Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead

by Tara Mohr

you simply need to learn how to live with the inner voice of self-doubt but not be held back by it, to hear the voice and not take direction from it.

The inner critic is an expression of the safety instinct in us—the part of us that wants to stay safe from potential emotional risk—from hurt, failure, criticism, disappointment, or rejection by the tribe.

The inner critic speaks up with more viciousness and volume when we are exposing ourselves to a real or perceived vulnerability—something that triggers a fear of embarrassment, rejection, failure, or pain.

Being accurate isn’t the aim of the inner critic; getting you to avoid emotional risk is.

Many women find their inner critic speaks up most loudly around their most deeply felt dreams for their lives and work, because we feel particularly vulnerable about them.

Many women find that the more strongly the inner critic shows up, the louder and meaner and more hysterical its voice, the closer they are to a breakthrough or the more likely they are to be on the edge of taking a very important step. In this sense, when you hear a major inner critic attack, you can often greet it as good news: It likely means you are playing bigger.

We can get confused if we’ve been taught that we’ll feel good or excited when we’re on the right track. In fact, often when we start doing what we most want to do in our professional lives—or when we even contemplate doing so—we actually feel a sense of discomfort.

The inner critic can motivate you to be a meticulous worker bee, but it can’t motivate you to be a game changer.

The traditional mentor-mentee hierarchical relationship is particularly tricky for women as they step into playing bigger, because that often involves their pioneering new ways of crafting their lives and careers or acting as change agents in their organizations or communities. As innovators, their primary need is not for someone who went before them who can show them the ropes and give advice based on what worked for them. Rather, they need tools and encouragement to find their own unprecedented ways forward.

That’s because American women are liberated but not empowered.”

“It’s a failure of imagination. If people haven’t been taught how to use their creativity, how to imagine, then they can’t create a dramatically different reality than what they know today, because they can’t imagine it.”

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Another thing that can help is to vary the journey. Instead of traveling on beams of light (if that part didn’t work for you), see yourself taking a long mountain hike or sailing across a lake to meet your inner mentor.

“What associations do I have with this place, activity, or object in the visualization? What did it seem to connote to me? What was the feeling or tone it had in the visualization?”

It can be tempting to try to figure out what the vision meant. “Am I really going to end up moving to the jungle? Am I actually going to become a teacher? Am I going to have five kids?” Don’t go down that road. You won’t find answers to those questions through thinking about them. Live with the imagery and feelings that came through your visualization for a while.

Keep alive your experience of your visualization in your own heart and mind, but keep it to yourself, at least for a while. Then be very thoughtful about whom you choose to tell about your experience.

Find a comfortable spot where you can sit—a comfy chair or sofa is great—or recline in bed. Have a pen and paper nearby, as you’ll do some writing by hand right after the visualization. Close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths. Relax all the little muscles around your eyes. Release your jaw. Let your cheeks feel heavy. Notice your breath as you inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale. Imagine that your body is a body of water, a calm lake. As you take a breath in and release it out, just notice the soft current in that body of water. Let each exhale carry some tension and stress away. And again with another breath out, just let any tension or stress float away. Bring your attention to your feet. Notice if you’re carrying any tightness or stress in your feet, and if so, just soften there, let it out. Let a soft heaviness come into your feet. Move your attention to your calves, your shins, and relax that area; send some breath there to loosen it up. Soften around your knees, breathing in and out and relaxing more deeply. Now move your attention upward, releasing your quads and upper legs. Imagine any tension that’s there seeping away. Then as you take your next inhalation, imagine your breath moving into your hips, into your pelvic area, and opening it up. As you exhale, let any stress and tension melt away. Let your belly fully release. Relax your torso and your chest. Let any stress seep out of it. Now move your attention to your upper back and your shoulders; let any tension...

Write about what you experienced during your visualization: any images, feelings, or words from your inner mentor. What was her presence like? What was her appearance like? What was her home like? What food and drink did she bring you? Write what you can remember about her response to the specific questions you asked in the visualization: What do I need to get from where I am to where you are? How can I sing my true song? Any other question you chose to ask her, and her answers. What is your true name? What was her parting gift to you?

What does she like to do with her free time? What are some of her daily rituals—morning or evening routines? How does she handle difficult relationships? What is her relationship with money like? What kind of art or creative pursuits does she enjoy? How does she care for herself physically? What does she eat, where does she eat, how does she eat? What does she like to do to move her body, and what is her approach to exercise? How does she take care of her health and deal with sickness or medical challenges when they arise? How does she care for herself emotionally? What does she do with sadness? Anger? Joy? What kind of physical environment does she create to live and work in?

Here’s where things get fascinating: Rabbi Lew explains that in the Hebrew Bible, there’s a second word used for fear, yirah. Yirah has three different meanings: 1. It is the feeling that overcomes us when we inhabit a larger space than we are used to. 2. It is the feeling we experience when we suddenly come into possession of considerably more energy than we had before. 3. It is what we feel in the presence of the divine.

Moving from playing small to playing big means being less and less run by pachad and becoming more and more comfortable living with yirah.

