The voice in your head saying your aspirations are too high: Is it actually you? Business leader and speaker Patty Azzarello offers three tips for dealing with your inner critic before it runs amok.
In my tech jobs, my internal critic showed up to regularly feed me a steady chorus of insecurities: You don’t belong here with these people. You are not like them. You are way too young to have this job. You are not technical enough. Why did they even hire you? You are a girl and a weirdo. You do not have what it takes to succeed here. Nobody likes you. No one wants you to be here.
And no matter how much success I achieved or how many promotions I got (despite my internal critic’s protests), even when I reached the executive level, none of that was enough to silence it. In fact, as I became more successful and my jobs got bigger and bigger, my inner critic’s voice became even louder.
A key part of my success and my resilience was figuring out how I could keep moving my career forward despite my internal critic’s endless insistence that I should not. But it was always right there, Johnny-on-the-spot, to convince me that I was not ready, that I was not welcome, that I was not deserving and that I should not even try, especially when I wanted to reach for something bigger in my life.
There are three ways I have learned to outpace his efforts to stop me. Did you notice I called it he? That is on purpose. And that is key to the first strategy I use to win against him.
Give it a personality
I decided long ago to give my internal critic its own persona separate from myself. My inner critic’s voice feels different from mine. If it was just my own quiet inner voice telling me what an undeserving loser I was, I would believe it because I tend to believe what my own voice is telling me.
So, to gain an advantage and fortify my resolve, I put that critical voice outside of me and gave it a concrete persona. That way, my adversary became someone I could better fight against or ignore. I don’t want to be my own adversary; I don’t want to fight against myself, but I do want to fight against him.
A wonderful thing happened in this regard when I published the audio version of my book, “Why is SHE Still Here?” I had a male narrator be the voice of my internal critic. Later, I made an audio file collecting all the things my internal critic said to me throughout my book (and throughout my life) in one place.
Listening to this was better than therapy. I heard his voice, one physically and literally outside myself, coming from the speakers say to me, You? In this job? You can’t possibly succeed as a top executive. You are still too young even for the job you had before. This one is just way too big for you! YOU ARE AN IMPOSTER, AND EVERYONE IS GOING TO FIND OUT, and then you are going to fail. You are going to get fired. You will go broke, and you will live under a bridge and die.
Of course, when I heard this in the real world, outside of my own head, it sounded so ridiculous. I would never say these things to anyone. And if someone ever said these things to me, I would not take them seriously because they just sounded so stupid.
Hearing his voice out loud took the inner critic’s power away. I stopped feeling insecure and simply thought those attacks were nonsense. It was such a gift to hear the voice of my internal critic for what it really was — just plain mean, and most importantly, not credible.
I highly recommend this maneuver of giving your internal critic its own persona. Schedule some quiet time for yourself and write down the terrible things your internal critic says to you. Once you see your internal critic as a separate voice just being a meanie and trying to rob you of your ambition, it will be much easier not to accept what it says. For extra credit, ask a friend to read those things out loud and record it. I guarantee when you listen to it, it will make you cringe and laugh and your internal critic will have far less power over you.
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Read moreDetailsMake friends
The second way I have outsmarted my internal critic is to make friends with it. Yes, you read that right. I have made friends with the big jerk who is my internal critic, not the kind of friend I want to hang out with sitting in a sunny piazza in Italy sipping wine and eating pizza but in the sense of, “I know you will never go away, so I might as well just welcome you into my life.” I have found that if I treat him as an annoying friend who will be with me forever, instead of a scary enemy I must vanquish, it reduces his power over me.
What this looks like is when I am reaching for something big I want to do, and he steps in to say, This will never work, you shouldn’t try this. People will see that you tried and you failed, and you will embarrass yourself with this failure so much that you will never recover. You are an idiot to take this risk, what I say to him is, “Oh, hello. It’s you again, right on cue, now that I am trying to do something new and important. I know your game. You are here to stop me. I know that you will never go away, so you might as well come along for the ride as I try this new thing. But you need to shut up. You don’t get to sit in the front seat, and you certainly don’t get to drive, you need to sit in the back. But you are welcome to come along.”
Your internal critic will probably never go away. So don’t waste energy hoping for that. Practice inviting your fear along for the ride, as an annoying friend who is not really dangerous, because you are not letting it control the destination, make any decisions or dictate what you can do when you get there.
Just don’t listen
The third way I try to outmaneuver my internal critic is simply this: I recognize that it is not just me who deals with an internal critic. We all have internal critics. The playing field is level in this regard. So why would I disadvantage myself by giving mine more power than others do?
I have watched so many people let their internal critics define their lives because they just accept and believe everything it says. My final secret to dealing with the internal critic calling me an imposter and trying to stop me from reaching for what I want is simply this: I acknowledge that I don’t have to do what my internal critic tells me. And the more times I don’t listen to him, the bigger and more interesting my life gets.
Accept that you don’t always have to do what your internal critic says. But don’t worry; you don’t always have to fight against it either. That would be exhausting. Remind yourself of this: You don’t automatically have to stop trying when your internal critic tells you you are not ready, or not good enough, or don’t belong there.
When you hear those things, you have a choice. You can accept what it is saying, you can reduce the volume or you can shut it off. You can still choose to do the thing. You can still keep going if you want. Every time you don’t listen to your internal critic, every time you don’t let it stop you, it gets easier not to listen again the next time.
Patty Azzarello is a business leader and speaker. Her book, “Why Is SHE Still Here? My Ungraceful Journey from the Playground to the Boardroom,” was published in 2025. 
