53: When Your Inner Critic Is Running Your Business

If you’ve ever felt like you’re being bullied by your own thoughts while trying to run your business you want to listen to this episode.

In this episode, I’m talking about the inner critic. That mean, relentless voice that tells you you’re not doing enough, not good enough, or that everyone else has it figured out but you.

And if you're a sensitive, driven woman running a business online, this inner critic isn't just making you feel bad.  It might be shaping your entire business - how you price, how you show up, and what you avoid doing.

📋 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why your inner critic isn’t actually you, but  something you learned
• Why common advice like “just make friends with it” might backfire
• What makes it louder during slow seasons in business (and why it spirals)
• Why highly sensitive women can often struggle with a vicious inner critic

✅ Key Takeaways:

• Giving your body space to feel safe works against a harsh inner critic.
• A harsh internal critic is internalised conditioning that can be changed
• The louder it gets, the more your nervous system is likely dysregulated (plus what can change that)

📍If your inner critic is holding you back in your business (whether it's stopping you from posting, pricing, launching, or simply enjoying the work you love) book a free Embodied Exploration Call with Tertia .

https://calendly.com/tertia/consult

✅Get the FREE Embodied Entrepreneur Masterclass :

https://tertiariegler.com/the-embodied-entrepreneur-free-masterclass/

➡️ Get your Impact & Income Capacity Reset and start tapping into the wisdom of your body and grow your business with more ease, without overriding your nervous system.

https://tertiariegler.com/impact-income-capacity-reset/

🧵Follow me on Threads for embodiment tips to navigate business without pushing past your limits.

https://www.threads.com/@tertia_riegler_embodiment

📩 Got questions? DM me

https://www.instagram.com/tertia_riegler_embodiment/

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📌Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute therapy, medical advice or business coaching.

