You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 204. Welcome to Weight Loss for Successful Women, a podcast for women who are ready to break the diet cycle and end their struggle with weight for good. Here’s your host, fortune 100 executive and certified life coach, Shannan Christiansen. Hello and love. So happy to be back with you.

I’m excited about today’s show because we’re gonna talk about the inner critic, and I know in some form or fashion, you know, we’ve talked about self-sabotage and you know, beating yourself up. But I wanna go a little deeper today in it and really just talk about how this inner critic is really undermining your success. And I hope all of you we’re coming to the end of summer and the beginning of fall.

I know, I can’t even believe it. And you know, we’re coming to the end of August. I know everyone’s getting ready for school and you know, the hustle. But when I think about it, I think about we’re coming to the last four months of the year. I know it happens so fast. And so I hope that for all of you who are listening,

that as you go into the last four months of the year, that you think about how this year has gone for you. Think about it in terms of your successes, how you’ve grown, what you’ve learned. And I know that in all of life there are challenges and pain and really hard things. And for some of you, you’ve experienced really hard things this year,

I want you to think about how and what have you learned? How have you grown? I think sometimes we can get wrapped up in all of the things that are happening in life, and we can forget about just the daily things that we’re doing, how we’re showing up, how we’re caring, how we’re serving, how we love. I think it’s just an important reminder because the last four months of the year are important.

And I think a lot of us power down the last four months, and we’re like, oh, we’ll get to it next year. And I don’t want that for you. I want the last four months to be, again, a continuing cycle of growth, of learning and showing up for yourself. The whirlwind will come in, you know, if I know anything about this life with what I’ve experienced in over half a century of life,

is that life is full of all of it. The good, the bad, every day is full of different emotions, good emotions, painful emotions, all of the things. We are constantly ebbing and flowing. And this is life. And it gets tough and it gets hard. And a lot of times we’re not gonna wanna show up for ourselves. And I just challenge you to,

to put yourself on the list, to show up for yourself in this last four months of the year. I know, right? So let’s talk about the inner critic. So what is the inner critic? Every human, well, I believe this, and I don’t know every human, so I don’t know, but I believe most humans have this inner critic.

And it’s really just this script that plays in the back of our minds and in our automatic brain, in our primitive brain, and in different, actually different parts of our brain, our memories, how we believe, you know, something happened or didn’t in our story of it. It’s just really this script and stories that we have built over a lifetime of evidence,

and we gain this through our experiences. And you know, I would say for most of us, this inner critic, this dialogue that we have, we believe it’s true. So maybe you were growing up and someone said, you’re bad at math. For most of us, especially when we’re young, we’re impressionable. And so we take on those characteristics.

If someone says something about us, then we believe that it’s true, and we kind of take on that story, and we take on that persona. What happens is we create this dialogue, this inner critic in our head, and we just keep repeating it over and over and over again. You heard about it in many different ways. Negative self talk,

right? Beating yourself up and so on. It just is this story, script, thoughts, beliefs, that are in the back of your mind that are playing. It’s important to know, because for probably most of you who are listening to this podcast, my clients, that inner critic can get really loud. And so we want to numb it. We wanna numb that voice.

We want to disconnect from that voice because it doesn’t feel good. When you walk by a mirror and you say something negative to yourself, it, it doesn’t feel good. It causes an a negative emotion. And so in an attempt to avoid feeling that emotion, we turn to this external stimuli like food, shopping, social media, drugs, all sorts of things as numbing mechanisms.

When we numb our feelings, we’re also disconnecting from our thinking. Because remember, our thinking causes our feelings, right? When we think of thought, we then feel a certain way. You might not be aware of all of the negative thoughts that you’re repeating. Why is this important? Because so many times I will have ladies who come to me and they’re like,

I’m just out of control. Or, you know, I’m making my realistic plan, I’m doing the things, and then I just eat off plan. I don’t know why I can’t, you know, stop this night eating or weekend eating, and it feels like you don’t know why, but in your brain, there is a reason this inner critic is speaking to you all the time.

You have thousands and thousands of thoughts every single day, and they’re just like automatic records playing in the back of your brain. That record player is always on. And as you start to do this work, you know, I see this with my clients, when they first start doing work on their thinking and their mindset, they start to hear the inner critic more.

That voice gets louder. They start becoming aware of things and how they’re speaking to themselves. And you know, it’s surprising when you walk by a mirror and you hear in your brain, you say something like, oh, you’re fat, blah. Right? For some of you, it might be surprising because even though you’ve had that thought playing in the back of your head,

you haven’t been aware because you’ve been numbing for so long. And so I just wanted to give you that as a side note, as you start to become aware, as you start to hear what’s going on in your mind, you’re gonna start to hear some of this negative self-talk, this inner critic, you know, ladies, it’s just awareness. And this is important because if you don’t know why,

right? You could tell me, Shannan, I do know why I’m overeating, because I can’t control myself. I don’t believe that. I really don’t. I think we overeat for many different reasons. One of the main reasons is because we’re trying to numb feelings because of our thoughts, because of our thinking. We just wanna escape it. We don’t wanna think it anymore.

