From Self-Sabotage to Self-Trust: 8 Small Mindset Practices for Creatives

When is the last time your inner critic took a day off?  Can’t remember?  Yeah, neither can I.  It shows up right when you open a blank document, pick up a paintbrush, or sit down at the piano.  It comes in with opinions about everything.  Your tates, your output, your audacity for even trying.  Honestly, it will probably never fully go away, but we can stop letting it run the show.

These nine practices won’t silence the critic, but they can make it much quieter. 

1. Notice and Track the Trigger

Anyone else have the little voice that says, “Someone is already doing this, so what’s the point?” or “They’re probably doing it better than I would.” Just me? 

Whatever your inner critic says to you, I bet that voice gets loudest in very specific moments,  and we’re often too caught up in the spiral to notice the pattern. Maybe it hits when you’re exhausted. Maybe it shows up right before you share your work, that terrifying moment just before you hit send. Or maybe, like many of us, it arrives courtesy of a doomscroll through Instagram, where everyone else’s highlight reel makes your in-progress work feel suddenly embarrassing.

Here’s the practice: keep a tiny log. Not a journal, just a note on your phone. When the critic gets loud, jot down what was happening. Were you tired? Comparing? About to be vulnerable? Over time, patterns emerge, and patterns can be worked with. Noticing isn’t a cure, but it’s the first move toward not being ambushed.

2. Call It a Draft

This one is a small but mighty reframe: rename everything you make “a draft” until you consciously decide it’s done. Not “my painting.” Not “my novel.” A draft.

Drafts are allowed to be messy, unresolved, and weird. That’s literally their job description. When you call something a draft, you give yourself permission to keep going instead of defending every choice. The inner critic loves a finished thing. It has almost nothing to say to a draft.

3. Make the Goal “Interesting,” Not “Good”

What if “good” is a trap?

There’s a book called “Good to Great” by Jim Collins that I read forever ago.  The opening line is “Good is the enemy of great.” I’m paraphrasing, but the basic concept of the book was that we never get great because we settle for good.   I kind of think it works in reverse, too. What if we never explore because we feel the need to always be “as good as” whoever or whatever we are comparing ourselves to?

In both cases, good is vague, it’s comparative, and it hands the inner critic a gavel and a podium. Who decides what’s good? By whose standard? Good compared to what?

“Interesting,” on the other hand, is curious. It leans in. Something can be technically rough and still be interesting; in fact, the rough parts are often exactly what make it so. Try swapping your goal before you sit down to create: not “I want this to be good,” but “I want this to be interesting.” Notice how differently your hands move.

4. The Two-Minute Maker Check-In

What if, before you start a creative session, pause for two minutes and ask yourself one question: “What am I hoping to feel when I’m done?”

Not “what do I hope to produce,” what do you hope to feel? Relieved? Energized? Proud? A little more like yourself? This tiny ritual anchors your session to joy and intention rather than output and judgment. It also gives you a way to assess the session that has nothing to do with whether the work is “good.” You set out to feel energized. Did you? Then it worked. 

I wonder if this would work for a bedtime routine.  Like, I hope to feel awake and energized when I wake up.  I might give that a try tonight. 

5. The “I Made a Thing” Text

Pick one person in your life, a friend, a fellow creative, a sibling who gets it, and make them your creative cheerleader. Whenever you finish something, you text them. Not for feedback. Not for validation. Just: “I made a thing.”

It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but the ritual of marking completion — with another human — slowly rewires how your brain experiences finishing. Right now, finishing might feel anticlimactic or immediately followed by doubt. Over time, this tiny celebration teaches your nervous system that done is worth something. And done is how you get better.

I have so many of these people in my life, thanks to my Epiphany Space community.  It’s funny how much getting a simple “Woohoo” or “Yay” text back can be when I’ve completed something hard! 

6. Remember: The Gap Is the Goal

Ira Glass said it best: “All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”

That distance between what you can see and what you can currently make? That’s the gap.

The inner critic loves to frame the gap as proof you’re not cut out for this. But the gap is actually proof that your taste is working, that you’re discerning enough to know there’s more to reach for. Every creative you admire spent years in the gap. You’re not behind. You’re in it, which means you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

7. Share the Struggle, Not Just the Outcome

We are all quietly drowning in everyone else’s highlight reel. The polished final post. The triumphant “I finished a thing!” with the beautiful photo. It makes everyone else’s process look clean and inevitable,  and makes your own chaos feel like a personal failing.

Try posting the in-between. The failed experiment. The thing that didn’t work and what you learned. The half-finished mess you’re not sure about yet. When you share the struggle, you don’t just help yourself; you give everyone watching permission to be in progress, too. Community isn’t built on finished things. It’s built on honesty.

8. Make Something You’ll Never Show Anyone

Once a month, or once a week if you can swing it, make something with zero intention of sharing it. No audience. No caption. No critique. Just you and the making.

It’s remarkable how much of our creative anxiety lives in the imagined gaze of other people. When you remove the audience entirely, you remember something essential: you do this because you love it. The inner critic has no jurisdiction over something that was never meant for anyone else. This is your practice space, your playground, your pressure valve. Protect it.

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None of these practices will make the inner critic disappear — but that’s not really the goal. The goal is to keep making things anyway. To build a relationship with your creative self that’s a little more spacious, a little more forgiving, and a lot more fun.

Pick one. Try it this week. See what happens.