Banish Your Inner Critic: Silence the Voice of Self-Doubt to Unleash Your Creativity and Do Your Best Work

by Denise R. Jacobs

While it's easy to believe that the main barriers to being more productive, generating and developing ideas, and doing our best work are external (how many times have you vented to a coworker about "hitting a wall?"), the truth is that these frustrating blocks are most often in our own heads. What is the entity responsible for this? The Inner Critic.

The Inner Critic is relentless, driving us toward perfectionism and fanning the flames of self doubt, self-sabotage, and self criticism while dousing the sparks of creative ideas before they have a chance to develop. It encourages rationalization to help us feel better about snuffing out these sparks and keeps us believing that it's saving us from rejection, judgment, and failure. Worst of all, it makes us think all of this is our own idea.

How do we break free of something that feels like it's a natural part of who we are?

Denise Jacobs, Speaker, Author and Chief Creativity Evangelist of The Creative Dose, who speaks at web conferences and consults with tech companies worldwide, maps a way out in her latest work, Banish Your Inner Critic. This book is your manual and toolkit to help you not only reclaim your creativity and productivity, but bump it up to extreme productivity, clearing a path for you to find your zone more often - and stay in it longer.

Jacobs' guidebook will provide instant relief and lasting insight, showing you how to:
- Identify and quiet the voice of self-sabotage in your head
- Master three power practices to transform how you relate to yourself and your creativity forever
- Overcome the fear of not knowing enough or not being original enough
- Free yourself from comparisons, overwhelm, and self-criticism
- Transform your self-talk into a tool for success
- Generate more ideas than ever before
- Embrace your expertise and share your brilliance with the world

Calling on neuroscience, psychology, mindfulness principles, and self-compassion research, deftly blended with personal storytelling, Jacobs presents approachable and immediately applicable techniques for putting your Inner Critic in its place. Banish Your Inner Critic will help you make your creative process more fluid and develop practices to cultivate innovation. When your next creative idea sparks into being, you will be ready to nurture it into a dazzling light of success.

Banish your Inner Critic to start doing your best work, achieving excellence, and contributing meaningfully to the world!

Genres: Self Help, Nonfiction, Psychology, Personal Development, Design, Business, Ebooks

352 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 13, 2016

About the author

Denise R. Jacobs is a Speaker + Author + Creativity Evangelist who speaks at conferences and consults with companies worldwide. As the Founder + CEO of The Creative Dose, she promotes techniques to unlock creativity and spark innovation in people, teams, and workplaces, particularly those in the tech world. She teaches game-changing techniques for busting through creative blocks, developing clear and effective communication, cultivating collaboration, and up-leveling productive creativity. Denise is the author of Banish Your Inner Critic, the premier handbook on silencing fears to unleash creativity. A web and tech industry veteran, Denise is also the author of The CSS Detective Guide and co-author of the Smashing Book #3 1/3 and Interact with Web Standards. She is also the founder of Rawk The Web and the Head Instigator of The Creativity (R)Evolution.

Reviews

[Josiah Sanchez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you have to rank a book based on the value you got from it instead of based on how well it was written or how good the content was.

This book was a pretty textbook example of a self help book: a lot of positive you-can-do-its, here’s how you feel better about yourself, etc. To be honest, I didn’t particularly enjoy it. BUT, there was one activity that made a huge difference in the work I’ve been doing on myself: an interview with my inner critic. In the activity, you ask your inner critic questions with your dominant writing hand and then write your responses with your opposite hand. I don’t know how it worked, but the responses were written in a unique writing style that doesn’t sound like how I write! It truly felt like I was talking to another person and it was something that got me past some major blocks I’ve been fighting with.

I don’t know that I would recommend this book, but I do know that it was beneficial for me and that I can celebrate.

[Gen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some useful information but boy was it a chore to read! Very repetitive and formulaic. The book could easily be half as long.

[Szymon Kulec · Rating 3 out of 5]

The inner critic is a part of our mind, molded by years of upbringing. It's protective, it's vocal and it can be extremely prohibitive and devastatingly forbidding. Can you silence it, can you banish it? This book provides some answers to this questions.

