The Drawing That Stopped Me Cold
A number of years ago, I developed a relationship with anxiety that I hadn’t signed up for.
Not the polite kind that taps you on the shoulder before a big moment and then goes home like a decent guest. The kind that moves in, eats your groceries, and rearranges your furniture so you're constantly bumping into things in the dark.
Somewhere along the way, I realized I was living slightly hunched over inside my own life, like the ceiling had been lowered and I hadn't gotten the memo.
I didn’t know what to do with any of it. So I did what I’ve learned to do when I run out of answers: I called someone I trust to see more clearly than I can. Teresa and I have a friend and mentor we’ve turned to more times than I can count. Her insight doesn’t announce itself. It just lands, right where it’s needed. When I told her what was going on inside me, she didn’t offer a podcast, book list, or a five-step plan.
Instead, she said, "Journal your thoughts. But not in words. In pictures."
So I bought a beautiful leather journal—because if you’re going to confront your inner world, you may as well bring a little aesthetic intention to it—along with a set of colourful felt pens, and began translating my thoughts into stick figures, thought bubbles, and emotional cartoons.
At first, it was just doodles. And then one image stopped me. It was rough. Barely even a drawing. Just a few jagged lines.
A figure crawling on the ground. Arms buckling. Head down like it had given up negotiating. Standing over it was another figure, upright and rigid, holding a whip mid-crack.
I stared at it for a long time.
Because the crawling figure was me.
And, inconveniently, so was the one with the whip.
When I showed it to my friend, I tried to explain it in a way that sounded slightly more respectable than it actually was. "This," I said, pointing, "is how I get things done."
And there it was.
The Voice Behind The Drive
For most of my adult life, producing music, building things, and through every attempt to create something that mattered, I had been producing from the same place: you will perform, or you will suffer the consequences. Not a pep talk. Not a hand on the shoulder. A whip. Applied internally, consistently, and with considerable skill.
Somewhere along the way, I had decided that the voice in my head, the one with the whip, was not only useful but necessary. I had embraced the belief that the only way I could produce something of value was by pushing myself hard enough to hurt. It was the engine. The edge. The thing that made everything work.
And to be fair, it had.
It got results. It kept me sharp. It made sure I didn't get too comfortable, too proud, or too visible without a safety net of self-criticism already in place.
It also slowly chipped away at my peace and my sense of identity.
The punchline, of course, is that I was leading an organization devoted to helping people loosen the grip of their inner critic while mine was backstage, running the entire production with a whip.
If nothing else, the drawing had excellent comedic timing.
The Achiever’s Trap
Here's what I've come to call the paradox of the driven life.
Many of us who have produced valuable work in the world carry a hidden conviction: the critic deserves the credit. Without the whip, without the voice that says succeed or suffer, we would fall apart. We would coast. We would drift into comfortable mediocrity.
So we keep it around. We fund it. We give it respectable names—discipline, drive, high standards—but we never call it what it is: the whip in our own hand.
And the critic obliges. It helps us produce great work: music, programs, creative projects, career milestones. It helps us hold our faults and weaknesses in check before anyone else can spot them. It is, by any measurable outcome, useful.
Until it isn’t.
Psychologist Leon Seltzer describes it this way: under a strong inner critic, achievement doesn’t feel like joy, it feels like relief. You didn’t win; you avoided falling short. And that relief lasts only until the next expectation shows up. The pressure is constant. You’re not running toward something—you’re running from not being enough.
The whip keeps you moving. But it doesn't tell you where to go. And it never tells you that you've gone far enough.
What The Research Actually Tells Us
The instinct, when we finally recognize the taskmaster, is to fight it. Silence it. Decide: no more.
Turns out, that doesn't work. Ethan Kross, Ph.D., directs the Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan and has spent years researching what does. His solution is surprisingly simple: self-distancing.
When the critic is loudest, we are fully inside it, looking at our situation from inside the storm. The questions we ask from there don't help. Why am I always behind? Why can't I get this right? What's wrong with me? Those aren't really questions. They're accusations with question marks at the end.
Self-distancing pulls you out of the storm and up to the balcony. And it starts with one small shift: you stop using the word I and start using your own name.
Instead of “I'm behind again, I'm always behind”, try: “Jonathan, pause. What do you actually know right now?” Then keep going: “What have you already done? What have you learned? What's one next step you can take?”
That shift, from I to your own name, isn’t just grammatical. It changes your perspective.
You're no longer the person drowning in the problem. You become the steady voice sitting across from that person, and that voice asks better questions.
In Kross's research, people who practiced this, processed difficult experiences with more clarity, less emotional flooding, and more effective problem-solving. Not because the critic disappeared, but because they were no longer merged with it.
Social psychologist Timothy Wilson adds another tool: what he calls story editing. The inner critic is not just a voice. It's a narrator, constantly constructing the meaning of your experiences, and those meanings harden into the stories you live by. The goal isn't to deny a difficult experience, but to deliberately revise its meaning.
