132 THE CREATIVE INVESTMENT TEAM
trying to destroy us. The critic is reacting to early life experiences
and messages from our parents and others. Like a software pro-
gram that gets written before we have a say in it, the critic learns
what will keep us safe. Unless you had one of the mythical “good
enough” parents, your inner critic probably has been giving you a
lot of bogus messages about playing it safe, looking good, staying
in control, and the like. Mostly these messages were useful only in
our families of origin, where we were “guests” of our parents and
had to play by their rules. As we grow up and go out into the
world, these rules don’t serve us anymore. If we are going to shine
creatively, we have to stop seeking approval and being terrified of
rejection, and trust our own intuition.
Put simply, the critic is trying to protect us. Its job is to keep
us safe, to keep us alive. It’s in this sense that the critic is the enemy
of creativity. Why? Think for a second of a child’s world. Parents
and school officials teach that conformity is good (“color within
the lines”). Thus, children in our society associate being different
with being bad or wrong. They receive disapproving looks from
parents and questions like, “Why can’t you be like the others?”
Why is being bad or wrong so scary? Well, those traits—thinks
the child—could lead to rejection by parents, teachers, and class-
mates. Rejection for a child means being alone or uncared for. And—
here’s the key step in the logical progression—being uncared for as
a child means death. Not figuratively, but literally. Small children
are terrified of abandonment because it means they will die. So,
this progression goes all the way from being different to death. I
believe that this “different = death” equation is what propels much
of the critic’s “life-saving” behavior. The critic’s job is to keep us
the same.
How does this old software program in our psyche still run our
lives today? The critic doesn’t go away just because we grow up.
Like a dog that is trained to bark at strangers, it continues that
behavior forever until it is retrained not to do it. Recently, I talked
with a successful, middle-aged money manager who would love to14-25 ware 132 1/19/01, 1:14 PM