The REAL Reason Your Inner Critic Won't Shut Up

[00:00:00] Saying Another Year, Another Year, Another Year, and That Just Becomes Your Life I kicked off with a new client today. She talked about the cost of being haunted every day by your own tentacle and only using about like 10% of it. That tends to be painful.

[00:00:16] And listen, if it's not painful for you and you can just live having an okay life and an okay existence, if that's your standard, this right here, this is not for you.

[00:00:31] Like you can go back into that same way after listening to this podcast and have a really okay life or you can have an extraordinary life. One of meaning where you actually become an example for your children instead of a warning label.

[00:00:48] My ultimate question to you for this episode is who do you want to be? If you are ready to burn bright instead of burning out, to lead without losing yourself and to enjoy the life you have worked so hard to create then keep listening.

[00:01:06] I'm your host, America's leader on rewiring perfectionism, CLG, and this is Perfectionism Rewired, the podcast. Welcome to Perfectionism Rewired. Today we are digging into asking yourself quality questions instead of crappy questions. As perfectionists, we ask crappy questions of ourselves without realizing it and you

[00:01:31] do not rise to the level of your answers, you fall to the level of your questions. Questions are what you are optimizing for. So if you are optimizing for terrible because you're asking yourself crap tasked at questions like what did I do wrong?

[00:01:47] Why can't I be more efficient with my time? Why doesn't anyone around here help me? You are optimizing for the wrong questions. And when you are optimizing for the wrong questions, a.k.a. asking yourself the incorrect questions that is going to take you further and

[00:02:04] further away from the calm confidence that you want. What this episode is going to do for you is identify the most common ones, illuminate why your brain's default is being an ask whole. And I'm going to give you quality questions to ask yourself instead.

[00:02:24] These questions like verbatim from clients in the past week. Oh, my goodness, this question is so good, you could literally bottle it up and sell it at the store. The questions that I ask and the questions I give clients to ask

[00:02:39] themselves or to ask during a job interview or a board meeting are the highest quality questions you can ever get. So open up notes on your phone. You're going to want to write this down. You're going to want to listen to this episode several times.

[00:02:51] What I see with ambitious driven high achievers like you, why they don't even realize your crappy questions is you are in the black and white thinking, which comes from to tie it back to the past couple of episodes that we've had about fascia, the Wi-Fi of your insides.

[00:03:13] When you are clenchy, when you are rigid, guess what a side effect of that is? Black and white thinking. So when you have that black and white thinking, you're either asking yourself, why am I such a pathetic loser?

[00:03:26] Or you're asking yourself, why am I so awesome in the greatest of all time? But that doesn't feel true. It feels like a lie that black and white thinking, that rigidity, that clenchiness now most perfectionists do not know how to ask quality questions of themselves.

[00:03:41] If you're wondering why, who taught you how to ask quality questions? Because no one has ever taught us. We ask ourselves crappy questions that have terrible answers at the end of them. It would be like if the only place that you go grocery shopping is the

[00:03:55] dumpster because no one has ever introduced you to a grocery store. Like if you didn't know that grocery stores existed and you just thought that the dumpster was the only place you get food, that is the perfect analogy for what is happening in your mind.

[00:04:09] If you haven't gained the lifelong skill of learning how to ask quality questions. Here are some examples so that you know, oh, I could improve the questions that I'm asking myself. Why aren't they getting back to me? How awful do I look?

[00:04:24] How can I possibly get everything done? Why did they make that face at me? Why can't I do everything I want to do? What do they want from me now? What if it doesn't work? What if I get fired?

[00:04:36] If you don't consciously think about the questions before you run off and answer them. Here's how it goes at like 1 a.m. You wake up, you really ought to be sleeping and you're asking the question, what did I do wrong in that meaning? OK, that is useless.

[00:04:52] It is useless. It's a useless question. Every time that question comes up, tell yourself unsubscribe. Like poorly worded questions, not even going to dignify that with a response. Instead of thinking, what did I do wrong in that meeting?

[00:05:10] How about what can I do a little bit better in the next meeting? Like think about the question. What did I do wrong? Like we'll never have a useful answer. Any questions, by the way, that you are up asking yourself in the middle of the night, just stop.

[00:05:26] Decide I'm going to lie in bed right now and I'm going to be so bored that I will fall asleep. If the questions can come in, you do not need to entertain them. Just like when you go to Target, you don't need to buy every single toy

[00:05:41] that your kiddo touches. Another greatest hit of crappy questions is what's wrong with me. Now, do you think that your perfectionist detail oriented brain is going to be like absolutely nothing is wrong with you, love kids? Here, sit back and take note.