Maybe we’ve had trauma, or maybe we’ve had an experience in the past, or maybe just you’re feeling irritated because you know your partner didn’t do something you wanted to do. Or maybe you’re not exactly where you thought you would be in this life. Or maybe you’re aging and you’re starting to feel regret, and you’re starting to look at things. And so you want pleasure because that feels painful.

And so you reach for the cookie, or you reach for the pizza, whatever it is for you, and then you’re like, Ugh, I’m out of control. And so this process of starting to realize like, where is my inner critic? What’s it based on? This part of becoming aware is so, and this is the important part, you can start talking back.

You can start talking to that part of yourself. You can start to say to yourself, oh, you know what? I hear you, but we’re, we believe this now. Or, oh, I hear you, but this is what we’re gonna do today. And understanding the old thoughts and beliefs that are, you know, really for the most part,

causing sabotage your own self-sabotage, causing you to do things that you don’t want to do. You know, we have these scripts that, you know, weight loss is our struggle. I can’t do this, I can’t do that. It’s too hard. My body, my health problems, you know, blah. You know, all the things. And again,

it’s not that we don’t have real things. Of course, my loves life is difficult. They, all those things exist. And for many of those things we cannot control. The only thing that we can control is the way that we think. I find that there have been things that have been challenging in my life, and then when I have not managed my own mind and that inner critic comes in,

I then just pile on a whole bunch of, you know, negative thoughts. And then it causes me to feel bad, feel frustrated, feel, you know, disappointed, sadness, all of the things. And then I don’t take care of myself. I didn’t show up for myself. I overate. I overspent. You know, all the things,

ladies. And so this is why it’s so important to understand how this inner critic is showing up in your life so that you can start ultimately changing the story and the dialogue that you have with yourself. This is the thing, I’ve said this before, but this just came to me as I’m talking about this. No one is coming to save you. No one can change your mindset.

No one can tell you what to think or what to believe. And our own worst critic, the voice in our own head, that is the voice that is guiding the way that you feel and the what you do or don’t do. Maybe you have a outside critic, maybe you have a family member or a friend who’s critical of you, or you had a parent who was critical of you,

or a boss or whomever. I hear you on that. That does exist. People you know because of the way they feel about themselves, outwardly take it out on others. And maybe you do that too. I know it’s just part of being a human. But the one person that we are with 100% of the time is ourselves. And the worst critic I find through this work with many,

many clients and the work on myself, the worst critic is the one that’s living in your own brain. The worst critic of what you do. How you show up, how you feel about your worth is the one that’s living within you. This is the thing. If you have a strong belief, if you have thoughts and it’s, you know, this record that you’ve just been playing on repeat a million times that you can’t lose weight,

that you’ll never be thin, that it’s your struggle, then that will be your result. Because you’ll think it, you’ll feel frustrated, or you’ll feel sad, or you’ll feel disappointed, and then you won’t wanna feel that negative emotion, and then you will overeat. And so starting to challenge those beliefs, starting to talk to yourself again, more than you listen,

you’ll start to create different results than the results that you have that you don’t want. So my take on this, my TBOs take is one, I believe that most humans, if not every human, has an inner critic. It’s our inner dialogue. It is the way that we speak to ourselves. Two, awareness is the first step. It’s starting to recognize when I’m overeating,

when I want to overdo anything, what’s happening. Asking yourself questions, getting into your thinking brain like what’s going on? Love what’s happening right now so that you can see how you’re talking to yourself. And then three, start talking back. Start to create different stories and different beliefs, because once you start to create new beliefs, new thinking, you start to talk back to yourself,

you’re gonna feel differently. And when you feel differently, you do things differently, and then you get different results, thought work. This idea that you can change what you think and believe it is, to me, the most powerful work that you can do. When you start to change what you believe about yourself, when you start to think differently about yourself,

you will start to feel differently. And then you will start to do things differently. We think if we just do more, we’ll get different results. But it’s so short term, long term, to change your results, to lose weight, to live the life that you want to get, the career that you want to have, the relationship that you want.

Whatever it is, wherever you’re at in your life, you have to start with thinking first, thinking differently. And then once you start to think differently, you start to challenge the inner critic, you start to, you know, say, Hey, we don’t believe that anymore. Hey, not today. Today. This is what we believe today. We practice different thinking.

We practice something that we can believe about ourselves Today, our today, I tell you my love, if you wanna take this work deeper, go to jointransformboss.com. This is where you can learn about what I teach. You can also get free resources. Start to learn how to lose weight for the very last time. And really what I think is the most important thing,

you get to start to think differently so that you can start to lose that mental weight. I tell you, ladies, you can lose body weight. You can, you can go on some quick fixed diet, you can lose some body weight, but the body weight is not what’s weighing you down. It’s the mental weight. And next week, ooh,

I wanna discuss restriction and denying yourself and how it’s not helping you. I know. So good. All right, my love. Bye for now. Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and wanna learn more, come on over to bflycoaching.com. That’s bflycoaching.com. See you next week.