Meet the Committee
Somewhere in my head there is a committee.
They didn’t ask to be there.
I didn’t hire them.
But they’ve been running meetings for decades and they have a lot of opinions about how I’m spending my time.
The one I know best I call the Task Master.
Picture a mid-century office administrator — sharp, efficient, slightly uptight, straight out of Mad Men.
She is not unkind.
She is genuinely trying to help.
But when I’m under stress she transforms into a pushy aunt with a clipboard, rattling off everything I haven’t done yet and implying, with absolute conviction, that if I don’t get on with it right now something terrible and vaguely unspecified is going to happen.
Then there’s the Drill Sergeant.
Male, mid-thirties, motivates entirely through intimidation.
Push. Push. Push.
He showed up early in my life and he was loud for a long time.
I’ve gotten better at managing him over the years — understanding that his urgency comes from somewhere real, even if his methods are exhausting.
And then there’s my personal favorite:
The Cousin.
She doesn’t say much.
She just shows up when the Task Master gets too intense and quietly suggests that what I actually need right now is a snack.
And then maybe to reorganize the pantry.
And then — have I ever looked into the history of Salito tiles?
Because that’s fascinating and probably important.
This is not a quirk.
This is not laziness dressed up in self-awareness language.
This is Internal Family Systems — a framework that recognizes these inner voices not as character flaws but as parts of us, each one developed at some point to serve a purpose, each one trying, in its own way, to keep us safe.
The problem isn’t that the committee exists.
The problem is when we let it run the meeting without questioning whether its agenda still applies.
Tuesday Afternoons
I meet with my web person every Wednesday.
Which means Tuesday afternoons have a particular energy in my world.
If I don’t have content ready — a blog post, social posts, an exercise for my mastermind group — the Task Master shows up right on schedule.
And she is not subtle.
You need to do this.
You shouldn’t be thinking about dinner until this is done.
Do this now.
You will not build what you’re trying to build if you keep letting these things slide.
She’s not wrong, exactly.
The content matters.
The consistency matters.
Showing up for the work of building a coaching practice is real and it requires discipline.
But here’s what happens next.
The Task Master turns up the volume and the Cousin — bless her — steps in with a very reasonable observation that I haven’t eaten since noon.
And then I’m in the kitchen.
And then I’m reorganizing the pantry because it’s been bothering me for weeks.
And then it’s 7 p.m. and the blog post still isn’t written and now the Task Master is truly unhinged.
The very pressure designed to make me productive created the conditions for spectacular avoidance.
This is what being owned by your inner voice actually looks like in practice.
Not a dramatic spiral.
Just a Tuesday afternoon that somehow ends with a very organized pantry and a blank page.
Where These Voices Come From
Here’s what I’ve come to understand, both through my own work and through the framework of Internal Family Systems:
These voices didn’t appear out of nowhere.
They evolved — often in childhood — as interpretations of the world and attempts to navigate it safely.
The Task Master who won’t let me rest until the work is done probably learned somewhere early that rest wasn’t safe, that productivity was protection, that being enough meant doing enough.
The Drill Sergeant who motivates through intimidation?
He sounds a lot like environments that rewarded toughness and penalized softness.
They meant well.
They still mean well.
The track they’re playing just hasn’t been updated in a very long time.
This is the distinction that matters most in coaching work:
The difference between a voice that is genuinely trying to protect you and a voice that is running outdated software on a problem it no longer fully understands.
Listening to your inner critic for guidance about your current life is a little like asking a single uncle who has never put himself out there for marriage advice.
The information may be well-intentioned.
But it doesn’t have the context of your world today — and if it did, it might not give you the same advice.
The Client Who Heard Her Mother
I worked with a woman who was particularly hard on herself whenever she didn’t volunteer for additional projects at work.
The guilt was disproportionate — she knew that rationally — but knowing it didn’t make it stop.
Every time a new initiative came up and she didn’t raise her hand, something inside her became relentless.
When we slowed down and pulled on that thread, we found her mother.
Not her mother today — her mother from childhood, the one who had pushed her hard and meant it lovingly, the one whose voice had become the internal recording that played every time she was faced with a choice about effort and ambition.
You will never get anywhere if you don’t push yourself harder.
The moment she recognized whose voice it actually was, something shifted.
Because her mother — the real, present-day version of her — did not have the context of her current workload, her competing priorities, her professional landscape.
And if she did, she wouldn’t be telling her daughter to pile on more.
She’d be telling her to focus.
The voice didn’t disappear after that conversation.
But it changed.
It stopped giving orders and started asking questions.
Instead of:
You need to volunteer for this.
It became:
Do you think it’s a good idea to take this on right now?
That shift — from command to conversation — is everything.
Because a command bypasses your judgment.
A question invites it back in.
Critic vs. Intuition: How to Tell the Difference
One of the most common things I hear from women in coaching is some version of:
But how do I know if it’s my inner critic or my gut?
They can both feel like truth.
Here’s the tell I’ve found most reliable.
Your inner critic is bossy.
It uses words like should, need to, always, and never.
It catastrophizes.
It compares.
It has a tone — urgent, disappointed, slightly contemptuous.
It wants you to act from fear.
Your intuition is quieter.
It doesn’t repeat itself seventeen times.
It doesn’t threaten.
It doesn’t need you to feel bad about yourself in order to make a point.
It just knows something.
And it waits.
Most people, when they slow down enough to listen, already know which one is speaking.
The problem isn’t that they can’t tell the difference.
It’s that the critic is so much louder that the quieter voice rarely gets a turn.
Your One Question
Think about a voice in your head that shows up regularly — the one that tells you that you’re not doing enough, not moving fast enough, not ready enough, not enough full stop.
Now ask yourself this:
Whose voice does it actually sound like — and does that person have the full context of your life today?
If the answer is no — and it often is — you don’t have to silence the voice.
You don’t have to fight it or shame it or pretend it isn’t there.
You just have to stop letting it chair the meeting.
Thank it for trying to protect you.
Update it on who you are now.
And then make the decision yourself.
I found How Women Rise early in my coaching career and recognized myself on too many pages. I’ve pressed it into the hands of more women than I can count since then. Now, with some real miles behind me, I’m revisiting a few of those habits — this time with receipts.