Awareness versus the Inner Critic

The Thing That Happens Before You Even Notice It's Happening

I want to start with something small, because I think the small moments are where all the real work actually lives.

An Example: My partner is looking disinterested while I am trying to share how I am feeling.

My chest tightens before my brain has even formed a thought.

My lungs start panting, my jaw tenses, my arms cross my body.

My brain is creating the story that he does not care how I am feeling.

My heart begins to shut down and put up barriers, lock down in process.

I am safe now, he can't hurt me, I am no longer listening.

But when I come from a state of being aware, of observing the communication, I can probably see that he needs a minute to digest what I have said because emotional language is not his native tongue.

That gap — the space between something happening and me noticing I've already reacted to it — is where almost everyone I work with is living.

Not because they're broken.

Not because they're "too sensitive" or "too much."

But because most of us were never taught to actually notice ourselves.

We were taught to manage the outside world.

Read the room.

Perform the right version.

Fix it before anyone sees the mess.

Nobody sat us down and said: the first move isn't managing what's happening out there. It's noticing what's happening in here.

That noticing has a name. It's awareness. And it is, without question, the single most important skill I teach — more important than any technique, any breathwork, any ritual. Because none of the rest of it works without it.

The Inner Critic Runs the Show When You're Not Watching

Here's what I've come to understand after years of sitting with people in their most unguarded moments: almost everyone has a voice running quietly underneath their day.

It tells them they're too much, or not enough.

That they need to shrink here, perform there, stay quiet in this room and loud in that one.

Most people don't even register it as a voice — it just feels like the truth.

Like common sense.

Like "just being realistic."

That's the inner critic.

And it is remarkably good at staying invisible, because the moment you can actually see it — really see it, as a voice, separate from you — it starts to lose its grip. Not because you've fought it or silenced it. Because you've finally turned the light on in the room it's been operating in the dark.

This is why awareness comes before everything else in my work, and in the book. You cannot soften a pattern you don't know is running. You cannot come home to yourself while a critic is quietly managing you from the shadows, deciding what's safe to say, what's safe to want, what's safe to feel. Awareness is the doorway. Everything else — the healing, the expansion, the magnetism — waits on the other side of it.

There's a pattern almost everyone I sit with eventually uncovers. The critic rarely announces itself as cruel. It's far more likely to sound reasonable — better to play it safe, better not to ask, better to keep the peace — which is exactly why it goes unchallenged for so long. It doesn't feel like a voice working against you. It feels like good judgement.

Until you learn to actually see it.

Why Triggers Are Rarely About What's Actually Happening

Here's the part that tends to land hardest for people, so I'll say it plainly: when you feel triggered, it is almost never really about what just happened.

Someone's tone shifts and your whole body goes on alert. A silence stretches a beat too long and you're suddenly bracing. The intensity of that reaction — the speed of it, the size of it — very rarely matches what actually occurred. A look isn't usually dangerous. A pause isn't usually a verdict. So why does it feel like one?

Because your nervous system isn't only responding to the present moment. It's responding to every other moment that ever felt like this one. The tight chest, the racing thoughts, the urge to disappear or defend — that's not new information about right now. That's old information, filed away in the body a long time ago, getting brushed up against and firing all over again.

This is one of the most freeing things I know how to teach, because once you can actually see that link — oh, this isn't about them, this is an echo — the trigger stops being something to fear. It stops being proof that you're too sensitive or too reactive. It becomes information.

A doorway back to something that's been waiting, quietly, for you to finally notice it and meet it with something other than panic.

An Exercise to Bring This Into Your Body

If you want to actually feel this rather than just understand it conceptually, try this the next time you notice a reaction rising in you — even a small one.

Pause, and instead of moving straight into the story your mind is building, ask your body three questions:

Where do I feel this?

What does it remind me of?

How old does this feel? 

Don't reach for an answer with your thinking mind — let it surface. Often what comes isn't a memory exactly, but a sensation, an age, a flash of a feeling you recognise from somewhere much earlier than today.

That's the moment awareness does its work. Not by fixing the trigger, but by widening the gap between the spark and the reaction — just enough for you to respond instead of being run. This isn't about becoming calm on command, or pretending the old feeling isn't real. It's about giving yourself permission to actually meet it, rather than being swept along by it the way you always have been.

Do this consistently, and something remarkable starts to happen: you become less reactive, less guarded, less busy managing yourself in every room you walk into.

The energy that used to go into bracing, scanning, and self-protecting is suddenly available for something else — for actually being where you are, with whoever you're with.

And what's left, underneath all that management, is the very thing people describe as magnetic. Not performance.

Presence.

Why This Is in the First Chapter of MAGNETISM, Not the Last

When I sat down to write MAGNETISM: Becoming the Energy That Attracts the Life You Desire, I knew Awareness had to come first — before the chapters on nervous system regulation, before the relational work, before anything about attraction or energy at all.

Because none of it holds without this foundation. You can't embody magnetism you can't even perceive yourself losing. You can't soften a critic you've never actually met. You can't tell the difference between an old wound and a present-moment truth if you've never paused long enough to ask.

The Awareness chapter walks you through exactly what I've touched on here — meeting the inner critic without shame, learning to read your own triggers as information rather than emergencies, and building the kind of self-noticing that makes every other layer of this work possible. It's the ground everything else in the book is built on.

If any of this landed — if you recognised that gap, that voice, that echo of something older — I'd love for you to sit with the Awareness chapter properly. It's where this all begins.

You can find MAGNETISM: Becoming the Energy That Attracts the Life You Desire on AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com.au/MAGNETISM-Becoming-Energy-Attracts-Desire-ebook/dp/B0H3VRXP1X

Come and explore this work more deeply inside Embodied Magnetism on Skool. It is FREE! https://www.skool.com/embodied-magnetism-6563