Hey, welcome to Lessons From a Quitter where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you spent getting to where you are, if ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.

Well hello there. Welcome back to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. I'm excited about a lot of things actually, a lot of amazing things happening. I closed down the launch for the founding members for my new membership called The Quitter Club. I'm so excited about this group of people. It is going to be an amazing year and I'm working very diligently on the back end to get that membership up and running. We will be opening doors and kicking things off next week and yeah, I'm just feeling really good. I I feel like it tapped into the creative part of me that I haven't tapped into for a while. And so I've been dreaming up all the things that I wanna teach and all the new classes I want to have in there and I'm super giddy about it. So that'll be fun. If you didn't get into the founding members group and you still wanna be a part of the membership, I will be opening doors at some point in the future so get on the wait list so you're notified. You can go to uh lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub. And when we decide to open doors for both monthly and annual memberships, you can be the first one to jump in because I promise you it will be all of the tools that we talk about on the podcast, all of the things that you need to take this work deeper and actually apply it to your own life and your job you will find in that club, it'll be the funnest place to hang out. I'm certain of it. So come join me. But today I wanted to jump in. I think I'm gonna do a two-part series. We're gonna break this up and I wanna talk about learning how to trust yourself and really letting go of the lie that you can't trust yourself. Okay? And today I wanna talk mostly about why you even have this belief. I think that a lot of people think that it's just the truth that they can't trust themselves. And I get one of the main things that I coach people on is the root cause of their issue is their lack of self-trust. So whether that is, you know, being able to make a decision about anything but specifically about whether they should leave or whether they should go or what they want, whether they can really trust their own body and how much rest they need. And, you know, I constantly hear people and I did this so I'm not like surprised which is why I wanna do this podcast episode. But I constantly hear people be concerned that if they just trust what they feel or if they just go with the thing that they want to do, they're going to somehow become a lazy, slothful person who never gets off the couch. And there's almost this idea that like oh, I have to be on to myself. I'm gonna be tricky and I'm gonna try to get out of doing work or I'm gonna try to get out of, I don't know, bettering myself. And so I have to constantly be the watcher of myself and make sure that I'm not giving in to these desires and I'm pushing myself to do more. And I'm and we have this very mistaken belief that we have to be hard on ourselves. We have to constantly punish ourselves. We have to constantly beat ourselves in order to do the things that whatever it is that we think we should do, whatever goals you think you're supposed to be reaching or whatever timeline you've put yourself on. And part of the work that I do is really getting people to understand how misguided that thought is and truly understanding how much they've always been able to trust themselves, they just were taught not to. And how to unlearn that and how to deprogram that and how to start listening to that voice. So that's sort of what I wanna talk to you about today in part one, of this idea of getting rid of your inner critic. In order to get rid of it, you have to understand where it comes from. You have to be aware of why it's there because oftentimes just being aware can help get rid of a large percentage of it, right? Like Carl Jung has a quote that says until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And I think so many of us do that where we don't understand why we're doing something or we don't understand the origin of why something has come about in our lives. And we just think like this is just the way it is. This is the way I am, this is the way it'll always be. And that's just not true. And a lot of times when you become aware, simply becoming aware can allow you to sometimes just completely stop in that behavior altogether. And other times like it will take you halfway there, right? It'll get you to see like oh, you can't unsee it, right? So it's like oh, this is why I'm doing this. What do I wanna choose to do instead?

