Breaking the “Tomorrow I’ll do it all!” cycle

You had such big plans for today. You were going to get up early, hit the gym, finish that big work project that’s been hanging over your head once and for all, and then knock out all your chores. You might even have time to think of a cure for cancer before getting to bed right on time.

But somehow, it didn’t go that way.

Your inner critic has a lot to say about your day. How could you fall so short? You’ll have to really hustle tomorrow to make up for it. Yes, tomorrow, you’re going to get up early, hit the gym, finish that big work project…wait. I see where this is going.

Getting out of the cycle of disappointing yourself

If you’re going to get out of the loop of setting high expectations, not meeting them, and then raising them even higher, you need to be honest with yourself about what is and isn’t working in your day.

But being honest with yourself feels awful, because you’re disappointed in yourself. It’s so much more comfortable to keep making plans for a perfect tomorrow, even though it keeps the cycle of disappointment going.

But there’s another way to review your day, one that isn’t all about beating yourself up for doing a bad job. The key is in choosing your point of view.

The inner critic’s point of view

When you beat yourself up for falling short, you’re taking the point of view of your inner critic. The inner critic isn’t a bad part of you — it serves a purpose. That purpose is to think about how other people will judge you and help you act in a way that will avoid that judgement. So taking your inner critic’s point of view is like trying to see yourself from the outside.

From the outside, you were “supposed” to do all these things, and you failed. From the outside, it’s hard to tell why you failed, so your inner critic will assume there is no good excuse, and it’s a reflection of something about who you are.

The inner critic misses mistakes in planning

Although this outside perspective serves a purpose, it’s inherently limited. From the inside, from your own perspective, you know that, say, the reason you didn’t get up early and hit the gym is that when you woke up, you felt exhausted, and you remembered that if you don’t get enough sleep, you don’t do a good workout, and you’re worse at your job — it’s actually not worth it. So you made the responsible decision to choose sleep over the gym.

The outside perspective can’t take into account what your body felt like when you first woke up, so it skips over this whole lesson. But it’s an important lesson: “I shouldn’t plan a schedule that gets me less than 8 hours of sleep.” (Or however many hours your body needs.)

In this case, the mistake was in your planning, not in your execution. Your inner critic would miss that. That means that by taking your own perspective, you’re not just letting yourself off the hook — you’re bringing in more information so you can do a more accurate, more helpful review of your day.

The inner critic misses the reasons for mistakes in execution

Okay, so you got enough sleep to prepare yourself for a good workday. Then whose fault is it that you didn’t finally finish that big project?

I’m not going to tell you that every unchecked box on your To Do list is due to bad planning. Maybe when it came to the work project, your schedule wasn’t to blame. It was the perfect time of day to do this kind of work, you were well-rested, and all you needed to do was start. But you just couldn’t bring yourself to.

From the outside perspective, you failed for no good reason. Your inner critic might conclude that you didn’t try hard enough, or you’re lazy, or you don’t care about your job enough.

But from the inside perspective, you can see that something was really intimidating about getting started. You’ve done all the easy parts of the project by now. All that’s left to do is the one really sticky part. It’s confusing, it’s intimidating, and thinking about it makes you feel like you don’t really know what you’re doing. You hate feeling that way. It brings up all your fears about being a fraud.

From this perspective, it’s not so surprising that you’d avoid it, is it? Why do something that makes you feel bad about yourself when you could do…literally anything else?

This inside perspective uncovers the true reason you didn’t get the project done — an impulse to avoid triggering your imposter syndrome — rather than blaming it on some vague, unsolvable notion like laziness. Once you know what the problem is, you can start figuring out how to solve it. (If you haven’t taken my quiz, What’s Your Procrastination Type?, that’s what it’s for!)

The inner critic motivates you to avoid the review

Let’s assume that your last big goal for the day, doing your chores, is not as mysterious as your other two goals. Your inner critic whispered in your ear that you should do your chores before you got all comfy watching Netflix, and you just didn’t listen. You settled into the couch and caught up on the latest binge-worthy drama, and between all the cliffhangers and getting sleepy, you could never bring yourself to get up and wash dishes. It was totally predictable, and the obvious solution is to take your inner critic’s warning more seriously next time.

So surely, this is a case where taking your inner critic’s perspective is fair, right? Well, not really. Because if you struggle with procrastination, it’s likely that your inner critic is a bit mean. Inner critics don’t have to be mean — with inner work, they can learn to give “just the facts” instead of insulting you along the way, and they can even become encouraging. But when you’re not getting stuff done, they tend to resort to vitriol to motivate you.

This, of course, backfires. Knowing that as soon as you try to learn from your mistakes, you’re going to be plunged into thoughts about how terrible you are, makes you want to avoid learning from your mistakes altogether.

And you know what you feel like doing when faced with the prospect of being attacked by your inner critic?

Watching Netflix.

So even when your inner critic has the right answer, it can be hard to hear it when the only way you know how to review your day is to give your inner critic the mic.

How to review your day from your own point of view

So the key is to review your day from your perspective. But how do you even do that?

Find your own stance

Your inner critic is typically up in your head. To take your own perspective, draw your attention into the rest of your body. Notice the grounded feeling of having your feet on the floor or your body in your chair. Try to feel both your inner critic and this grounded feeling at the same time, proving to yourself that there’s more to you than the critic.

Hear out “both sides”

Review your day, allowing your inner critic to give its opinion on what went wrong, but not stopping there. For each plan that didn’t work out, go deeper into the review: why didn’t it work out? How were you feeling? What were you thinking? What were the trade-offs?

Draw conclusions

Write down what you can learn from each broken plan. Was the plan faulty? Did you make a poor decision? Do you need to eat, sleep, or hydrate more in order for it to work out? Did you run into internal resistance that would have thrown off even the best of plans?

Try it out

I’ve made a journaling template you can use to try this out. When your inner critic is loud, you can just follow these prompts to take you through the process of a deep, honest, and yet less painful review of your day.

Giving yourself this clear, accurate feedback can help you get out of the vicious cycle of setting unrealistic expectations for yourself, disappointing yourself, and then doubling down on those expectations.