My stick figure drawing didn’t have to be a story about what was broken in me. It became a story about what I could finally see and change. The reframe didn’t minimize what I’d been doing to myself. It changed how I understood it—and from there, what I did next began to change.
The taskmaster, it turns out, was never the source of the good work. It was a tax on it.
Three Moves That Actually Help
1. Name it. Don't merge with it.
When the taskmaster fires up, “you're behind, you're not enough, you can't stop now”, resist the urge to either obey it or argue with it. Just name it. That's the Taskmaster. That's the voice that believes I only have value when I'm producing.
Naming creates distance. And distance is where choice lives. From that distance, try addressing yourself by name: Jonathan, what do you actually know to be true right now? It sounds almost absurdly small. The research says it works.
2. Edit the story before it hardens.
After a moment of failure, frustration, or the particular exhaustion of realizing you've been crawling again, don't let the critic write the final draft. Ask yourself: What is the more honest version of this story? What meaning do I want to carry forward?
The critic's version: “You only produce value when you push yourself hard enough to hurt.”
The edited version: “You produce your best work from love, guided by clarity—not from fear or force.”
That's not spin. It’s choosing which story gets to be true going forward.
3. Let outward compassion open the door inward.
One of the more counterintuitive findings in Kross's broader research: one of the most effective ways to soften the inner critic is to shift our attention outward and genuinely focus on someone else's needs and struggles. When we do, we become less defended, less self-threatened, and oddly more able to receive the grace we'd been refusing ourselves.
For me, this often looks like remembering why I do what I do. Not to produce. Not to prove. But because love, offered well and freely, actually changes people. That reminder settles the taskmaster faster than almost anything else. It gives the work a different engine entirely.
The Love Connection
There is a version of success built on fear. Many of us have built remarkable things on that foundation. The results are real. So is the toll, and the toll is never just ours to pay.
Kristin Neff, Ph.D., who has spent decades studying self-compassion, found that treating yourself with compassion doesn't make you soft—it makes you stronger. It builds resilience, increases motivation, and sharpens your ability to see yourself clearly. Self-compassion isn't letting yourself off the hook. It's giving yourself what you need to keep going.
And the science confirms what ancient wisdom has been saying all along. “Love others as you love yourself.” Because the quality of care you extend inward determines what you have to offer outward. The taskmaster doesn't clock out at the front door. The people closest to you—partners, friends, colleagues, children—they don't experience your productivity. They experience your presence. And presence is shaped from the inside out.
This is not a small thing. What you carry inside becomes the emotional atmosphere others live in. They absorb it. They pass it on. It ripples further than you’ll ever fully see.
I still have the stick figure—etched into an aesthetically pleasing leather journal. Not as a reminder of what was broken, but of what finally became visible.
You can’t change what you won’t acknowledge. And you can't offer others what you refuse to give yourself. Which means this was never just personal.
The world doesn't need more of your output.
It needs more of you.
Until next week, keep leaning into love.
Jonathan Penner | Co-Founder & Executive Director of LifeApp
Resources To Dig Deeper
Book
Chatter
In Chatter, psychologist Ethan Kross explores the constant inner dialogue that shapes how we think, feel, and perform—revealing how our inner voice can either steady us or quietly unravel us. Drawing on cutting-edge research and real-world stories, he shows how negative self-talk—what he calls “chatter”—can fuel anxiety, undermine confidence, and strain our relationships. But more importantly, Kross offers practical, research-backed tools to shift that voice from critic to coach, helping us gain clarity, regulate emotion, and navigate challenges with greater resilience and effectiveness.
-Ethan Kross
Video
The Space Between Self-Esteem and Self-Compassion
This TEDx Talk offers a powerful reframe of how we relate to ourselves in moments of failure, stress, and self-doubt. Drawing from both personal struggle and years of research, it reveals why the instinct to judge and push ourselves harder often backfires—and how self-compassion, far from making us weak, becomes a source of resilience, clarity, and strength. If you’ve ever felt caught in your own inner criticism, this will challenge what you’ve been taught about motivation and show you a better way forward—one that is both kinder and far more effective.
-Kristin Neff at TEDx CentennialParkWomen (19:00)
Music
You Say
This song captures something deeply human—the quiet battle between the harsh, familiar voices in our own minds and a truer, steadier voice that speaks worth, strength, and belonging. While the lyrics are framed in a spiritual language, their power reaches far beyond any one belief system. At its core, it invites us to consider a different authority than our inner critic: a voice—whether you understand it as God, the universe, the truth of your own being, or even the loving perspective of someone who truly sees you—that speaks with clarity and care about who you are. In a world where so many of us are shaped by self-doubt, this song becomes an invitation to ask a simple but profound question: What if the most important voice you listened to was the one that believed in you?
-Lauren Daigle (4:30)