Think back to the last time something went wrong in your business.

How did you respond to yourself about it? Did you say something kind and encouraging? Something like, 

“This is so hard, but it’s going to be ok and I still believe in myself”

OR

Did your inner dialogue turn critical? Did you say something to yourself along the lines of, 

“You idiot! I can’t believe you made such a dumb mistake!”

I hope your response was more aligned with the first option. However, chances are, you’ve had that second voice appear on at least one occasion. For some of you, it might be a voice that’s whispering in your ear all day long while working to bring your dreams to life as the owner of your own companies.

Introducing… your inner business critic

Being an entrepreneur can be incredibly stressful and isolating work, which makes it the perfect place for a critical voice to creep in when you make a mistake, procrastinate on an item on your to-do list, or don’t meet your weekly goals. That voice is what I like to call your “inner business critic.”

You might have heard the term “inner critic” used before. We all have a critical voice inside of us and labeling it as our inner critic can help us create space from it and eventually loosen the hold it has on us. However, you might not have considered how it manifests in your work as an entrepreneur before. I certainly hadn’t. Until I attended a Mindful Self-Compassion course last summer.

Under the guidance of two leaders in the field of self-compassion, I spent 5 days learning about the latest research on this topic, and practicing guided meditations and journaling exercises designed to help us learn to treat ourselves more kindly, gently, and generously. Having worked with many clients to increase their own compassion towards themselves,  I was shocked and delighted to discover just how powerful many of these exercises could be when I tried them out on myself.

I returned from the course determined to maintain, and deepen, the daily self-compassion practices I’d begun. But, one surprising discovery was just how relevant and helpful they could be when I applied them to the challenges I faced as an entrepreneur as well.

I consider myself a recovering perfectionist and I’ve struggled to let go of my overachiever ways, while still pursuing the dreams and goals I have about how I want to spend my limited time on earth. Tapping into the tools of self-compassion seemed like an ideal avenue for staying connected to my intrinsic motivation and my values and vision for my company, while also providing me with tools to increase my ability to take risks and recover from mistakes.

I became curious to learn more about how self-compassion could help entrepreneurs and other professionals thrive in their own careers and discovered I wasn’t the only one who was curious about this topic. A few months ago, the Harvard Business Review published an article entitled “Give Yourself a Break: The Power of Self-Compassion,” in which the author noted that fostering a growth mindset, helping employees to be true to themselves, and creating more compassionate leaders, were all benefits of bringing self-compassion to professional environments. Greater Good Science Center also published an article last year with tips on how to implement self-compassion practices in your work day.

Using self-compassion to combat your inner critic

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with my clients to help them to direct self-compassion towards their own performance at work when dealing with issues such as mistakes or failures, considering a pivot, or struggling with burnout. One of the objections I run into time and time again is this:

“Being more self-compassionate will make me complacent, lazy, or unproductive.”

Many of us have a deep-rooted belief that if we stop being beating ourselves up when we don’t live up to our standards, then we’ll stop working hard. However, there’s an increasing amount of research that suggests that self-compassion is more effective than self-criticism at helping us motivate ourselves to achieve our goals. When we treat ourselves with compassion, we also tend to believe that we’re more capable of achieving our goals. It’s also negatively associated with fear of failure, which means that the more self-compassion we show towards ourselves, the more likely we’ll be willing to risk failure.

Believe it or not, self-criticism comes from a place of wanting to take care of ourselves. It’s part of our fight-flight-freeze response, which is designed to keep us alive. When we perceive danger, this threat-defense system is quickly activated so we can respond to the danger. This is great news when the danger is threatening our physical bodies, such as a fast approaching car. However, in our modern society, most of the threats we face are challenges to how we see ourselves. Just how the “fight” response may have helped us in the past when faced with a predator, our brains may still respond with “fight,” but towards ourselves.

The good news is that we can also override this tendency to criticize ourselves by practicing self-compassion.

And when it comes to running our businesses, we can lessen the voice of our inner business critics by tapping into and strengthening a different voice.

That of our inner compassionate business coach.

I’ve put together a free journaling exercise and guided meditation that is designed to help you tap into your own inner compassionate business coach. Click here to download it now.