Transcript

Tertia [00:00:00]:
I believe that women who are sensitive are more likely to have a terribly loud and mean inner critic. And this can bring you to your knees. If you have an inner critic that's constantly running commentary in the background below your level of awareness even, it shapes your entire identity without you even realizing that. And if you are running a business, especially as a woman who is navigating visibility, if you're running a business online, you're navigating visibility, you're navigating charging for your services, and potentially you are also navigating your worth. If you have a particularly toxic and nasty inner critic, it even shapes your entire strategy of how you run your business without you realizing that you are doing it. So how do we get rid of such an inner critic if it is harming us in such a way? That's what we are getting into in today's episode. So welcome to Beyond Burnout for Driven Women. I'm your host, Tertia, and this is where we go from burnout to abundance. And we take your notes. Nervous system along for the ride. If you are doing all of the right things on the outside, but you are still not feeling the shift, you are in the right place. Here we explore embodiment healing and what it really takes to be magnetic in business without over efforting or burning yourself out. So the first thing that I want to get us started with is to define what I mean by, by inner critic. So when I speak to the inner critic, I speak to that voice that is running in the background. It's the bad things that you say to yourself about yourself without even realizing that you are doing it. So this voice is mostly unconscious and it is learned. So as children growing up, we learn to navigate our environment. We find different ways to adapt to our environment. And one of the things that we do in order to stay loved, to stay part of the tribe, to stay accepted, is we internalize the voices of those around us so that they can guide us, so that they can help us stay loved and accepted and approved of. And over time, these messages, these voices becomes hardwired into us. So the external voice becomes. Becomes internal. When those external voices have not been supportive or when the consequences of not listening to the external voices ended up in something that was not so pleasant, not so safe, not so good for you, it really hardwires a more vicious, nasty kind of inner critic into us. So when I'm speaking of the inner critic in this context, it's not the inner critic that helps guide us and that's there to protect us. It's the one that has gone into overdrive, the one that is no longer supporting us. Okay, so let's see how this plays out in business if you have an inner critic like this. So the first thing to know, as you will know, is that business doesn't grow in a straight line, right? Our business will always ebb and flow. It grows, it stalls, it surges. We have periods of feast and we have periods of famine. Especially in the early stages where you still building trust with your audience. Will you still trying to get clear on the problem that you solving? Were you still trying to take your body of work from a conceptual nice to have into something that really speaks to the heart of your audience and will really help them transform? When we go through these slower seasons, when we go through a period where it looks like everything is stalling, it can feel brutal, especially if you are someone who is quite hard on yourself. And. And I've worked with enough driven women to know that often the more driven we are, the harder we are on ourselves and the louder our inner critic can also get. So when we go through these seasons where things seem to stall a little bit in our business or it's not flowing as well as we want it to, especially if we then look to other people in our space and it looks like they are selling and they are doing well, it not only hurts you financially, but it hurts you emotionally, right? Because if your launch flops or if people aren't lining up by outside your door to sign up for your services, your mind doesn't go, oh, it's a season. It will pass. It goes, oh, you're not cut out for this and you're doing it wrong. And see, you shouldn't even try. And you need a better strategy and you should try harder. And there's no time to rest now. You should really put shoulder to the wheel and work, work, work, and make sure that you make this thing work. And you should know better. You should be doing better. You should, you should, you should. When you have a toxic inner critic, it makes it feel as if the ebbs and flows of your business is not something that's a natural way that business grows, but that it is because there is something wrong with you. And that is like walking around and trying to run a business with a lead balloon around your ankles. So common advice is, okay, you have a toxic inner critic. And when you realize you have this inner critic, what you should do is give it a name. And then every time the inner critic pops up, then you go, oh, thank you I know you're trying to protect me. Well, let me tell you that that advice never worked for me. It never worked for me. And in fact, it even made me feel worse. The moment that I try to befriend this inner critic of mine, I actually end up ended up feeling worse. And I often went into a tailspin. Okay? My inner critic used to be stronger than me. And looking back at that now, I can hardly believe that that used to be the case. But my inner critic was stronger than me at one stage in my life. So even if I was making friends with it, it would wear me down like a five year old that's asking for sweeties. And if you have ever had a five year old in your house who really, really wants that sweetie, you know how they just carry on and on and on and they wear you down and they go, please, may I? And then you go, no. And then they go, but why not? And then you give an explanation and even the old standby, because I say so doesn't help. They wear you down until you give them that sweetie just to have some silence in your ears, right? And that is what used to happen with this inner critic, no matter what I did or how I reasoned with it or how I tried to befriend, wore me down. And it always won. And if you have ever been in the grips of this constant narrative that's running in the background and that makes you feel like crap about yourself, if things don't work out as you imagine they should, and I'm putting should here in quotation marks, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. So I thought it might be helpful for you if I shared the mechanics as I understand it. But first, a disclaimer. Number one, I'm not officially trained in in nervous system theory, right? I'm not a nervous system specialist, but I am a certified feminine embodiment coach. I did my training through the School of Embodied Arts and I am also a certified non linear movement method teacher. So I work with the body and I have a nervous system, as we all do, and my nervous system used to be so dysregulated it wasn't even funny. And through what I've learned through my training in the embodied arts and also through my own application, I have taken myself out of that constant state of dysregulation. I've created more ease, more openness, more space, more of an exhale in my system. And that has transformed my life. You've heard me speak about this in my other