The Courage Habit by Kate Swoboda

Author:Kate Swoboda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SEL023000 Self-help / Personal Growth / Self-esteem, PSY013000 Psychology / Emotions, SEL021000 Self-help / Motivational & Inspirational, BUS107000 Business & Economics / Personal Success
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications

Your Best Friend (with Lousy Communication Skills)

I’ve been talking about the fact that the Critic exists and you’ve been exploring how yours shows up, but we haven’t yet looked at the questions that dogged me for the longest time. Why is the Critic so caught in a fear routine? Why isn’t stopping the Critic just as simple as telling it to go away, or refusing to pay attention to it? Logically it seems like it should be that simple, but in practice it never is.

The answers to these questions start with revisiting what we know about the basal ganglia and cue-routine-reward. Remember that with the cue-routine-reward, we feel the cue of fear, and the basal ganglia prompts us to move into whichever routine gets us to the fastest “reward” of reduced tension. When Taylor’s Critic berated her, its voice was dysfunctional and stress inducing. But, for Taylor, the Critic’s voice was never as stress inducing as actually taking action toward her big dream. That big dream was new, uncertain, and therefore a bigger deal because it was emotionally riskier. Every time Taylor backed down and checked out, she got her temporary “reward” of reduced tension. To stop getting stuck in the same cycle, she needed to keep coming back to the essential work of slowing down to access the body, remember that her Pessimist fear routine might be at work, and make a conscious choice to listen in to what the Critic was saying. Consistently practicing each piece of the Courage Habit in tandem was essential.

Your fear routine might be different than Taylor’s, but it will play out the same way. For example, when I felt fear, I went into my Perfectionist fear routine, which drove me to overwork. While it was stressful when my perfectionist Critic would berate me, it was still more familiar to do what the Critic said, because that’s what I was used to doing. Our fear routines are habituated and will always feel, at the beginning, more comfortable to turn to than trying something entirely new.

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