Finding Your Inner Mentor (Tara Mohr)

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

"I was feeling this self censoring and constant push pull in sharing my voice and just feeling quite afraid of going for things that I wanted and so I got really interested in that gap and started to work with people with those clients around the inner critic.

And my first guess was like, oh, we're going to dig into their childhoods and find who was the critical source in their lives that created this voice. And very quickly, I found out that was not going to be my answer because I would hear the exact same adult inner critic in these women. And some were like, my parents were so supportive. And some were like, my parents ignored me, my parents cheered me on, my parents were so critical. And yet this sort of adult, more professionally oriented, more adult selfhood oriented inner critics sounded the same despite this wide range of early experiences. So then I had to look a little more culturally and also biologically.

And what became clear was that that inner critic voice really spoke up when something took us out of our comfort zone, or when we were contemplating something out of our comfort zone. And to place that in a context of gender, for women, what is unsafe and what we very deeply learn is unsafe is visibility, power, too much success, shining bright, standing out from the crowd in some way, all of that."

So Says Tara Mohr, a coach, educator and the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, which is celebrating its 10th birthday this fall. I first met Tara a decade ago and was so taken with her and her insights that we did four stories together—stories that were deeply resonant with women everywhere. These stories were about understanding—and releasing—your inner critic, locating your inner mentor, examining the ways in which you keep yourself in the shadows and why, and the most potent one of them all: why women are so quick to criticize other women. We cover this same ground 10 years on—and it’s just as powerful as it was then. I loved reconnecting with Tara and can’t wait to do more with her over the coming decades, specifically revisioning what it might look like if more women led—but not in a model defined by men, in a way that might be uniquely their own. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM TARA MOHR:

The Inner Mentor Guided Meditation

Tara Mohr’s Website

Tara’s Online Courses

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

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