So today we're gonna talk about why the inner critic is even there, okay? Why that negative self-talk that has gotten you to believe that you can't trust yourself, that has gotten you to believe that you have to be mean to yourself in order to get anything done. Why that is there so that we can work on the next episode on how to get rid of it. Okay? So let's jump into why you have that inner critic. And I want you to just know that that voice is not your voice. It isn't some objective observer that is just telling you that you're terrible and that you're lazy and that you'll never amount to anything. That's not not a voice that was born with you. Most of us have been raised in cultures and in societies that through various forces have put that voice in our head. And I want you to understand how that has happened in for, you know, most of you listening to me are probably in America or other similar Western type countries. And even if you're not, the same things probably apply in your own cultures and the messages that you've gotten. And so I want you to start like really looking back at what were those messages. So let's just start with the first one, which is religion or sometimes it's just the culture in which you raised and may not be completely based on religion but it's the same messages. And this isn't one particular religion, it's most of the major religions that are running most major countries. And so when you look at these religions, especially in America that is sort of based on the Christian Puritan belief system, you can see very quickly that the things that are touted as being good, right? That the desirable traits that people are supposed to have are like selflessness, humility. It almost glorifies suffering, right? Pleasure is bad. Anything that's pleasurable like you don't wanna be glutenous, you don't wanna eat too much, sex is definitely bad. Anything that brings you pleasure is made to look as something that is sinful and suffering makes you a better person, right? Those are generally the messages that we receive. I did a whole episode um episode 212 on throw your own party where I talked about just if you look at the definitions of humility, which is a modest or low view of your own importance, right? And like how much is touted in religion is to like have a low view of yourself and humility is supposed to protect you from pridefulness. And the definition of pridefulness is a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction with one's own achievements and abilities, right? So like if you think about the basis of religion is trying to get people to have a low view of themselves and to prevent them from having a deep satisfaction of their own achievements and abilities. That is, I mean, explicitly what a lot of these major religions are doing. And so even if you're not religious, even if you don't come from religious family, when that is kind of the ethos of the culture, whereas like a a good person is a selfless person who doesn't think so highly of themselves and a bad person is somebody that has deep satisfaction with their own abilities, you can see where children are kind of guided towards, right? On top of that, you look at basically everything in our culture, whether that's school, your family, and we'll talk about that in a second, but religion specifically sends the message that you can't trust yourself, right? In most religions there's an idea that like man is sinner and if left to his own devices, he or she will always do the wrong thing, will want more, is greedy, will want to take, doesn't give. And so in order to be a quote unquote good person, you have to sort of reject these natural parts of you, these natural desires that you have because those are sins. And so you have to not trust those and suppress those and actively work at rejecting that part of you, right? And you have to trust somebody else to tell you the right way to live. You have to trust somebody else that will tell you like oh, that thing you're feeling, that's not good. So push that aside and instead try to be this way. I mean, think about that for a second. Think about how much you're taught that your own desires are bad, that what every single human being is born with, right? The desires that come within our bodies, the desire for food, the like desire for sex, the desire for a lot of like pleasure, which is like what our bodies have been created for and what keeps you alive and you know what was needed for all of evolution is now sinful and something to be shamed of and something to suppress. And so of course, when you start learning that and you grow up with that, whether again it's very consciously stated or like outright like you go to church or you go to mosque or whatever and you hear these things, or just from a society that also takes that in, whether it's in schools and stuff, you're continuously molded to believe that you can't trust those desires, that you can't trust yourself, right? When you look at certain religions and like the sins of glutton, of wanting to eat, I don't know, more than you should I guess, slothfulness, laziness. Like even though those are absolutely normal parts of a human body, like did you know your brain is created to want to overeat? Like as you're eating, you release like certain chemicals that make you want to overeat because evolutionarily that kept you alive. Cuz when you found a berry tree, you should eat all the berries before you move on because you may not have food for a couple of days, right? So like you've been created a certain way like neurologically, the way that our body functions evolutionarily, we've been created a way and then culture comes and tells us this way is wrong and you can't trust yourself. So like that happens with religion. Add on the patriarchy. I love the patriarchy that we live