How to Defeat Your Inner Critic

What is the biggest obstacle to your success as an actor? It could be the same obstacle that prevents EVERYONE from achieving success in any field. It is the small voice in your head.  You know that small voice, full of brutal criticism, feeding your self-doubt, talking you out of achieving your dreams by instilling you with the fear of failure.

In coaching, we call that voice NEGATIVE SELF TALK and it is a powerful form of self-interference. Interference acts like a fog between you and your ability, obscuring your opportunity to shine. At ACS we call it your INNER CRITIC. 

We all have interference, but in an industry like acting with such a high rejection rate, caused by an over-supply of actors and an under-supply of work, actors seem to be at its mercy more than most.

During the audition it never stops talking. On the way to the audition it fills you with self doubt, it questions your competence. After the audition it brutally chimes in again.

Most people know what we’re talking about, but if you don’t believe that it’s there here’s an example. One of our coaches recently gave a workshop at Surviving Actors, an event in London. Before the workshop, they asked a SA staff member if she could help them to gauge the distance that someone would have to throw a piece of paper into a waste paper bin. They handed her the paper and started walking away. Before she’d even taken a shot, she had started saying “I don’t know if I can help you though, I’m a rubbish throw, I’ll probably miss.”  They didn’t need her to throw, it wasn’t going in now anyway.

And when you have a lot to lose – like most audition situations, that voice is going to be almost deafening. Whatever story your internal narrator tells is going to affect your external performance. So quietening down our little ‘friend’ is a major priority.

We don’t want that voice to be the only thing that’s holding you back from success, and you probably don’t either.

They have been addressing this in sports psychology for almost 40 years, but only now is it really being introduced in acting.

Here are our tips on reducing the interference and removing the biggest obstacle to your success as an actor:

ONE: Give the Inner Critic a name. Something silly. Something that you struggle to take seriously. We’re going to call ours BERTY.  BERTY is like a friend who is very well intentioned, but entirely unhelpful. Actually, he’s the worst friend you’ve ever had, because in order to save you from pain, he’ll do anything. He’ll criticise, scold, mock, brutalise, distract, lecture, scare, unsettle, undermine – the only thing he won’t do is criticise himself. But now when we hear BERTY, we know who’s talking, that unhelpful friend. By the way, we never brutalise BERTY, that’s just feeding into his way of doing things, but we are going to shut this Inner Critic up.

TWO: You do not need to believe your Inner Critic. They are spinning a narrative, an inner dialogue that isn’t true. Start a new story. An objective story about what is actually happening in front of you – what we in our studio would call the truth of the moment. This raising of your awareness in a non-judgmental way will vastly reduce the Critic’s presence in your life.

THREE: Start that story with ‘It is what it is’. Encourage no judgment in your self-feedback. Leaving the audition with your head held high, it was an audition. Your thoughts and feelings on it are largely irrelevant. And if BERTY starts chiming in, you will usually feel very bad about yourself or over-confident. Don’t listen. BERTY wants to help, but he’s a dick. Hamlet says “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Shakespeare knew something about the Inner Critic.

FOUR: The enemy of interference is focus. Focused attention. Absorption. Tim Gallwey, create of the Inner Game reasoned that “focus is whatever distracts us from whatever distracts us.” The Inner Critic distracts us and so to silence that most unhelpful voice in your head, you need something to take up your attention. Pour your attention into something other than yourself. As your perform your scene audition, place your attention somewhere outside yourself. If it’s with a scene partner, score yourself on how much effect you’re having on them. Take a look at them at the start of the scene, and really try to change them. Even if it’s a casting assistant reading aloud monotonously, try to change them. What do you want them to do? To look down with the shame of it? To rush over and hug you? Score them, how you doing? Change them. This is powerful enough to completely silence the Inner Critic, but I’m sure you can come up with your own variations.

If you struggle with your own Inner Critic, it is possible to defeat it.  Please don’t let the voice in your head, and the story that it’s telling overcome you. You have every right to be in this profession, and you have every right to earn your place in our industry. The Inner Critic has no place in your success story.