episodes. It has transformed my life. It has deepened my relationships not only with myself, but also with the people in my life. It's helped me with boundaries. It has helped me with making better decisions. And I am now taking what I've applied in my life, and I'm also growing my business with those same principles. So when I'm sharing these mechanics and if I'm using terms that are not technically correct, I apologize. I'm speaking here from lived experience and not from a textbook. Okay, so after that disclaimer, the other thing that I want to say is that I appreciate that this is a very layered topic, and I'm simplifying it simply for clarity sake. So let's get into it. The way that I see it works is we internalize the voices from our childhood. And if those voices, as I said earlier, weren't very supportive, or if we grew up in an environment where we tended to feel unsafe, often as we internalize those voices, it becomes an habitual background narrative. So it's running under. Under the level of our awareness. And we are not even. We don't even know that it is there, but it does kind of shape who we are, and it shapes how we show up in certain situations. It shapes the. The role that we adopt as we move through the different places, situations, and conversations in our lives. When this happens, your nervous system is constantly on a level of alert. So it's very careful. There's always some level of alert going on there. And then something happens in your external world. So it's a slow month, or someone unsubscribe subscribes from your newsletter, or you're going into a new stretch of your business, a new level of your business that's still feeling a little bit unfamiliar. And what happens is the nervous system starts feeling unsafe. Oh, something's wrong. I'm not feeling safe here. And the inner critic goes, yeah, we need to fix this. But the inner critic isn't a very good fixing partner. Instead, what it does is it throws insults at you. It spews anger at you. It tells you how terrible you are and how it's all your fault. And this is when you begin to spiral, because now your system is feeling even more unsafe than what it did before. And the more unsafe you are feeling, the worse the inner critic starts to spew until you become either immobilized or you start doing frantic things that is actually not supporting you, but it's putting you in overdrive and it's burning you out. And I believe, as I said at the Top of this podcast that if you are by nature, call it a highly sensitive person, a person who is sensitive already to any internal feelings and sensations and emotions that is happening inside your body, you tend to get overwhelmed quicker. You're more sensitive to the effect of your nervous system, and this leads to anxious, racing thoughts and you end up feeling like a failure. And that's why you avoid emailing your list, because you don't want to bother them. That's why you have an emotional shame spiral every time you post something on social media. And A, it's a little bit more expressive than what you are used to, or B, you're not getting the likes and the comments that you hoped for that will validate that what you are doing is okay. And this is not even like a lead balloon around your feet anymore. This is like cutting yourself off at the knees. You can't run a race like that. Not that we are running a race, but you, you know, in order for you to have a sustainable business, in order for you to have a sustainable life where you are enjoying it and you are not hanging by the threads of your fingertip, you need capacity, you need ease, you need openness. And unfortunately, if we are buying into this inner critic, if we become a victim to this inner critic, and remember, this happens unconsciously. So when I say you become a victim to it, what I mean is the consequences of having such an inner critic cuts deep. And I know you know that. So is there a way out if befriending the inner critic hasn't worked for you? If you've tried that strategy like I used to and it also didn't work for you? Yes, there is another way. And this is the process that I take my clients through. It's a process that I have developed myself. And it's not about making friends with your inner critic because your system is still activated. It. Right. It's like there's a lion and that lion is going to eat you. And you try and tell it, no, it's a kitty. And if you don't look at it, then it won't see you. But you know that that thing is going to chomp you up. So what we want to do instead is you want to take the inner critic out of your system so that it gives you space. You want to take the lion out of the room. Yeah. And when you do that, it stops freaking out your system. And this is the process that I take my clients through. The second prong to this two pronged approach is that you also want to Practice embodiment to unravel the emotions, the feelings and even the memories, the. The voices that has been frozen in your system, that keeps on being activated, that keeps on living in your system, but they don't serve you anymore. We want to unravel those. We want to unfreeze those from your system, from your body, from your being, so that it stops your nervous system being on high alert all the time. And in my experience, this is the most effective way to not only silence your inner critic, but to completely change the voice, the tone, the intensity, and even the malice that your inner critic might have. So if you have an inner critic that is particularly malicious about your failures and it is holding you back in business, it is causing you to show up or not show up in ways that you wouldn't otherwise have done, then I want you to know it doesn't have to be like that. You don't have to be someone who has an inner critic. And you just need to live with it. You don't. And this is really, really important for you. I really want this to land for you, because it matters. Because if you are run by your inner critic, you stay small. You delay, you over give, you don't let yourself show up in your most full, messy, brilliant, beautiful, real self. You burn out and you wake up wondering, why am I doing this if it doesn't feel good anymore? So I want to finish us off by saying that even if you might have thought that this voice in your head that's pushing you forward, that's demanding more of you, that is wanting you to succeed and do and go the extra mile, you aren't that voice, that voice is not you. That harsh tone and that. Don't do it like this. Don't do it like that. Be careful. Don't embarrass yourself. That's not your deepest truth. That's your conditioning. And because it is not you and it is conditioning, it can change. I'm going to leave a link for you in the show notes. You can book a free embodied exploration call with me. I'm not going to try and sell you anything. It's just going to be us looking at one place in your business where you feel stuck. And we'll get to the root of that and then will map out a plan how you can move forward, not with another strategy, but how can you move forward from wholeness. Because when you feel safe being yourself, everything changes. That link again will be in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. And if this episode resonated with you. Please share it with a friend who's been hard on herself lately and go on and listen to it again. You'll see off. I'll speak to you in the next one. Bye.