in, right? Where you over and over get the message for women like you can't be trusted. Like I mean, I want you to think about the fact that like women could not have credit cards until the seventies. That's not some other lifetime ago. That's in a lot of our lifetimes. Our parents' lifetimes for sure. They needed a man to co-sign to open a bank account, right? A credit card. You needed permission. It wasn't until the nineties in America that marital rape became a thing. That means before the nineties, before 1993, as a woman you did not have a say at whether you had sex with your husband or not. This is in America. This is like I was in school, right? It's not like it's like we're talking about some other time. And so when you think about how recent that history and obviously the patriarchy is still, you know, when you look at everything. Beauty standards, diet standards, the way that we treat women, the laws that are on the books, it's very much still reinforced day in and day out. And you may not, you know, it's like a fish doesn't know it's in water. Like we don't realize that it's in the air that we're drinking is constantly, sorry, the air that we're breathing is constantly reinforcing these ideas that like women can't be trusted. You can't be trusted with money. You're not good with making decisions. You need somebody else to tell you what you can and can't do. You need to go and poll every other person about what they think you should do with your life, right? And so we wonder why for women making decisions is very difficult and it's because we've been trained to doubt ourselves from when we were children. We have been told that like you need, and this is why men tend to be more confident and men tend to be more leaders is because they've also been trained to be that, to make a decision and stand with it and be willing to, you know, go full force even if they're wrong. And women on the other hand have like just constantly been trained to believe that they can't trust themselves and they don't know the right answer and everybody else needs to be happy with them and they only exist for everybody else's desires and needs and wants. Now, the patriarchy has done a number of on men as well. It's like you can't trust your emotions so just suppress 'em, push 'em down, unless it's anger. That's the only emotion that's apparently acceptable for men. But like don't trust the fact that you're feeling sadness or vulnerability or you need support. You don't. Push it down, right? Don't ever show vulnerability. And so again, we start learning that like we can't trust ourselves. That these things like boys growing up very much have the human experience and have tons of emotions but are taught to not trust those emotions. On top of that, you add capitalism, which also does a number on us, right? If you think about what capitalism does, it commodifies time. Everything has to be productive because yes, that's in capitalism's benefit. If everybody's being more productive, then more people are working, more things are being made. So even our rest time has to now become productive. Notice we just like adopt these views, they were given to us. But if you think about it, like our nights and weekends and vacations, like I was recently coaching somebody that was telling me how like she would get so stressed out about her vacations like making sure she got all the books she had to read and she saw, you know, all the tours that she could get and like you have to squeeze out every ounce of every single thing or you're wasting time or you're behind, right? Like we have this idea that we're constantly behind. Behind what? So like we don't know, we just have to constantly keep going. You have to keep going. So you've been programmed with that kind of a message over and over again. Part of that programming is that you can't trust your own body, right? I want you to think about how nothing in this world is go, go, go, go, go every day in and day out, year in, year out, season after season. Nothing in nature is like that except for humans. And we have to sort of remind ourselves that we weren't meant to be robots. That of course, there's gonna be times where I can't, my output cannot be the same as it is at other times. But because we can override kind of our natural instincts, we've sort of adopted, well I should always be able to go, I'm not actually tired, I shouldn't be tired. If you think about right now like sleep has become, you know, this obviously more scientific research and so it's become this big hot topic about how you should be getting eight hours of sleep. But up until a couple of years ago that wasn't even the case, right? It was like the hustle culture of like I'll sleep when I'm dead and, you know, all these people touting how they only get four hours of sleep or five hours of sleep. And that was the sign of like something to be proud of I guess. And everybody else was falling in line, like other people weren't saying like well I actually need seven to eight hours so like I can't do a six hour. It was like oh, that person can do it so I should be able to do it as well. And so we start not trusting our own body. I always think about this with tired cues too. Like it's fascinating to see because like when you look at babies, you look at a baby, babies range in how much they sleep, right? And so anybody with sleep, they'll tell you like, you know, let's say baby needs between 11 and 13 hours of sleep or 10 to 12 hours because not every body is the same. And yet for so many of us, it's like well Susie can work on six hours so that I should be able to too. We should all only sleep seven hours. What if you need nine hours? What if that's what your body needs? That's something that I've had to work on a lot for myself as I've talked a lot about on this podcast is one of my biggest