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Week 1 – ‘Reflect ‘- the Inner Critic Program

Welcome to the first week of the program!

Woman journalling with happy memories of the day

This is an overview of what’s coming up for the week and explains how the tool for the week works. I’ll send a separate message with the daily question and survey.

Focus of Week One’s Questions

The emphasis for the week is on Reflect. The questions will help you work out the sources and history of your critic, so you understand your critic better. The critic is often trying to help you and protect you – but doing it in a horrible way. Appreciating what it’s trying to do helps calm the voice down – more than trying to ignore or destroy it. 

Tool for Week One – Positive Journaling

Through this week, you will test out the first Disarm tool – positive journaling

  • At the end of each day, write down (or draw, or record) the three best things from the day. It can be anything that left you feeling happy – a beautiful scene; a nice chat; delicious food. If you got any positive feedback or compliments – even if you don’t believe them – note them. You can add more than three things if you like, but don’t turn it into a chore. 
  • Here’s the important bit – it’s not just about writing these three things; it’s about spending the whole day looking for the nice things so you can select three later. 

When the inner critic is strong, negative thoughts dominate, and attention focuses on these. Deliberately shifting your attention to the positive helps rewire your brain to get back into the habit of focusing on the good. So, throughout the day, keep looking for nice things you can record in the evening, and try keeping your mind a bit more focused on these.

Day Zero – Optional exercise

On day zero, you’ve been asked to decide what medium you want to use when responding to the daily questions – eg, word doc, pen and paper etc. You’ll be looking back over each week’s reflections at the end, so make sure it’s fairly easy to gather together.

Day Zero doesn’t have a proper ‘question’ as such – but if you feel up for it, use your chosen medium to reflect further on this question from the Benchmark Survey. As with all the daily questions – answer some or all of the bits; go as far as you can without this turning into a huge chore:

  • What would a good result for this month be? What would an amazing result be? How would you know that you have a better inner narrative? What will help you complete the whole program?