Not at the beginning, that would be too easy. At the beginning, there's still some excitement, some momentum, some residual caffeine. She waits. She's patient. She lets me get invested, lets me care about it a little, and then she leans over my shoulder and says, very quietly, oh, you're still doing that thing you do.

She's not loud. That's the thing people get wrong about the inner critic. Most of us picture a heckler. Someone yelling from the back of the theater. But mine isn't like that. Mine is more like a bored expert sitting just behind me, someone who has seen a lot of mediocre work, has very high standards, and is running out of patience.

She'll say things like: You overwork everything. You know that, right? You're doing the thing where you get excited about a texture and then you sand down every interesting edge because you can't tolerate uncertainty. The piece was better twelve minutes ago.

And here's the part I find hardest to explain: sometimes she's correct. Not always. But enough times that I can't simply dismiss her. Which makes the whole arrangement considerably more complicated.

I've spent a long time trying to figure out who she actually is. What she wants. Whether she's an enemy or a strange kind of ally. I'm not sure I've landed anywhere definitive.

But I've learned a few things that have genuinely helped. And that's what I want to share this week.

Here's something worth knowing about the inner critic: it isn't trying to destroy you.

That sounds like optimism. It isn't. It's neuroscience.

The part of your brain that generates self-critical thought, primarily the medial prefrontal cortex, involved in self-referential processing, was created to do something useful. It monitors your performance against social standards. It flags potential threat: what if this is bad and people notice and you lose standing in the group? In ancestral environments, losing standing in the group was genuinely dangerous. The inner critic was, in a real sense, trying to keep you alive.

That context is almost entirely useless in a studio, of course. No one is going to exile you from the tribe for an overworked encaustic panel. But the brain doesn't know that. So it keeps running the threat-detection software, because the cost of a false positive is low and the cost of a false negative, historically, was very high.

The psychologist Kristin Neff, who has done some of the most important research on self-compassion, makes a distinction that I find genuinely useful: there's a difference between the inner critic and the inner mentor. Both care about your performance. But the critic uses threat, shame, and comparison as motivators, if I make you feel bad enough, you'll try harder. The mentor uses honesty, curiosity, and encouragement,  here's what I see, here's what I think is happening, here's what might help.

The trouble is they can sound almost identical. Both are pointing at real things. Both have opinions about your work. The difference is in the tone and the goal. One is trying to protect you through fear. The other is trying to help you through understanding.

And here's the useful part: you can learn to tell them apart. Not perfectly, and not all the time. But well enough to ask the right question in the moment, is this fear talking, or is this information?

I've been experimenting with something I think of as the named critic, and it's been stranger and more useful than I expected.

The idea is simple: give your inner critic a name and a specific identity. Not a mean nickname. An actual character. Mine has a name, I think of her as Vivienne, and a backstory. She's a retired printmaker who spent forty years making technically flawless work that she secretly feels wasn't alive. She has impeccable standards and a complicated relationship with her own creative risk-taking. She’s slightly theatrical, probably keeps a journal of my failures. She's projecting some of that onto me.

This sounds a little...something. Off?  Maybe it is. But what it does is create distance. When Vivienne says you're overworking it, I can answer her as a separate person rather than drowning in the accusation as a fact. I can say: Thank you, Vivienne. What specifically are you seeing? And sometimes she actually has something useful to offer.

The distance also lets me notice something important: Vivienne has a range. When I'm tired, or hungry, or anxious about something unrelated to the studio, she gets louder and less accurate. Her criticism becomes more general, this is all wrong, this is the thing you always do, rather than specific. General criticism is almost never useful. Specific criticism sometimes is.

So the practice, for me, has become: when the critic shows up, notice how loud she is. If she's loud and general, I thank her, tell her I'll check in later, and I keep working. If she's quieter and specific, I stop and listen..

→ Read more about building a sustainable creative practice on the blog, Living by Making

Two things worth keeping company with this week:

The book I keep returning to on this topic is Kristin Neff's Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. I know, the title sounds a bit like a shelf you'd walk past. Don't. Neff is a researcher, not a motivational speaker, and her work on the difference between self-criticism and self-compassion is precise, strange, and genuinely useful for anyone who makes things. The chapter on the inner critic alone is worth the price.

And for a shorter read: a 2020 paper in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts looked at how self-criticism functions differently in artists versus non-artists. The finding that surprised me: experienced makers are better at using their self-critical voice productively than beginners, but only when they've learned to treat it as information rather than verdict. The practice matters. The voice doesn't go away; you just get better at knowing what to do with it.

Three moves for working with your inner critic, rather than against it.

1. Name it and locate it

When the critic shows up mid-work, pause for thirty seconds. Give it a name, any name, it doesn't matter. Then locate it physically. Where do you feel it in your body? Chest? Shoulders? Jaw? This sounds odd, but it works: putting language and location on the experience shifts you from being inside it to being with it. Small but significant difference.

2. Ask the one useful question

Instead of is this criticism right or wrong? which spirals, ask: Is this fear, or is this information? Fear is vague, global, and comparative: this isn't good enough, you're behind, other people do this better. Information is specific and actionable: that edge is muddy, the proportion is off, the pacing slowed down in the middle section. Only one of those is worth your attention right now.

3. Give it a job with a boundary

The critic wants to be useful. Give it a defined role: You can have the last twenty minutes of this session. Before that, I work. After that, we can look at it together. This sounds like bargaining, and it is, a little. But it works because you're not trying to silence the critic, you're postponing it. Postponing is easier than silencing, and your brain knows the difference.

This fall, I'm taking twelve makers to Italy.

Six days in Mercatello sul Metauro, a small medieval town in Le Marche, the kind of place where the walls are eight hundred years old and every surface is a study in beautiful imperfection. We'll paint plein air in the hills, visit a charcoal maker who still works the old way, and spend time in the landscape that taught the world what patience and craft actually look like together.

The theme of the week is embracing imperfection, which, after this issue, feels like it arrived at exactly the right moment.

Twelve spots. A refundable deposit to hold your place. Fall 2026.

If that's calling to you, the details are here: Italy Workshop

It's free, and it's here if you want it: Living By Making

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The inner critic is loud because it cares. That's worth remembering, not as an excuse for it, but as a reframe. It shows up because you care about the work. People who don't care about the work don't have inner critics. They have inner indifference, which is considerably worse.

The goal isn't to silence it. The goal is to stop letting it run the session.

You are not your critic. You are the maker who has to decide what to do with what it says.

Thank you for being here. See you next week.

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here on the Living by Making Blog

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• Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (2011), inner critic vs inner mentor framing, self-referential brain processing

• Medial prefrontal cortex / self-referential processing, well established in cognitive neuroscience literature (Northoff et al., 2006; Kelley et al., 2002)

• Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (2020), self-criticism in artists vs non-artists. Search 'self-criticism artists creativity' on APA PsycNet to verify exact citation before sending.