stories was how tired I always was and how lazy I always thought I was and how I just had lower energy levels. And that's not to say that you shouldn't check out like why that's happening and maybe there's a medical reason or something that you know, but also we just function differently. And I remember I got an oura ring which is like a ring that you wear and it tracks your sleep schedule and it tracks like your oxygen level and all this stuff. And what was fascinating is that for me, most of my REM sleep, my REM sleep is in the morning time and it's like the last hour, two hours that I'm sleeping which a lot of your REM sleep is what helps you feel rested. And what was interesting is a lot of times when I was trying to wake up earlier and sleep like six hours, I just would get no REM sleep. So I would have a really restless night. Like I would wake up feeling like I didn't sleep at all and if I slept another hour, hour and a half is when I would get an hour and a half of REM sleep and I would feel so much more rested. And it was really fascinating for me now that I see that study and I really think back and think why couldn't I just trust myself to know when I woke up that I was still tired, that my body didn't feel as though it was rested? But I mean, think about it now when I say it, it sounds obvious but how many of us are like no it doesn't matter that I'm tired, it's time to get up. I should just get up. And then we just berate ourselves like why am I so tired all the time? Why can't I just get up and get to it like other people? With no regard as to like what is actually happening in my own body, right? Because we've just been so trained to believe that you can't trust that, you shouldn't need more than six hours. You shouldn't need to sleep past this time, you shouldn't need to take a nap during the day. But what if my body does? What makes that wrong? Right? We've been taught like you can't trust your hunger cues. We all know that. It's like buy the figure out this diet. Do keto, do paleo, do whatever. Get on this exercise plan. Fast until noon. You don't know about yourself. You can't tell when your body's actually hungry. It's the most insane thing. If you think about how insane this is that we've adopted this. Think about a child, think about a baby. Is any baby ever born being like I don't really know if I'm hungry right now. I don't really know. Nah, I don't need more than that. Like half this bottle was fine. I'm good. No, a baby knows very intimately when they're hungry and when they're not and it doesn't give a d*** what your schedule is. It doesn't care that you think they should eat dinner at seven o'clock. They're hungry at midnight and they want food right then. Like we are born knowing so deeply what our bodies need and then it's beaten out of us. And so many of us are so lost. Like really knowing that there is something wrong. Like knowing I'm hungry but I'm not supposed to eat more than this many calories today, knowing that I'm tired when I'm not supposed to rest because that means I'm lazy. It's mind-blowing. Like think about illness like because capitalism has required us to just constantly work and never be able to take time off, for so many of us it's like okay, I can be sick for like a day. That's it. I don't have time to be sick more than that. And when we are sick, I notice I do this all the time, I just, I recently had COVID and this is a reminder every time this happens I now observe it is like I feel sick and then I don't realize how sick I felt until later when I'm better. And I like was like oh no, I was really sick. But it's because during it, in my mind is all the thoughts of like it's not that bad, just get up. You don't need to lay for this long, just get up and do some work. You can work on your laptop while you lay, right. And it, I have to like now I combat that stuff. Like no, I deserve to just rest. I deserve to rest for as long as I need. Even if that's longer than what my brain is telling me. Even if I think that two days of rest was enough, maybe I need four, maybe I need a week, right? Think about how crazy it sounds that like we can't have a week of illness. Like of course, illnesses take time to move through your body and of course, your body takes time to recover. Like scientifically we even understand that. And yet when it happens to us, these thoughts that have been ingrained are so deeply ingrained that we can't trust it. I've talked a lot about, you know, thinking that I had ADHD and I'll I'll probably do a episode at some point because I don't necessarily think it's ADHD anymore and I've stopped saying that it's that term cuz it could be other things. Maybe it's ADHD symptoms. Anyways, that's an episode for another time. But I will say that one of the most validating things of thinking I had ADHD was finally just thinking of the thought like oh, maybe this is just the way my brain works and I could stop thinking the thought of like what's wrong with me? Why can't I just focus? Why do I forget things all the time? And what's so sad about that is like I shouldn't need a diagnosis or something else to just truly understand that like my brain might just work differently than yours and you don't need that either, right? For a lot of us that maybe that it isn't a diagnosis, maybe you don't have ADHD or you don't have something else but maybe your body just works differently. And how can we start undoing this idea that everybody else tells us what our bodies should and shouldn't be able to do? And if we can't do it, there's something deeply wrong with us that we have to try to suppress or beat out of us or, you know, hack our way to productivity or whatever other b******* we're taught. Nothing in nature works that way. So far we have religion, we have capitalism, and we have the patriarchy all working to make you