You don’t have to stop criticizing yourself to move forward.

To begin to get free of the self-critical voice, ask yourself if it is helping or hindering you in building the kind of life that you want for yourself. Is it helping you realize your dreams? Does its input give you strength to persevere? Does it give you productive new ideas that really make things better?

Now try talking to yourself in a voice that is neither positive nor negative, but curious and observant: Hired killers are telling me I screwed up again, and they want to know how that could have possibly happened. Okay. What else is new? How bad was this so-called screw-up, on a scale of 1 to 10? Do I need to make amends to someone? How many produ