I’ve felt an imposter for as long as I can remember but it took me until my 40s to feel brave enough to start to talk to others about the overbearing sense of not being good enough that I experienced when doing the things I enjoyed doing. Who was this shadowy Inner Critic who seemed to have an opinion on everything? And what would happen if I started to put him in the spotlight rather than let him lurk in the shadows?
In February 2016, I wrote a blog about an MI5 style investigation I had began to find out more about my him. I was surprised to receive many e-mails from many readers of that blog telling me they had thought they were the only ones who had that voice in their head who despised their creativity. The investigation subsequently expanded in a number of ways. I created an on-line Inner Critic gallery where people from around the world submitted their own images, models and photos of their own inner critic. With my friend Simon Cavicchia we started to run our 2 day “Playing at the Edge” workshops where we used a number of creative means to help shine a light on shame and get to know our super egos. I even made a mask and a puppet of my own Inner Critic in order to stand it its shoes and get a better understanding of how it thought, felt and moved.
And on Saturday 10th June 2017 my investigation took another bold and interesting turn as I was invited to tell the story of learning to dance with my Inner Critic at TEDx RTW – a rather intense experiment to see what would happen if I were to share a rather personal story on a global stage.
Here’s what happened…
