How to quiet your inner critic isn’t about drowning it out or replacing it with something positive. It starts with understanding the two modes that keep feeding it and why most of us have been cycling between them our entire lives without realizing it.
Your brain has two default states. Craving: the reaching. The title you’re stretching toward at work, the recognition that keeps not coming, the closeness in a relationship you want and aren’t asking for. And aversion: the avoiding. The conversation you keep postponing, the colleague you route around, the pattern at home you’ve quietly filed under that’s just how we are.
When you’re in either one, you’re not actually present. The person in front of you (your colleague, your partner, your kid) is getting a version of you that’s somewhere else entirely. And they feel it, even when nobody says anything.
A monk named these two modes and spent a lifetime teaching people how to work with them. A CEO found the same truth with two questions he now does every morning before he picks up his phone and within weeks described a shift in how he leads, listens, and shows up at home.
In Episode 99 of Magnetic Communication, the second episode in the Going Silent series, Sandy Gerber breaks down what craving and aversion are doing to your conversations at work and at home. You’ll hear what Thich Nhat Hanh calls Radio NST (Non-Stop Thinking) and why research shows we spend 30 to 50 percent of our waking hours somewhere other than where we actually are. Not planning or solving. Just replaying, rehearsing, and looping.
You’ll hear how to quiet your inner critic and what the first three days of a Vipassana retreat involve. Why the practice starts not with insight but with the nostrils, and what happens when you finally sit still long enough to see what’s been running you all along.
And you’ll walk away with a 60-second practice you can use today. Two questions. Before your feet hit the floor and before you close your eyes at night. Small enough to start. Powerful enough to shift everything.
This is the inner work that changes every conversation after it with the people you lead, love, and with yourself.
