Working With the Habit of Comparing

what's the point of comparing? we're all different sized eggs!

The ways in which we compare ourselves to others often stops us from entering into our own joy. And when we compare ourselves to others, it’s often a signal of an area of growth that we want for ourselves. Comparing isn’t very generative, is it? And yet we do this.

Recently this came up with a client who was moving into some new territory for herself and her business by taking a business development course. Before the course began we had a session, and she was distinctly in that territory of comparing herself to everyone else on the course. As it happens when we get into this territory, we often come up short. Everyone else had more experience in business than her. Everyone else had a current website. Everyone else knew just what they wanted and she was still searching. And she hadn’t even met these others yet!

I utterly understood her struggle, as I’d

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Awareness & the Self-Critical Voice

The Self-Critical Voice

As part of the launch of the Embodied Creative website, I encouraged your questions. The first one I received is a juicy one, so I wanted to spend some writing time on it in the hopes that it speaks to many of you as well. Here it is:

How can one minimize or eliminate the self-critical self?

Such a good question. Such a place of grappling, for both writers and non-writers.

I’ve often found that the self-critical voice appears as I’m expanding my repertoire. Deciding to claim some new territory, new ground. As if the critical voice is saying: Oh no, why don’t you just stay small/safe/inside yourself? And then the litany can begin — if you go there, you’ll be ridiculed/be seen as not smart enough/go broke …, etc. It’s never very pretty, where this voice sends me. Or likely, you.

So, I encourage you to try these three steps in confronting that self-critical

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