 So in this video I'm going to ask you for something very precious to you and that is your time. I'm going to ask you to make a commitment to working on the inner critic. People often ask what do I do when I realize I have this voice inside me that's very critical, makes me doubt myself, makes me insecure all the time, often undermines me. What do I do practically to get rid of that? First things first is it requires some input. So I've already talked here about what is the inner critic? Should we just ignore the inner critic? We can't in order to deal with it and to address this problem. We need to invest in that. Now I'm not going to ask you for a huge commitment. I'm just going to ask you for a little bit of time in this. To quote to the chase, I'm going to ask you for as little as 15 minutes, maybe half an hour a day towards this. And this is a commitment and the idea behind this is it's a commitment in this one area of doing this inner work to address the inner critic will improve all other areas of your life outside of that. Emotionally above all things become a lot easier. So imagine what would your life be like if things got a little bit easier for you emotionally? That's what I'm talking about here. It just requires a little bit of time. Now if you know what you're doing in that time, it's going to be a really, really great use of your time. And so to kind of make this point really clear, to do the inner work, I'm going to ask you to do it regularly. I'm going to ask you to do it daily here in this. And there's a story, there's a fairy tale, I'm sure you're very familiar with it. It's called Cinderella. And the Cinderella story is, there's a kind of a, it's been analyzed before in the past because it's such an old fairy tale, but there's a meaning in it that I want you to take from that story. And in the story very briefly, Cinderella, she's living with her step-sisters, step-mother treating her very harshly. And in this story, she is magically transformed and she suffers for a long, long time and fairy godmother comes and grants her wishes. And the fairy godmother says, basically, I'm going to talk very generally here about story, but she says, I can give you this gift, this great thing, I'm going to make all your dreams come true, but you have to return home before midnight. Okay, now this story, it was first published in 1697 by Charles Perrault and it goes back as as early as the ninth and sixth century. Okay, some Chinese and Greek versions of this story are out there. It's a very, very old story and there's something in this story that has meant it's hung around for a long, long time. You have to return home before midnight. So you can basically, the story is saying you can have whatever you want. I will give you whatever you want, but you have to return home. What I'm saying here is it's kind of like that with inner work. You can do whatever you want, you can have whatever you want really, but you have to keep returning back to yourself. Okay, that's the one have-to item in this. Okay, most of the time our have-to items are externally focused. I'm here and I'm trying to advocate for the only thing you really have to do in your life to heal or to address the inner critic is return to yourself on a daily basis to do the inner work. So you're asked here to return home and it's a daily practice be it 15 minutes, 30 minutes and I'm thinking of it in terms of a time commitment because you will find, okay, what are you going to do in that half hour block or at 15 minute block? That may change. So there's many, many tools I'm going to talk about here. There's mindful journaling, there's meditation techniques, breathing techniques, relaxation techniques. I'm going to talk about them more here in a moment, but they may change from time to time. But one thing is for sure, if you don't have a space in your life or time set aside to do whatever the tool is you're going to use, nothing will change. The default, as I've said already in the past is set to inner critic. The inner critic is there. It's going to be active and we need to do something in order to switch that default to something more peaceful, more helpful, cooperative. So again, can you commit to a small part of your day for this? And I mean non-negotiable. To experiment with any of the tools we're going to talk about in this. And the promise is if you do that on a consistent daily basis, emotionally your life gets easier. That's the promise here. So what we're trying to do in this period of time and with these various tools I'm going to mention in a moment is you could think of it in this sense, you're going to start to shift your orientations. When the nervous system is so excessive and it chimes in with that inner critical voice, we will notice that our focus, first of all, our focus is always external. And especially if you've had some kind of past traumas, it may even be hyper-vigilant. It's always looking for danger. Now it always looks for danger anyway, hyper-vigilant just means it's to a greater extent. So in the inner work what we're going to try and do here, is we're going to try and shift our focus, our orientation of focus from external, almost exclusively external, looking for problems in the world externally. Now we don't stop doing that, we still do that, we're bringing balance to it. We're switching it from exclusively external to internal focus, okay, contemplative work, inner work, body work sometimes, okay. Not always external, there needs to be a far greater balance. The other orientation, we're going to start to shift, is from an avoidant orientation to an approach orientation. When the nervous system is aggravated, when it's constantly turned on and alert, everything is about avoidance, okay. So you may notice from your past perhaps that maybe at the end of the week, it's Friday evening and you think, oh my god, it's like a deep sigh, it's like a breath of relief comes, oh my god, thank god that didn't happen this week. And then your attention shifts to next week and it's about god, I have that horrible thing coming up, I hope that doesn't happen. Everything's about avoidance, okay. So when