believe that you can't trust yourself. That something within you is bad. That the way you're doing it is wrong. That some ideal person does it some other way so everybody should do it that way, right? You add on your family of origin and your school, think about the messages you got. Every one of us is obviously different in this situation. We've all received very similar messages which is why memes are so funny cuz we all relate. But you just have to think about like everything that we've all been taught is like stop crying. It's not a big deal. Like your your emotions have been invalidated, your body cues have been invalidated. Like no, you are hungry cuz right now is dinner time so you have to sit down and I eat dinner and I understand there's things that need to happen. Like one of the biggest objections I always get is like well we can't always just do whatever we want. I'll address that maybe on next week's episode. But nobody is saying it has to be all or nothing. Nobody's saying that you have to let your kids like eat whenever they want and not get used to some kind of dinner time or what, you know, schedule. We just have to start understanding how we're invalidating people to believe that they aren't feeling what they're feeling. That they aren't, you know, sensing what they're sensing. I mean, we're becoming more open to that now but a lot of us really didn't grow up with that. Where it was told to us that like everybody else knows what's better for you. Like if you're fidgety and you can't sit still in school there there's something wrong with you. As opposed to like maybe children shouldn't have to sit for eight hours, maybe that's just, maybe they just can't focus like that, right? But it wasn't like that, it was like this is the path. Follow the path, ignore what you need. And so for so many of us, we've spent so many years ignoring that voice. Ignoring what we need. Pushing it down. Being like it's not right. I don't need that. I don't need more sleep, I don't need more food. I don't need more rest. I can do this just like everyone else. I can be as hard of a worker. And so obviously that creates a voice when like the work of capitalism and patriarchy and all these other, you know, systems that have been kind of put in place. We do the work for it. It doesn't have to do the work anymore when it's in my head and now I have the voice that's telling me you're so lazy, you're so stupid, you're so fat, you're so ugly, you're so undisciplined, you can't get anything done. Why can't you be like everybody else? That's not your voice. You are not born with that voice. Babies are not born with a voice that's constantly telling them they're doing it wrong. And when a society has managed to get that voice in your head, it becomes a lot easier to control you, right? Patriarchy doesn't have to do anything when I'm the one constantly telling myself that I'm fat and I'm ugly and that I need to like put on more make up or get plastic surgery or lose weight. Capitalism doesn't have to do much when I'm constantly telling myself that I'm lazy and even my weekends should be productive and I should start that side hustle and I should have 14 different like hobbies and I should put my kids in 47 different sports to be a good mom. I'm doing the work for it now, right? If I constantly tell myself that I'm behind and I'm constantly running, running, seeking, then I'm gonna keep consuming. I'm gonna buy the next diet plan. I'm gonna buy the next workout regimen. I'm gonna buy the plastic surgery. I'm gonna buy all the consumer then to make myself feel better to outrun that voice, right? So many of us are just trying to out-hustle that voice and we think if we can be perfect, then we can get rid of it, right? If I could just work harder, if I could just sleep less, if I could just lose some weight, if I could just suppress all of the desires that I've been born with for some reason, if I could just become a robot, then it would be so much easier. But you can't outrun it. You will never outrun a voice of hating yourself. You cannot hate yourself into a version of yourself that you will love. You can't ever do it. Cause I want you to think about how absurd the requirements are, right? It's like it shows up in every single area. So even if you start conquering it in one area, it will show up somewhere else. Cause it's not like oh, just make sure that you're really productive at work. It's make sure you're productive. Work as much as you can. Make as much money as you can. Also, make sure you work out three to five days a week. Eat healthy and organic. Don't let your kids have any screen time. Cultivate healthy relationships with your spouse and your friends. Make your house Pinterest- worthy. Wear trendy clothes. Have girls' nights with your friends that other people are envious of. Don't gain weight, right? On and on and on and on. This is one of the reasons like the people I work with I don't allow people to have more than one goal because when you have a lot of goals, your brain is just gonna focus on where you're failing. So if you have a goal to lose weight and you wanna make more money and you wanna start that business and you wanna, you know, have date nights once a week like you might be killing it in one thing, you might be doing so well, really sticking to your goal, being consistent. And then your brain's gonna be like yeah, but remember you were supposed to have date nights and then you haven't done that. Like we will find a place where we're not meeting that standard because that standard is impossible to meet because suppressing all of your needs is impossible and it's not something you should even be striving for because your body was created to give you cues and literally tell you what it needs. And that includes pleasure and that includes as much food as you need