What relationship do you have with your inner critic?

Ahoy legend. I'm Travis Thomas, your host of the Team Buffalo podcast. Welcome to a another episode today. Today's episode we are talking about mindset been a lot coaching in that space recently and focused more and more with leaders, particularly given the stress on you as a leader and the employee challenges and the market challenges and just having been through a couple of years of craziness in the world, mindsets become more and more of a topic I've always coached to it's always been a core part of my coaching process. But it seems to be at the absolute forefront at the moment with everything that's going on for people. So today we're going to talk about mindset, but I'm going to pose the question of the day, as always one question a day. The question of the day is what I'm posing to you. And it's one that I recently spoke about to a group of executives, and the answers and insights that came out were quite interesting. So the question for today is, how are you being unreasonably unkind to yourself? Repeat that again? How are you being unreasonably unkind to yourself? Think about that for a second. It's a big question, right? Unreasonably unkind. What does that even mean? Well, chances are, if you're listening to this, that you're a high performing leader, or at least have aspirations to be a high achieving leader. And with that, there are a number of things that come with it that can present as unkind things, things you're doing or saying or thinking to yourself, that are truly unkind. So a good litmus test for this is, think about the things you say to yourself quietly in your head, you say things like, you know, that was shit. Or I could have done that a lot better. What an idiot. Why did I do that? Of course, we're going to be our own worst critics. But the litmus test on this is, if your own inner voice was published, or was another person speaking to you, would you still be in a relationship with it? If the answer's no, that's quite telling. It tells you Well,$hit, there's some I wouldn't. I wouldn't tolerate this from someone else. Why am I doing it to myself, in the way you speak to yourself, the way you beat yourself up over things that maybe don't matter that much, but your high standards are forcing you to do that is a problem, it affects the way you think about life, the way you perceive the world around you in invariably your trajectory towards or away from your goals. So I want you to think now, this is normal, it's perfectly fine for a high achiever to be critical of themselves. It's actually a core requirement of being a high achiever and someone who's performance and self motivated. But if you're doing it in a toxic and abusive way towards yourself, how can that possibly be useful? So instead of saying, that was stupid, saying, how could I have done that better next time? Or look, that didn't go? Well, I need to think about how I'm going to do that better. Next time, you would speak to someone else that way is a leader, but you probably don't speak to yourself that way. And even when I've spoken to leaders recently coached executives had small group sessions on this, more often than not the highest achieving ones have been really, really horrible to themselves. Now, what are some of the ways you can pull that apart? Because that's, that's what this is about, right? It's about how do we make some incremental improvement on the question of the day? And today's incremental improvement on that to move this question for there are a number of tactics, but one of the first ones you can look at is, what am I saying to myself that's useful? And how can I say it to myself in a kinder or more effective manner, that gives me the behavioural change or the outcomes I'm after from myself, but isn't damaging to my sense of worth or my personal view of myself? Additionally, when on the other side of that, are you being kind to yourself by celebrating what you've landed? So one of the things I'll ask high achievers who perpetually achieve the innovative in their personal lives, they achieve at work, they've got the best teams performing under them, their businesses just seem to grow, and they're their portfolios out of the park. As someone said, last time, you celebrated your progress and achievements. And you'd be shocked, absolutely shocked that how often the answer is, I don't know. Or not anytime recently. Yeah, well, what's your goal? Where do you want to be? What do you want life to look like? What how big is big enough? How much market share is enough? They often can answer that question. Can I say Mmm, okay, well, if you can't answer that question, that's fine. But what's a milestone? So maybe I don't know what I want my company to be or how big I want it to be. Maybe I don't know what the exact dollar figure Here is where the exact headcount I want or how I want my team to 100% feel. But what are some milestones along the way I can celebrate, you know, maybe you win your first seven figure contract, or maybe you land something that gives you some personal freedoms that you haven't had before. How are you going to celebrate that win, gotta have something locked in with every goal should be a reinforcing reward. That's part of SMART goals rather than smarter goals. Even if you don't subscribe to that framework, the idea that still holds true, aside from some of the specificity and everything else is that you must have a reward in there that you give to yourself at some point after to just reinforce that positive feeling of achievement. For some people, that is the achievement but quite often, that that only gets you so far, you need something to go with it, either. It's a profile piece at some new level of power, but you're going to celebrate that some new level of revenue, but you know, taking stock of that, yeah, I remember even once with my own team, we were going for a really, really big project, we had a number of tenders, and quotes and proposals and everything else going on all at once a lot of projects that were in flight, and we landed a really, really big contract, the biggest one we had ever landed, didn't think we had a shot and the hell, we had 40 Odd competitors who went in for and we won, we won the tender. And so the thing I did, which we were too busy, we didn't have a lot of time to sit and do a big formal celebration. So I went out, grabbed some food, grabbed a couple of drinks, put it out and said, Look, we're going to have a quick powwow over lunch, I just want to say thanks. I know this, by no measure is the celebration in its entirety, we will do that soon. But I honestly think we'd be absurd not to at least take an hour over lunch to sit together to enjoy and bask in the glory of what we've done. And that actually made a huge impact to the team. Morale was already good. We had a good performing team. But the the idea that wait, it's okay to stop just for a moment just for a few moments. To celebrate, it's important to acknowledge that was paramount. And then what happened, which was interesting, and you can expect to happen is more of that started to occur. So we people get more excited about winning bigger projects, because there was a bit of reinforcement on that. And people would share when they won big things because it became normal in the culture to celebrate those wins. So if you do that with yourself in the same way we did that as a team, you'll start to see that actually. It's okay. It's okay to have a goal and it's sure as hell okay to take stock and go you know what? I nailed that. Yeah, tell yourself Hell yeah, I'm awesome. I landed that I'm gonna celebrate, don't go around gloating. But it's perfectly normal to celebrate for yourself or with people close to you. And they'll, they'll love it. If they care about you, and they're around you. And they've been around you for a long time they want to see you succeed. So celebrate that. So that in summary today is the question is, how are you being unreasonably unkind to yourself and want you to go away and think about that you probably didn't have an immediate answer, but you might have seen some of the symptoms and thoughts around that. On the back of that, I want you to do a couple of things I want you to think about, well, what is my inner voice saying to me that's toxic or not productive? You know, the whole what would I be in a relationship with this person, if it were a person? And how can I change the language around that to ensure that I am being kinder to myself and I am saying nicer things. And then lastly, is to set milestones or markers or celebratory things that turn that initial unkindness, to at least a moment of really kind celebration to yourself. If you don't like the word kind and unkind. Doesn't matter. Pick another word, how am I being mean or, or supportive to myself doesn't matter. The point is, are you celebrating the wins? And are you being productive and caring to yourself in a way that gives you the growth and keeps the fuel going, keeps you revved up and ready to achieve the next thing? That's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for dropping in. I've been your host Travis Thomas. If you want to check out more, you can subscribe to the podcast. Also, we've got a kick@ss newsletter on teambuffalo.co. So it's Teambuffalo.co/newsletter. I look forward to seeing you in future episodes and keep being amazing and kind to yourself. chat soon. Thanks