Why Silencing Your Inner Critic Makes It Louder | Dr. Cindy McGovern • 452
Mind Love™ • Consciousness, Spirituality, and Science for Awakening
Melissa Monte | Conscious Coach
4.9 • 906 Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why does trying to silence your inner critic make everything worse?
Dr. Cindy McGovern breaks down why the voices in your head don't respond to suppression — and why the ones you inherited from other people's fear and outdated rule systems are still running your life. This conversation goes deep into the gap between knowing something intellectually and actually living differently.
What you'll learn:
- Why silencing your inner critic makes it louder
- The difference between a victim and a volunteer
- How to take inventory of which voices actually deserve the mic
Dr. Cindy McGovern is an organizational psychologist and author who spent decades studying why smart, self-aware women stay stuck. Her work focuses on the internal permission gap — why desire alone isn't enough to change behavior.
Find Dr. Cindy's book "The Permission Mission" and all links at: mindlove.com/452
Ready to figure out which voices in your head are actually yours? Join the free Mind Love Collective for monthly themed calls and weekly challenge accountability. mindlove.com/join
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Why does it usually backfire when we try to silence our inner critics? |
| 0:05.1 | You know, I think a lot of it is because they are so loud and conditioned in our minds |
| 0:11.0 | that we are used to having them as a co-pilot. |
| 0:15.4 | And there's a bit of comfort in that that we try to silence them, but we sort of also want them along for the ride. |
| 0:25.1 | I'm Melissa Monty, and you're listening to Mind Love. |
| 0:32.5 | So it's like, be quiet. Oh, wait, just kidding. I'm used to having you next to me. So I want you to sort of |
| 0:40.3 | kind of be in my ear. And we think we want them quiet, but we also want their advice. And we |
| 0:48.3 | want the opportunity to ignore it. Right. You know, I've been sharing with my audience that within the last like four months or so, |
| 0:58.1 | I've actually been going into parts work like IFS internal family systems, which I skipped over for a long |
| 1:04.4 | time. And I think mostly because I was making assumptions based on the name internal family |
| 1:10.1 | systems. And I was like, I don't feel like I need that. But when I actually understood what it was, I was making assumptions based on the name internal family systems. And I was like, I don't feel like I need that. |
| 1:12.5 | But when I actually understood what it was, I was like, wow, this is exactly what I need right now. |
| 1:18.6 | And I noticed, though, through doing that work that when I try to silence something, it's a different part of me that's trying to keep me safe by not |
| 1:30.7 | hearing that. But that other part of me that wants to be heard will just get louder and louder |
| 1:35.1 | and more destructive. Like I'll actually start doing behaviors I don't want to do rather than just |
| 1:40.4 | hearing the voice in my head. Yeah. It's interesting. I actually talk about that in the book |
| 1:44.9 | and Schwartz's work around that. And it is funny because you sort of imbalance your voices in |
| 1:51.7 | those backup singers in your head if you're not careful. And the whole point is to get them singing |
| 1:55.4 | in harmony. But as you try to do that and you're doing the parts work, it is very delicate to sort of take inventory of all of them. |
| 2:05.4 | And that's part of the initial work that we have to do is truly take that inventory of all of those different parts of our backup singers in the chorus and decide, okay, where are they, who are they? |
| 2:16.7 | And I encourage the reader to even name those voices, |
| 2:20.0 | figure out where they came from. Whose voice are you actually paying attention to? Why are you |
... |
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