There are so many voices out there – telling you how to think, how to behave, how to get ahead in life. But, out of all these voices, there is one that you instinctively trust, every time, and that is your own.

Learning to tune in to your own voice and use it as the starting point for your life journey is incredibly important but even that can be complicated at times.

In the silence of your own head you will hear both your linear, skeptical, risk-averse logical brain and your wild, anarchic, adventurous creative brain talking to you.

In an ideal world, both parts of your brain would speak at equal volume and frequency but, because of the conditioning you have been subjected to throughout your education and career, your logical brain will probably be far louder, and more resonant, than your creative brain.

Your creative brain is constantly chattering away with suggestions and ideas – many of them only partly formed and most of them sounding weird and unfamiliar. Our logical brain’s natural reaction is to criticise those creative ideas as “unlikely to succeed”, “irrational”, “unaffordable”, “dangerous” or “embarrassing”.

This is just your logical brain trying to keep your world safe and predictable, but it makes it very hard for your creative brain to be heard.

For some of us, our logical brain is so loud that we begin to believe that our creative brain is not actually there at all. On the few occasions when we catch a distant echo of our creative voice it is often quickly silenced by our logical brain – our “inner critic” as we sometimes call it.

The more this goes on, the more likely we are to collude with the propaganda that paints creativity as somehow “childish”, “frivolous” or “less important”. So, if we want to get all the benefits that our creativity can offer we have to learn to silence our inner critic.

The best way to silence it is to understand it for what it really is - FEAR

All of us find the idea of failure, exposure or ridicule frightening and our inner critic is often driven by our subconscious desire to avoid them at all costs. The critic often speaks with the gravitas of logic and common sense, but its message usually boils down to “Don’t try; you might fail.”

Most of the critic’s power comes from the fact that it operates in the shadows of our mind - just like the monster that I was certain lived under my bed when I was six. We need to undermine the foundations of our fears and a great way to do that is to bring them into the light by writing them down and putting them to the test.

So, the next time you have a great idea for something and your inner critic whispers that “no one will get it” or “it will be too expensive” or “I’m not good enough to pull it off”, write those fears down on a piece of paper. Next, re-write them as a question instead of a closed statement (see pic below).

By working through those questions, we turn the critic’s whispers from “Reasons why we will fail” into “Problems we have to solve so that we can succeed.”

As you get comfortable with this process, you probably won’t need to write things down every time but it is a great way to learn the art of silencing the critic.