7 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Eliminate Self Criticism and Improve Performance
Entrepreneur therapy helps ambitious founders outgrow the self-criticism that reduces productivity and contributes to burnout
Many ambitious individuals engage in self-criticism that reduces their leadership potential and productivity.
While you may justify negative internal dialogue as part of the motivation you need to achieve, critical statements detract from energy that could otherwise be focused in the same direction.
They create internal tension between different parts of yourself that feel out of alignment:
The perfectionist executor and the incompetent weakling you hide from others.
Without addressing this form of internal bullying, you’re unable to reach your full potential as a leader of your organization, and your perfectionist tendencies may sabotage progress before you’ve achieved your goals.
As an entrepreneur and cofounder psychologist, I’ve seen how these self-limiting tendencies contribute to startup failures.
A 2015 study found 49% of entrepreneurs have experienced mental health conditions and an estimated 65% of high potential startups fail due to interpersonal issues in the cofounder partnership. These issues demonstrate the significant interdependence between personal wellbeing and professional success.
Many clients have asked me how to improve their self-critical tendencies.
I’ll give you the same blueprint I share with them, but remember: It’s easier to see the path than to walk it. And walking it is what creates lasting change.
Below are 7 ways entrepreneurs, cofounders, and other ambitious individuals can reduce self criticism.
1. Bring more awareness to the situations in which you are self-critical.
Noticing which situations elicit negative self-dialogue teaches you a lot about yourself.
Over time, this consistent self-observation will help you make a mental map of the situations that activate this unhelpful response. These triggers often constellate around key emotional wounds that are outside of your awareness. Identifying them through this pattern recognition leads to greater insight and self-understanding, which is required to outgrow this self-limiting tendency.
2. Study the impact of self-criticism on your performance.
Now that you’ve built awareness of what situations tend to trigger the self-critical response, you need to better understand how it impacts your performance.
Ask yourself:
How do I feel in moments saturated with self-criticism?
How does that feeling contribute to my short-term behavior?
How do those short-term behaviors compound and impact me long-term?
What impact do these feelings and behaviors have on myself, my goals, and the people around me?
Linking this inner dialogue to its effects is an important step. Once understood, it provides ample motivation for change.
3. Develop insight into how this self-criticism was developed.
Self-criticism is a learned behavior.
It involves internalizing the voices of people in our lives. As you start this process, you may notice different coaches and teachers as shaping this inner voice, but going further back you’ll discover that it was your parents or the individuals responsible for your rearing.
As children, we learn of the world through internalizing other people’s representations of it. Those representations are limited by our loved one’s life experiences, psychological development, and social positioning. Thus, they are flawed, imperfect, and reflective of their psychological maturity at this time in our development.
We internalize, or take in and make our own, their voices and perspectives.
And to free yourself from their limitations, you must understand the messages themselves and the key moments in which they were instilled in you.
4. Uncover the function self-criticism served and serves.
You must comprehend the function of the self-criticism now and in the past.
Perhaps this form of punishment was used to motivate yourself — to push yourself beyond your limits and correct perceived mistakes. But now, despite feeling like a necessary part of yourself that you cannot imagine being free of, it’s no longer needed — it no longer serves your growth.
At this stage in your adulthood, self-criticism ultimately serves the purpose of hiding parts of yourself that you find ugly, undesirable, and shameful. It is this pressure to keep hidden that restricts your fullest authentic self-expression and limits your personal and professional growth.
When you were younger, negative self-dialogue may have been a way to build connection with the parents you idealized or longed for. It may have been an invisible bridge between you and them despite the pain they caused you. This way of connecting when they were emotionally unavailable for you was something that you needed for survival. But it’s not something you need as an adult.
5. Build an empathy and compassion for the inadequate self.
The last two items were heavy, props if you made it through without clicking away. If you’re still here, it means something resonated with you. It means you need to hear what comes next.
Self-compassion.
Far easier said than done. This is one of the more difficult steps in this process.
Now that you’ve developed a clearer understanding of how these feelings were internalized and the functions they’ve served, you must build an emotional bridge to the wounded part of yourself that 1) Needed to develop this form of attachment to emotionally unavailable caregivers, and 2) Continues hurting each time you speak to yourself in this way.
You need to mentally and emotionally connect to the younger part of yourself who experienced these original wounds and who is activated in moments of intense self-criticism.
This often involves a process of grieving, sadness, and loss leading to love, understanding, and acceptance.
6. Stand up for yourself and stop the bullying.
Here’s the fun part!
Now that you’ve built all of that understanding, it’s time to tell that critical voice to shut the fuck up.
Connect with that younger part of yourself who needs an ally, and advocate for it.
Stand up to the bully and set boundaries, such as:
It’s not okay to talk to me in that way
That’s not true, I am a good person with good intentions
I disagree, I could’ve done better, but I don’t need to berate myself for it
Keep it simple. Validate the perceived “incompetent” part of yourself by affirming its worth and good intentions. Tell the bully to step off. Stand up for yourself.
7. Counter with more realistic appraisals of your ability.
Setting boundaries offers the opportunity to create a valid counter-argument.
Challenge your inner critic by bringing more realistic perspectives to your abilities.
Normalize your suffering by adding important context the bully often overlooks, highlight your efforts and how effort compounded over time will yield the outcomes you desire, and create alternative perspectives.
Amplify these realistic appraisals instead of fear-based criticism.
While this list is easy to understand, it’s much more difficult to implement.
Working through each of the steps above requires time, patience, and tolerating discomfort — something most successful individuals find challenging to justify.
However, the benefits of engaging in this deep and meaningful personal work cannot be overstated.
If you worked with a startup therapist on those seven steps, you would:
Reduce stress, frustration, and burnout
Increase sustainability and improve energy management
Develop better focus, productivity, and confidence
Build a sense of mental clarity and lead to more effective decisions
Each of these outcomes is desirable because it improves your personal wellbeing, the quality of your relationships, and your professional growth.
The only question is, are you ready to make that investment in yourself?