Inner Critic or Coach: Who's Winning?
Shift Self-Talk from Sabotage to Success
Take stock of how you talk to yourself.
Our subconscious mind acts as an objective data recorder. It stores every message we feed it.
When we fill our internal dialogue with negativity, unease, and limiting beliefs, our subconscious tends to accept these as facts.
The Grip of the Inner Critic
When I was in the thick of musician’s dystonia symptoms, my inner critic ran the show. I constantly heard thoughts like:
• "Why are you wasting your time? You’ll never get better."
• "You’ll never return to performing again."
• "This recovery approach doesn’t work!"
Some mornings, I felt trepidation about recovery training and interacting with my trumpet before I had even gotten out of bed, and was greeted by a barrage of sabotaging thoughts.
These fed the anxiety and panic I was experiencing—a dysfunctional pattern that I had unknowingly bought into and was perpetuating.
When you are rewiring your brain and body, you need all hands on deck and united in your success.
What Are You Telling Yourself?
Think about your own internal conversations.
- How do you react after a subpar performance?
- What thoughts pop up when you approach a difficult measure of music that you dread because you don’t believe it will ever
feel solid? - What do you say to yourself before and after a musician’s dystonia training session?
- Do you compare yourself to colleagues or worry about what others may think of you, including how you look when playing your instrument?
Awareness is the first step to making change, and recognizing my own deep-seated pattern of negative, self-critical chatter marked a major turning point in my recovery journey.
Breaking the Pattern
To create an optimum learning environment and start calming my nervous system down, I had to intentionally forge a new path. I started monitoring my thoughts throughout the day and used two specific strategies to program a new mindset:
A three-to-one ratio: For every single negative thought I caught—or word I spoke out loud—I deliberately stated three positive things that I could buy into. These were grounding, intentional truths like:
• "I am making progress."
• "I love the physical feel of the mouthpiece."
• "I love sharing music with others."
Visualization: When a destructive thought surfaced, I imagined blowing it up in my mind and watching it drift down in harmless pieces, like a popped balloon. Then, I’d add my three positive thoughts.
Action Is Key
You may find other strategies that work best for you. The important thing is to observe what’s happening and implement a plan to change negative dialogue.
This has to be approached as technical work that you do anytime, anywhere.
The brain would rather stay on the current, aberrant path, which includes the negative thinking that is so often intertwined with other focal dystonia elements.
Building the New Normal
Once I got the hang of monitoring and revising the critical chatter, I felt a distinct shift.
What started as a forced, conscious effort transformed into a natural habit of positive, nurturing self-talk.
It was simply a matter of becoming aware of what I was doing and taking action to develop a new dialogue with myself— one that set the stage for learning and recovery.
If you are currently navigating this journey, take a moment to simply observe your thoughts. Musician's dystonia recovery starts with awareness, and you have the power to change your inner talk to become your best coach.