I think that this book would have gained if it had been written as a set of exercises, one per page. It is not written this way though. Sometimes it uses tone that is much too soft, sometimes it describes small, easy things in a very lengthy way. I know that you can't banish the critic implanting another one, but this book could be a bit shorter, a bit more dense and a bit more easy to refer to specific exercises.

If I was choosing the best piece, it would be Face of Approval showing you thumbs up every time you doubt yourself.

If you sometimes feel blocked, something is whispering that you're not going to make it and you haven't heard about the inner critic, this might be the book for you.

[Patsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting mystery!

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Your inner critic is not telling you how to improve. In the contrary. The inner critic with all the doubt, arguing and what-if’s is actively stopping you. Great ideas never see the light of day because the inner critic voiced “this is not good enough” or “everyone knows that”.

Denise Jacobs explains in this book how bad those self-doubts really are. There are many personal stories of Denise that make clear that you are not alone with your inner critic. But even better, she gives simple and easy-to-follow advice to overcome the inner critic. I liked the simple gesture of delete (a swipe of your hand from right to left) to get rid of the points brought up by my inner critic. It’s so simple that it may look ridiculous. But the combination of thought and a gesture is powerful and helps to reinforce the message.

Another simple technique helps to focus on the whole and not only on a tiny little negative part. When negative thoughts pop up you add “and then I did …”. An example: if you had a presentation in front of 10 people and one person was disappointed, you can focus on that person. Or you could focus on the 9 others that enjoyed the talk. Whenever the thought of this one negative person comes up, you can start overwriting that thought with “and then the 9 other people told me how much they liked my talk”. Not to loop endlessly in those negative thoughts gives you power to create something new.

The book offers many more techniques and if one gives it a try, then there should be something for everyone. I can recommend this book without limitation.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't normally read these types of "be more productive" books, but it was given to me. I found it fairly complete, with work sheets and good sourcing to the main authors in the field (people like Brene Brown, Julia Angwin). Utimately, it is kind of a book report, with good descriptions of things like "maximizing your work flow," etc. The author's background is as a computer programmer, rather than as a media-oriented creative, so that reflects her approach (which most definitely is not mine!) I have liked a couple of these books though...Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit" comes to mind.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Snake oil "based on several years of research on the creative process, article written and presentations developed and delivered around the world, survey feedback, coaching clients, and most importantly, talking with conference and workshop attendees and other creatives of all sorts in multiple industries" (p. 18). Compared to this, homeopathy and "vaccines give you ADHD" look like science.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a young student and writer, one thing I took to heart very early on was a passion to edit and revise my own work. And that has served me well over the years, but it also creates a slew of other challenges and unproductive, self-limiting mental habits.

Banish Your Inner Critic addresses challenges many of us face both personally and professionally when we sabotage ourselves with a wide range of self-critical thoughts. Denise Jacobs' book digs into the heart of this and delivers a range of approaches to counter the inner critic many of us know too well. It's well-written, organized clearly, and feels personal.

What may be most satisfying about this book is that Jacobs shows that these self-critical habits are more common that we might assume. Often while reading this book, I smiled in recognition, thinking, "Wow, that's not just me???" She shows research, evidence, and first-hand stories that reveal how common impostor syndrome, self-critical thoughts, and counter-productive habits can be, especially among writers, designers, and creative professionals.

I saw Denise Jacobs speak at the Nonfiction Storytelling Conference in 2019 and her presentation blew me away. I left moved and inspired; that talk — and this this book afterward — has been very beneficial to shifting professional outlook and sparking new ideas for creative projects on my own.

The only downside to the book is that by the end, it felt a little repetitive. Maybe it could have been fifty pages shorter and still delivered Jacobs key ideas, solutions, and techniques for change. But overall, this was a great read. I'm grateful to Ms. Jacobs for putting this out there and giving many of us some tools to counter our inner critic.

[Kathryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this because it was on a couple of different recommended reading lists for Enneagram Type Ones (we have loud inner critics). Unfortunately, not much of this book resonated with me, as it's aimed at creatives - people who make a living in creative spheres like art and design. Now, I'm not saying that motherhood doesn't involve some creativity. It involves a great deal, but that's not where I find I'm most critical of myself. All in all, she had some great points about handling outside criticism. Consider the following:

"Look for the positive truth in criticisms and learn from them. If we tense up, block, or react negatively to the information given, we can’t hear potentially valuable information clearly, take it in, or make use of it. Start to see criticisms as a way to grow, to make yourself better, and most importantly, learn about yourself. Transform your relationship with criticism and use it as a tool to improve yourself and your life."

