Inner Guide vs Inner Critic

We all have an internal dialogue that accompanies us throughout our days. It encourages us and dissuades us, it critiques circumstances, people and ourselves. It tells us what we like or dislike. It warns us and foretells catastrophes and aims to keep us in comfort zones of familiarity.

Our inner critic is created through conditioning, it was formed through our experiences of the outside world and what we were shown and taught by others in our formative years. It gets added to whilst reinforcing long held beliefs and those beliefs do not have to hold any truth to them, they are repeated and embedded as though they are a universal truth and then we navigate our worlds acting as though they are. 

It is the internalised voice of others, of an outside world that has put conditions and expectations on you and requires you to act and behave in certain ways. When listening to this voice, you have accompanying feelings that do not feel good to you. The voice can create a sense of doom, urgency and not enoughness. This is your inner critic and it can increase its volume and velocity if you dare to embark on new paths and try out new ways of being. It wants to keep you in what it views as safe and familiar settings.  It does not want change and it does not want to be questioned. It’s centre is all based in comparing and competing and looking our for flaws and focusses on what needs fixing and what you could be doing better. It is constantly looking for what is wrong, with you and what you create.

But there is another voice that resides within you and that is your inner guide. It may not speak to you in words, it may come through as a sense, a feeling, imagery you can see in your minds eyes. It is calm, it holds no sense of urgency within it, but it encourages you to act in the interests of your highest self. It does not include comparisons with others or critiques of yourself or anyone else. It is at peace and accompanies you in all your endeavours, but you have to be tuned into it and we are used to listening to our inner critics. We have been taught to listen to them and pay  attention to them and they shout the loudest. We are attuned to them but we can learn to attune to our inner guides instead and learn to bring the volume down on the voice of the inner critic. We can choose which voice we listen to and work with and we can choose over and over again in every moment. The more we tune into our inner guide the more accustomed we become to its voice, the way it sounds and the way it feels. The differences are night and day. One derives from fear, the other from love. 

Your inner guide is bespoke to you, a navigations system uniquely fitted to your inner callings, your purpose and aligned to your values. It is guiding you to your highest good and it may ask hard things of you, but only at a time when it knows you can take action on them. It may not reveal the whole path, but it will light your way a step at at a time, at a pace that you can keep up with. It is sustainable and encourages growth in a calm and measured manner.

The distinct differences between your inner critic and your inner guide are good for you to become familiar with so that you are aware of what is influencing your actions.