and whatever else it is that your specific body needs. So the secret is not to be perfect to prove to yourself that you can trust yourself. The secret is to trust yourself in your imperfectness. It's to see your own humanity. It's to see that even when you are lazy or gluttonous or whatever word you wanna use, even on those days, you can listen to that voice and let yourself have what you need. The reason I think thought work is so important and so necessary in every part of our lives is because the work is going back to yourself, to that small voice inside of you that's always there, that knows what you need, that knows when you're hungry and when you're full and when you're tired and when you're sick, that doesn't need other people to tell you. That's the same voice that will tell you that where you're working, the career you're in is not right for you. That you're not using enough of your creativity, that you're not fulfilled, that you're not happy. You know that, right? It knows when you're sick, it knows when you've had enough. It knows when you need rest. And it's learning to listen to that voice even when other people outside of you are telling you something different. So many of us are waiting until the world changes, until other people tell us like hey, you know what? It's okay for you to take a nap. It's okay for you to take some time off. I'm just gonna tell you like we're not gonna get rid of the patriarchy and white supremacy and capitalism and religion and all these things, in my lifetime or yours. We can definitely make progress and we should and we should keep talking about these things and we should keep pushing against them. But other people aren't going to understand because they will have drank the Kool-Aid, right? They're a fish swimming in that same water. They don't understand because nobody is aware of it. It's almost as if it's like the truth like the sky is blue and you should, as a woman, only weigh this much weight and you should only need this many hours of sleep and you should only want to whatever. And so other people are going to think other thoughts. And if you're waiting for them to change their thoughts, you'll wait forever. So doing this work of getting rid of that inner critic is learning to say no to it even when the rest of the world is telling you that like that's how you should treat yourself. And the first step is just becoming aware of it, right? Is just seeing like oh, when I walk by a mirror and I tell myself ugh, you're disgusting that is not my own voice. I wouldn't talk to myself and I don't need to anymore. And I can start noticing when that comes and realizing and even maybe giving it a name, right? Giving it some outside characteristic that's not me. Some people do like they name it. Some people think of it as like a like they make it super miniature and they give it like a chipmunk voice. Like they try to in some ways separate themselves from that voice which is what is a great thing to do as a first step. But I just want you to start becoming aware of it. In this episode that's all I wanna talk about is that that inner critic, that voice that's telling you you're not good enough, that voice that's telling you you're doing it wrong, that voice that's telling you you don't know yourself is a lie. And that's okay that we've all given into it because that we didn't know any better. Nobody had told us that it was a lie. Nobody told us how to combat it. And so we've spent decades and decades thinking that's a voice in our own head and now we can start chipping away at it. Now we can start rejecting it. Now we can start deprogramming it. But first we have to understand that it's not true. First we have to hear it when it's telling us horrible, cruel things and just be like no, I'm not doing this anymore. No, I don't get to talk to myself like this. I would never talk to somebody else like this. I'm not gonna do it to myself. I'm not gonna let society use me against myself and next week I will come back and tell you how you can start combating that voice. But for now, I just want you to understand, I wanted you to understand the basis of where it comes from so that we can start rooting it out. Alright? And if you want help rooting it out, which I really hope you do because honestly, this is some of the most important work we can do. Beyond changing your career, which I want you to do, I want you to learn to be nice to yourself. I want you to learn to have your own back. I want you to learn to trust yourself. I want you to learn that you always could do those things and that you were just lied to. And it's okay. We're gonna come back to ourselves now. So if you want help doing that, this is the work that we do together in the Quitter Club. You'll not only get the tools on how to do this stuff but you'll also get the coaching because it's one thing to hear, it is a whole other thing to actually apply it, right? When you start wanting to tell yourself like it's okay to nap, your brain's gonna go crazy. And that's where I come in to tell you that you're doing it beautifully and that it doesn't need to be perfect. And to give you tools on how to combat that craziness that happens in your brain when you think everything is gonna fall apart. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.comquitterclub and get on the wait list for the Quitter Club so that you can do this work more in depth. And I'll be back next week to teach you how to start getting rid of that inner critic.

Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, share it with someone else. I promise you know somebody who also hates their job and wants to quit, so why not share the love? And if you want to come follow along for more, come join me on Instagram at LessonsFromAQuitter and make sure you say hi. I'll see you next week for another episode.