that, and can you do it?
Then, in the next session, discuss what worked and what didn’t work. Experimenting with it starts to stretch you, and the debrief stretches you more.
At this point, you have enough information to begin mapping out a new, authentic paradigm. That process will be explained in the next post.
Step Five comes into play after you have examined the forces that created your behavior pattern or paradigm. You are now prepared to question it deeply and let it go, or you may feel clear about the pattern but don’t know if
you’re ready to release it.
“In the process of letting go, you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself.” ~ Deepak Chopra
Letting go of your current paradigm may be challenging as you may have been holding onto it throughout your transformational journey. It is where you must begin to look at and confront how you have been indoctrinated with your beliefs.
Holding on Tightly to Our Socially Constructed Patterns
Many beliefs that form your paradigm have been constructed through your social and cultural norms, and you may believe them to be absolute truths, as they have tremendous power. But they become invisible to you because it’s something you just do.
You don’t think twice that when you meet someone, you reach your hand out to shake the other person’s, don’t invade someone’s personal space, or always flush the toilet when you’re done. You don’t see or examine these social norms in your life; they just are.
Holding on Tightly to Our Personal Paradigms
As the saying goes for changing something in your life, “You’ve got to name it to claim it,” so, too, for creating a paradigm shift. Once identified, the decision then is to let it go if you are willing.
Herein lies the strength or lack of your ego. By strength, I don’t mean big; it takes a strong ego to allow another person’s opposite point of view or belief not to upset or enrage you. If your ego is big, it’s most likely weak, and you’ll hold onto your beliefs, having to prove yourself right. You’re more apt to hold on tightly to your paradigm if your ego is weak.
If your ego is weaker, your defense mechanisms may be gently questioned, and you’ll be guided to look within yourself to see what may be causing you to react.
Questioning Your Paradigm
Questioning your paradigm is where you must recognize you have a problem or issue and dare to face the pain that is part of the transformational process. But that is not enough to create lasting change in many people. Even though this particular behavior pattern now limits you, it was once a “success strategy” for you.
To embrace a new paradigm requires letting go of the old one, and letting go of the old one may require honoring it for how it did serve you in your life. You’ll be helped with identifying its strengths so you can discover ways to keep them.
Sometimes, knowing how a paradigm served you is not strong enough for you to let it go. When you identify how it limits you, you invite the contemplation required to understand what’s happening and its purpose.
Going a step further, when you see how the paradigm has been your teacher, it loses its grip over you, becoming more like a friend or a partner. When you see the paradigm has been in place to teach you a lesson, once you learn it, there isn’t a need for it anymore. Here is the turning point where letting it go becomes possible.
Voice Dialogue
Voice Dialogue, a system created by Hal and Sidra Stone to understand ourselves more deeply, is a method that helps you arrive at this point. Humans are comprised of many parts in the psyche, and one of your parts will be called out to have a conversation—usually the part driving the interaction.
There are many voices inside our heads, and the more you have a dialogue with them, the more you understand yourself. The more you know yourself, the more you can make conscious decisions. When you are helped to see all your parts without judging them, you can see yourself—all of your selves.
You are now ready to let go of your old paradigm and create a new, more expansive one.