But if in those moments we can say, “Oh, this is yirah,” then we can welcome the feeling as what it is: a sacred gift. We don’t have to do anything about it. We can appreciate it, feel it. Most important, we can know it means we are connecting to the divine within and stepping into playing bigger.

For many women, pachad comes with a physical sense of contraction and tenseness, while yirah brings more of a spacious, fluid feeling into the body.

We feel pachad when the ego perceives something it feels will wound the ego’s fragile self-concept in some way. We feel yirah when the ego perceives that something has the potential to bring us into transcendence of the ego.

The desire in each of us to know we matter to others is a healthy desire. The desire to know our work is effective in doing what we intended to do is an important desire.

The part of us that wants to know that we’re appreciated and warmly received is a fundamental part of us, a part to be honored. But it needs to be only one part and, importantly, not the driving one.

We don’t know how to deal effectively and easefully with negative feedback, so we curtail our career ambitions to avoid receiving the worst of it.

This is another, perhaps more subtle way many women get hooked by praise—they self-sabotage, never talk about their accomplishments, or conform to the levels of accomplishment of those around them in order to avoid praise.

When we are petrified of criticism or are in need of constant approval, we simply can’t play big. We can’t innovate, share controversial ideas, or pursue our unique paths.

Yet there’s a shadow side to our relationship orientation as well. It shows up when we turn away from our own truths because of outsize fears of not belonging, when we silence our most radical ideas because we are afraid of rocking the boat or offending others, when we prioritize likability over speaking up. It is present whenever we let fears of criticism, rejection, loneliness, or others’ resentment stand in the way of our playing bigger, growing into our inner mentors, or sharing our ideas. Our relationship orientation is a part of what makes us particularly wounded by criticism and particularly seeking of praise and approval from others.

That means women literally get more information about other people’s thoughts and feelings than do our male counterparts. And, the research has shown, this information isn’t always helpful. In a study conducted at Harvard University, social psychologists Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady found that individuals with high emotional recognition abilities frequently read hidden negative expressions from their colleagues. This “emotional eavesdropping” turned out to be useful in some workplace situations but harmful in others, where it was found to be distracting and upsetting, and where it lowered overall productivity.

For millennia, we could ensure our survival by complying with what was approved of or desired by those with greater power. Being likable, or at least acceptable, to stronger, more powerful people was a survival strategy. This is part of why disapproval feels so unsafe to many women: For millennia, it was life threatening. And it is still life threatening to women who live under oppressive regimes or in violent homes. Knowing that impacts our psyches, consciously and unconsciously.

This is one of the reasons we can become so afraid of criticism: Often, when it comes to powerful women, it is vulgar, shaming, and inappropriately personal.

Principle 1: Feedback Doesn’t Tell You about You; It Tells You about the Person Giving the Feedback

Feedback gives us facts about the opinions and preferences of those giving the feedback. It can’t tell you about your merit or worthiness. When we understand this, we’re free; we’re free to seek, gather, and incorporate feedback.

Feedback shouldn’t be dismissed because it doesn’t tell you anything about you. Feedback is vital not because it tells us about our own value but because it tells us whether we are reaching the people we need to reach.

Feedback is not meant to give you self-esteem boosts or wounds. That’s not its place. It is meant to give you tactical information about how to reach the people you want to reach.

Feedback is emotionally neutral information that tells you what resonates for your desired audience, what engages the people you want to engage, what influences the people you want to influence.

Principle 2: Incorporate Feedback That’s Strategically Useful, and Let the Rest Go

Yet we usually aren’t so good at filtering feedback—discerning which types of feedback are critical to incorporate and which aren’t.

Much of the feedback you’ll receive is not important to integrate into your work. This is especially true for women innovators, change agents, and activists. Some of it is plain old backlash. Some reflects people’s being threatened by or not understanding cutting-edge ideas. Some reflects attachment to the old way. Some simply reflects a natural range of responses to your work. The key here is to always be asking, What feedback do I need to incorporate in order to be effective in reaching my aims? And what feedback really won’t impact my effectiveness and is okay to ignore?

The most important people to gather feedback from are the intended audiences and decision makers you need to influence or reach.

Principle 3: Women Who Play Big Get Criticized. Period.

One of the most important mental shifts a woman can make to support her playing big is to stop thinking of criticism as a signal of a problem and to start thinking of criticism as part and parcel of doing important work.

Principle 4: Criticism Hurts When It Mirrors What We Believe about Ourselves

Since the criticism that most hurts us mirrors a negative belief we hold about ourselves, often what feels like a problem with painful criticism is really a problem with what we believe about ourselves.

Once we know that the “ouches” of criticism are mostly not about the external event, but about our internal reality, we’ve got power. We can utilize painful experiences of criticism to discover the negative beliefs we hold about ourselves. We can turn our focus away from the other person, away from the incident, and look inside to see what beliefs we hold that made the criticism so wounding.

The praise we seek reflects what we most want to confirm about ourselves.

Principle 5: Ask, What’s More Important to Me Than Praise?

What is more important to me than praise or being liked in this situation?