[00:06:01] Well, I tell you the thousands of thousands of ways that you are phenomenal. No. If you are letting your brain just be like, what's wrong with me? Then it's going to be like, well, chapter one of how you have f-ed up your life just this year.

[00:06:18] That's chapter one. Chapter two, here are all the wrong decisions you have made. Chapter three, here is the history of your most massive mistakes. Your brain is not going to go through and actually look for answers. That's the way that your brain works.

[00:06:35] One of the things that your brain is designed to do is it's actually designed to answer questions. It is like a computer in that way. And I'm going to hyperlink in the show notes to the episode

[00:06:51] that gets into the science of this and how your brain is just like a labrador retriever because our brain actually is designed to answer questions. If you ask a question and it's not a quality question and you don't intentionally answer it in an empowering way,

[00:07:09] it is going to default, answer it with all of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad stories that you've collected about yourself for all of your life. It's just going to scroll through. Let's kill her self-confidence, poor self-esteem, everything you're worried about.

[00:07:26] That's the only place that your brain knows to go to get answers because you have not trained it. It has not developed the skill of like, oh, there's actually other places that we can go when you don't have this skill. It only has your search history,

[00:07:42] which is the way that you've answered that question before. Just like Google, it's going to bring up the ones that you've clicked on the most and saved as your screensaver. You've got to be vigilant when it comes to answering or asking douchebag questions of yourself.

[00:07:59] Like, what's wrong with me is one that we need to be listening for and know that it is not useful asking these crappy questions. Questions like, what if I wasted my money? What if I fail? What if I humiliate myself? What if I'm letting people down?

[00:08:14] What if it doesn't work? What if they're judging me? What if questions you just want to delete all together? It's a more advanced skill. Like, once you come into perfectionism optimized because the type of what if questions that you want to be asking or like,

[00:08:28] what if I succeed? What if things work out 10 times better than I ever imagined? Before I get to quality questions to start asking yourself, I want you to be listening to the what ifs and the why's. What's wrong with me? Why can't I get it together?

[00:08:45] I want you to be listening for all that stuff because even if you don't answer on purpose any of the quality questions that I'm giving you, at the very least what you can do and what you owe it to yourself is to get

[00:08:57] aware of when you're doing things that are utterly unhelpful. A one percent shift that some of the stuff that you are asking yourself is not useful gives you the choice and it opens up a wedge

[00:09:10] of opportunity for you to try and do something that is useful for you. Maybe you do notice that you are asking these crappy questions. Now the question becomes, is this where you want to stay? There's patterns that make you really stressed out

[00:09:28] that kill self confidence that I've talked about in this episode. But there's also patterns that make you ambitiously joyful and have it so that you feel as amazing as your life look. I can train you in those patterns.

[00:09:42] That's what I'm here for so that you show up powerfully in integrity and being whole and complete and really owning yourself. I promise you if you stay on the pathway that we lay out together, it can't not happen. And this isn't about perfectionism leveraged my one-on-one coaching program.

[00:10:05] This is about you getting your life back. Like in three months, things could be exactly the way you want or they could be exactly how they are now only slightly worse. That's the almost certain probable future for you. If you keep on doing exactly what you've been doing,

[00:10:28] if you continue on this path asking yourself crappy questions that have terrible answers at the end of them, are you willing to settle for that? What we're actually talking about here when I say change, it isn't adding more meditation into your daily routine. This is a lifestyle upgrade.

[00:10:50] That's why you need support, whether it's me or it's somebody else. You really got to commit to raising your standards with and for yourself and the type of questions that you dignify with a response. I am going to give you some quality questions, but before I do,

[00:11:10] I just want to warn you your crappy narrative is not going to go away anytime soon. Those questions will still come up and they'll be like, here I am. Did you miss me? I don't want you to worry about like, wait, but I have these new questions.

[00:11:25] Why is my brain still asking me crappy ones or fetching like very unuseful answers? I want you to get so good at the awareness that you give yourself the opportunity to say, I don't want to think like that anymore. Here's what I want to think instead.

[00:11:41] Here are the questions I want to ask of myself. I can no longer afford to just keep letting myself ask these old crappy questions that have been passed down through generations. This quality question for perfectionists can help you break the cycle of always thinking things aren't good enough.

[00:12:02] Your day literally is just a bunch of facts and after you're done with the day and then you get to decide to make it mean that you're not good enough or do you make it mean that you have an opportunity to rise up a little tomorrow?