I wouldn't recommend this book for any and all enneagram 1s, but I would recommend it for those struggling to unlock their creativity.

[Jamie Cutshaver · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Banish your inner critic - Silence the voice of Self-Doubt to unleash your creativity and do your best work! ⁣
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As a business owner this one spoke volumes to me! ⁣
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I’m so critical of myself and I find myself getting STUCK or fearful and not able to move forward. I loved a lot of ideas in this book! I borrowed it from the library and I’m planning to buy it and HIGHLIGHT the heck out of it! ⁣
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Book synopsis: Are you ready to boost your personal productivity—minus the fear and loathing? Are you ready to Banish Your Inner Critic and unleash the creative ideas and personal productivity within you? Help is on the way!⁣
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Blocked creative ideas. Everybody has one, an inner critic that tells you that others have more talent, you’re just faking it, and that you’ll never have those great creative ideas that seem just out of reach….

This book has helped me get “unstuck”!

Loved it!

[Jakub · Rating 4 out of 5]

more like 3 than 4.

This is a handbook with lots of good advice how to help yourself. Its not like a book that you will read, write down some ideas or action points. This is more like something that you will return to use specific method again. Most of the methods described are not things that you can do on fly.

Therefore, if you want to take most out of this book, you need to work hard and you need to come back to it quite often.

Methods described in book works. Names are different but this are all the things that you might already seen someone else doing, read about them, or even practice them with nlp. This is the part that I liked a most. Its just gathered all of good stuff from the internet and left the ones that are not really interesting.

As for rating, i gave 4 as I like methods, but 3 for lengthy book that could be cut in third or in half.

[Theo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclaimer: In a previous job, I hired Jacobs to present at a conference I ran, and her top-notch speaking contributed to me purchasing and then reading Banish Your Inner Critic.

Some of the exercises in reframing how you think I found helpful. Especially asking yourself deep down why this happening or what these fears really are. With creativity, so many of our fears are shame or other things we shouldn't be worried about.

That said, this took me forever to read. It felt like "everything and the kitchen sink" (even if it's clear that Jacobs has more thoughts and ideas), and at times, it was overwhelming, and I'd put it aside for a while.

[Mela Nie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some notes:

• 5 Steps for Learning a new Subject:
1. Research: Limit the number of sources to around 20 and then stop; infographics
2. Sketch: Chart the relationships between concepts
3. Connect with the other knowledge you already have
4. Ask experts about the things you really need to know
5. Explain: write down everything that you have learned about the subject as though you were explaining it to a child: if you can’t explain to a 6 year old, you don’t understand it yourself
• Build your skills with intentions: 10,000 hour rule for mastery
• Commit 20 hours of focused practice. Schedule properly to avoid fatigue.

[Alinar Den · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was not the easiest read, and at some point, I was pushing through it. Book seams repetitive and bloated, feels like I read it three times, not once... 😅
BUT! There are a lot of inspiring quotes and valid advices in it.
There were bunch of moments when I internally nodded, finding statements close to my soul.
If you struggle with being creative and experiencing self-criticism, go ahead and read it!

[Keith Cantrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook. At first I was being a little (i’m embarrassed to say it) critical of this book because it was more dry than what I was expecting. But then when I was able to use principles from the book to redirect some of my critical self-talk and talk kinder to myself, so I’d say it was a pretty great book to kick off the new year with!

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found it highly informative and there’s lots of practical things you can do that can help you with self-doubt and self-criticism. You should make a list of what is useful to you otherwise you might forget

[Amanda Stamm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have some really good tools and insights. The one thing that nit-picked at me were there were a lot of grammatical errors of repeating words in the same sentence (editors overlook I'm sure) that made me need to stop and rethink what she was meaning to say.

[Karen Briscoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiration and insights that transform business and lives! Achieve a higher level of success by utilizing the strategies Denise shares. Karen Briscoe, author and podcast host 5 Minute Success

[ORyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, the banishing your inner critc part was interesting. The end on creativity could have been skipped.

[Linnea · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of buzzwords but a few of the practises had some good ideas