we're doing this inner work and you're investing in this time in this inner work, we're going to start to get in touch with something I've mentioned probably, I don't know, dozens of times here. What do I want? It's going to be more about approach motivation, approach orientation, moving towards something rather than moving away from something, okay. So those are the two orientations. Really it's just conceptually helpful to think about what I'm actually trying to accomplish in this. We need to have a goal for any inner work we're doing. So it's going to be more internal focus rather than external and it's going to be approach rather than avoid. That's kind of what we're doing with this. Now the goal in this inner work, let me give you a few examples of things we're going to be experimenting with here. There's really three goals and a few ways in which we can accomplish them. The first thing is we're going to try to calm or reset the nervous system, okay. That is fundamentally important when we're doing this inner work. Calm or reset entirely the nervous system. Ways of doing that. Two good examples are breath work coming back to your breathing. It sounds incredibly simple but there's something to it, okay, to learn how to breathe properly. Usually very much more deeply and slowly. When we're hyperventilating, it's the nervous system is taking in too many breaths. We need to slow that down, bring inner attention to the breath and something like meditation, okay. Meditation is just an attempt to observe what's going on inside yourself. That observation alone, bringing awareness to that will help calm the nervous system and also to shift out of that excessive constant stream of consciousness from that inner critic, which is preoccupied with danger all the time and problems to slow down our thinking, especially for something like anxiety. So that's number one. We're trying with any of these tools to calm or reset the nervous system. The second thing in this inner work, if you've got 15 minutes to a 30-minute block of time, is that we're going to do some more practical work, okay. So it's not that we ignore or deny that there are responsibilities externally, but what we're doing in the inner work period of time is we're contemplating. We step into a period of contemplation. Other words for this are words like philosophical inquiry, asking questions about your life. Another one is stoicism where you start to ask deeper questions about things in your life. So this is more of a practical focus. Now it's inner work, but with a practical focus. So this is not just about calm and the nervous system. That's fundamental, but you also move into contemplative work with this. And the third part in this is in this period of time, you're going to start to prioritize things a little bit differently. Look at some of your priorities with the goal of improving your self-care, how you take care of you as a human being. Okay. Again, what's happening there is the nervous system is always excessively looking for danger and it'll have us in avoidance mode or problem-solving mode all the time. So what we need to do is proactively put boundaries in place. Now I talk about this a lot in my procrastination course and how important this is, but I'm repeating the importance of it here. Self-care will be a part of this, planning self-care, giving some thought to the self-care that we're going to be using. Some people will say 15 minutes, that's a lot of time. 30 minutes, that's way too much time. Ideally, I'm looking for 30 minutes here. I'm advocating that you do this work for about 30 minutes a day, 15 minutes, whatever you can give consciously to this is enough. But you will get to the point where you want to do this. It won't take you long when you're diligently applying the inner work, sticking to it. You start to realize this is helpful. This works for me. And now you're no longer doing it because you feel like you have to do it or some therapist online said you should do it. You're doing it because you want to do it. So we usually get to this point where we're kind of like realizing, you know what, the way I've been doing it in the past or up to now hasn't really been working for me. And we get to the point where I realize if I could become emotionally more balanced or more peaceful, I think a lot more options would open up to me in my life. So what I'm saying is this investment will show up everywhere in your life. It's kind of a holistic approach. We're not focusing on any specific one problem because the problems themselves show up all across the board usually, but you will begin to realize sooner rather than later that if you can apply this, you can stick with this regularly checking in with yourself doing this inner work, everything improves, you're no longer abandoning yourself. That's the way to think about this. It's like the inner critic we have, which again is excessively trying to keep us safe all the time. It only becomes so prominent and aggravated and loud and intrusive when we ignore it. So in this inner work, we're trying to reconcile with that part of ourselves. And once we do that, that's like checking in. Inner child work is the same thing. You're checking in regularly with yourself. And over time, more self-trust develops. And there's huge benefits to this. There are enormous benefits to this. Now, we're not told to do this regularly because most of us have this aggravated nervous system. And it's always externally focused to think that your life will improve by just taking some time to yourself to contemplate or to do some body work or to relax or calm the nervous system. It seems like that's a luxury we don't have in this crazy chaotic place we live. But I'm saying put in a boundary with the external focus, okay? Bring some balance back to it and it will have massive benefits. So that's my pitch. I hope I've made an argument for this because I want you to work towards setting that time for yourself. And if you do, I promise that you will experience great benefits from doing that. I'll leave there in this video, but thanks so much for joining me here and I will see you again very soon.