[00:12:20] Like, is that what you want? That is what I want for you. And I'm pretty sure that's what you would want for yourself also. What is a one percent shift that will make my today better than yesterday?

[00:12:34] This is super helpful because instead of being on the hunt for how you didn't do enough or how today is going to suck so hard, start being curious. The scientists instead of the judge. Other quality questions that you can ask yourself, let's say you majorly

[00:12:50] messed up, a great question that you could ask yourself is if I was going to love myself in this moment, what would I say and do next? It is a super clutch question when being kind to yourself and showing yourself compassion because honestly, forget loving yourself when liking

[00:13:10] yourself feels like a huge chore. But just like ask yourself if I was going to like myself in this moment, what would I say and do next? Or you could be like, if I was not going to obliterate myself in this moment,

[00:13:27] what would I say and do next? What's brilliant about this is that it's not making you wrong. It's telling you without telling you what to do to give yourself a little bit of compassion. Other questions to check yourself before you wreck yourself is what story

[00:13:44] am I telling myself in this moment? How am I experiencing myself in this moment? What's one way I can do future me a solid and like doing future you a solid is not criticizing yourself. And this is a little bit advanced, but I'm throwing it in for perfectionism,

[00:14:04] optimized clients listening. And for those of you that are like, I already went to Courtney livegavin.com. I inquired, I want you to be my coach already. Give me some extra work that I can do. Another way you can look at this is to ask yourself what

[00:14:19] payoff am I getting by criticizing myself? What payoff am I getting by asking myself, what do they want from me now? You might be like, I'm not getting any payoff from it. But the truth is the only reason why you're subconscious is holding on

[00:14:32] to that question, like clenching it and gripping it tightly is because you're getting some benefit from it. So let's say I was asking the question, what do they want from me now? That is not a quality question.

[00:14:44] It's like, what payoff do I get by assuming that everybody wants something from me? Well, I get to feel very important. I get to feel righteous. I get to feel better than I get to feel like indispensable. You know what I mean?

[00:14:57] And it's just important to identify those because once you again, this is advanced, this is something that if you were my client, we would work on together. Once you are able to identify what it is that you are getting

[00:15:10] from asking the crappy questions or giving yourself crappy answers, we are able to graft those onto something that's actually beneficial for you. In this example, there are a lot of ways for you to feel indispensable without trashing yourself or your family.

[00:15:29] There are so many ways that you can feel important without being a martyr. There's a pinata of possibilities. You can feel helpful without doing harm to yourself or the relationships that you care most about. That's going to require you to do something different.

[00:15:48] And anytime that you make changes, it feels uncomfortable. It's super easy when the podcast is over to just go back into your crappy questions. But before you do that, tell me if you don't change this pattern now, five years from now, 10 years from now,

[00:16:08] do you think it'll be easier to change if you do nothing? Saying another year, another year, another year and that just becomes your life. I kicked off with a new client today. She talked about the cost of being haunted every day by your own

[00:16:24] potential and only using about like 10 percent of it. That tends to be painful. And listen, if it's not painful for you and you can just live having an OK life and an OK existence, if that's your standard, this right here, this is not for you.

[00:16:44] Like you can go back into that same way after listening to this podcast and have a really OK life or we can do the work together and you can have an extraordinary life. One of meaning where you actually become an example for your children

[00:17:02] instead of a warning label. My ultimate question to you for this episode is who do you want to be? If you're not here to settle for an OK life, if permanent change is important to you and it's important enough

[00:17:19] for you to change right now, I can help you make asking yourself crappy questions and crippling perfectionism a thing of the past. All you got to do is take the first step at CourtneyLoveGavin.com slash services, reach out to me and together we can map out your proven

[00:17:38] pathway to making intentional choices that empower you for the rest of your life. Listen up. Taking charge of your perfectionism is so much easier than you have been led to believe. Whether you want to stop playing out worst case scenarios in your head

[00:17:54] or be joyfully present ambitious again, you don't need more rigid rules, guesswork or hard work in perfectionism recovery. You need a framework that helps you understand and most importantly, rewire your perfectionistic habits from the inside out. It starts inside of perfectionism optimized.

[00:18:17] Besides the obvious mental health and wellness benefits, rewiring your perfectionism is the fastest way to figure out what's really underneath your perfectionistic patterns. This radically different proven proprietary approach helps you succeed by dropping the contempt and judgment that blocks change.

[00:18:37] Discover how to trust yourself, take control of your world and feel truly empowered to own your perfectionism instead of being owned by it. Head on over to CourtneyLoveGavin.com and start your transformation today.