This is the free guide. A first, gentle meeting with the voice you live with, in your own words, before the full course.
This guide asks you to turn toward the critic and listen to it. That can bring up feelings, faces, and moments you have not thought about in years. Thirty seconds of grounding first, even if you feel steady.
Let your breath follow the circle. Out as it shrinks, in as it grows.
These pages are a practice guide. They are not therapy. If this opens something older or harder than you can carry on your own, step out of the work, ground, and take it to a therapist. If you are in crisis, reach out now: your country's helpline is at findahelpline.com. Singapore: SOS 1767. Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14. UK: Samaritans 116 123. US: 988. This work is not designed for acute states: recent trauma, active suicidal thoughts, an active eating disorder, recent grief, or an unsafe relationship.
Before any of the work, take a reading. The answers stay in your own browser, and at the end of the course you will answer the same three questions again and compare. Leave your email below and I will also send you a copy, so the numbers are still with you six weeks from now. Answer for the last week, as it actually was.
1. Think about the last week. How often did you hear the critic?
2. When it speaks, how much do you believe what it says?
0 is not at all. 100 is completely.
out of 1003. When it tells you to do something, or not to do something, how often do you go along with it?
There are no right numbers. This is where you are starting from, and it is enough to have written it down.
Email me my numbers
A short hello from me, and why this guide starts where it does. Watch this first, then work through the rest at your own pace.
Three things to work with. Each one is made to be filled in, so the best way to use them is to download and open them in Preview or Acrobat and type straight into the fields. If you prefer paper, print them and write by hand.
The GuideThe two-day noticing diary, the four types, and the first step toward the inner ally - all in one. Fillable, or copy the diary into your phone. Witnessing the Critic · Practice SheetFill it in as you listen to the audio practice below. Fillable. The Noticing DiaryThe two-day diary on its own, if you want just the pages you carry with you. Fillable.A note on the PDFs: they are fillable forms, so they type best when downloaded and opened in Preview or Acrobat rather than inside the browser.
A guided practice in my voice. You sit with the critic and I walk you through witnessing it, noticing its tone and its tactics without taking them as true. Do it with the practice sheet open.
Witnessing the Critic · guided audio practice
Naming the critic and learning to witness it is the beginning, not the end. From here the work turns. You come to understand the job the critic has been doing, because underneath the sharpness it has been trying to protect you. You learn to hear it without doing what it tells you. And slowly, across all of that, a steadier inner voice grows, one that is on your side. It is not a single step you take or a module you finish. It builds gradually, woven through the work, until there is space again for the rest, the pleasure and the ease the critic had shut down. That fuller arc is the course.
Optional. If you want to know what this guide is built on, the ideas behind the three small moves it asks of you, and why each one works.
This guide asks three small things of you: name the critic, watch it, and settle your body first. None of them is about arguing with the voice or talking yourself out of it. Here is why each one works.
When the critic runs unnamed, it does not feel like a voice you have. It feels like the plain truth about who you are. Calling it 'it', and treating it as one voice among the many you carry, opens a small gap between you and its words. You move from being inside the thought to standing a step outside it, looking at it. A voice you can name is something you have, not something you are, and that shift alone loosens the shame the critic runs on.
The idea behind it: this is the observer stance at the centre of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, where it is called defusion, unhooking from a thought instead of being fused with it (Hayes, Strosahl & Wilson, 2012).
Why it works. You cannot get any distance from a thought while you are living inside it. Naming the critic and calling it 'it' is what puts you on the outside of the voice, looking at it, rather than underneath it, believing it.
Once the critic is named, you can watch it. Not argue with it, not obey it, just notice: the words it uses, the tone it takes, whether it arrives as a voice or as pictures, and where you feel it in your body. This is the Witnessing practice, and it is the same observer skill as the first move, taken a little further. Watching a thought is a different act from believing it. From that small distance you begin to see that the critic is doing something, warning you, bracing you, trying to head off shame, rather than simply reporting the truth.
The idea behind it: the observing self in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the part of you that can watch the mind at work instead of being run by it (Hayes, Strosahl & Wilson, 2012).
Why it works. When you can watch the critic's tone and tactics from a step back, its words lose their grip as fact. You are no longer caught inside the voice, you are noticing it, and a voice you can notice is one you can choose how to answer.
Before the guide turns you toward the critic, it asks you to ground: feet on the floor, a slower breath out, a warm hand on your chest. There is a reason it starts there. Self-criticism does not run on the reasoning part of the mind, so reasoning does not reach it. Paul Gilbert's compassion-focused therapy describes three emotion systems: a threat system that scans for danger, a drive system that chases and achieves, and a soothing system that comes online through warmth and safety. Self-attack lives in the threat system. It works more like an alarm than an argument, and you cannot reason an alarm quiet. What settles it is the soothing system, and that system answers to warmth and safety, not force. Grounding, breath and a warm hand are a direct way to nudge your body toward safety. It also widens what Daniel Siegel called your window of tolerance, the band where you are steady enough to feel something without being flooded or going numb. That is why the guide settles you first, then meets the critic with warmth, rather than fighting it or papering over it with affirmations.
The idea behind it: the three-systems model of compassion-focused therapy, threat, drive and soothing (Gilbert, 2010).
Evidence: compassion-focused therapy grew out of work with people whose self-criticism and shame ran deep, and compassionate-mind training was associated with lower shame and self-criticism, though that was a small uncontrolled pilot with six people (Gilbert & Procter, 2006). Across many studies, compassion-based training lowers depression, anxiety and general distress, and raises self-compassion (Kirby, Tellegen & Steindl, 2017), and structured self-compassion programs show gains in self-compassion and wellbeing (Neff & Germer, 2013).
Why it works. A harsh inner voice is a threat response, not a habit you can talk yourself out of. It settles when your body feels safe enough, and safety comes through warmth, not force. Grounding first is what makes it possible to turn toward the critic and stay steady.
If this opened something and you want to keep going, the full course, From Inner Critic to Inner Ally, is where the work deepens. You sit the critic in a chair and get to know it properly. You meet the job it has been doing all these years and why it took that job on. You begin to grow a different inner voice, not affirmations or positive self-talk, but something steadier that can answer back. You learn to keep hearing the critic without doing what it says, and to carry that into ordinary days, the morning, the evening, the small moments of siding with yourself. And near the end you turn toward what the critic had crowded out: rest, pleasure, and space that is yours. No rush. Sit with this guide for as long as it is useful. The course will be there when you are ready.
See the full course →Already enrolled? Go straight to Module 1.