Accepting Criticism

According to multiple studies, fear of judgement is the number one biggest fear, above dying.
The author Elbert Hubbard once wrote, "Do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing, and you'll never be criticised." And that's probably the only way to avoid criticism, isn't it?

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And hello to you, and welcome to the Richard Nicholls podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate, and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nicholls, and today you'll learn all about accepting criticism. And if you are ready, we'll start the show. Good morning. I say morning. It might not be morning for you. If so, good afternoon, evening all. Have a nice night and everything in between. How have you been lately? Hope the world isn't getting on at you too much. The thing about being human is that it's almost impossible. To hide away from the world. I mean, you can kind of try, but as so many of us found out back in 2020. It's not good for us. Avoiding social activities might keep the critical people and the possibility of rejection at arm's length, but it also trains the brain that the outside world is dangerous and encourages social anxiety. So if there's a choice, we don't want that. We wanna be able to handle the critics and the possibility of rejection. I mention this because a lot of people ask me about how to handle criticism. How to get a thicker skin because there are so many ways that we can be the target of someone's criticism. And if you are someone who feels rejection really deeply, please know that doesn't mean you are weak. It means you are human. Just existing is enough to invite judgment from some people, let alone the insults we might get from someone who didn't just get out of the bed the wrong side, but got out of the womb the wrong side. Or the barrier that the internet can have on us so that it feels safer to be rude in a comment on social media than it would face to face. It's a funny world we live in, but I think the first thing we need to bear in mind is that context is important. If you saw scribbled on a pub toilet wall, Gary Niblock's a nonce. You wouldn't phone the police and say, Hey, I've got a tip for you. I know the name of a pedophile. Because you know it's just someone who enjoys insulting people. It makes them feel superior, especially when it's anonymous. And social media can be like that. There's been loads of it over the last few years about transphobia and climate change denial. And then we left the EU and loads of people breathed a sigh of relief because it meant something positive to them. And loads of others put their head in their hands and cried. And everyone went on social media and argued with each other. You can't have such a divided opinion about something that's important to you and it not have an effect on people psychologically. I've seen genuinely seeing families break away from each other because the under 45s overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and the over 45s to leave, and people don't like to think that they're wrong. We defend ourselves, we stick to our decisions. You could be the ripest and sweetest peach in the entire world, and they'll still be someone who tells you that they hate peaches. Don't worry. Let them hate peaches. Let them hate you. It doesn't change anything about you. You're still good enough. If someone can't see that, then they don't want to. It's a cognitive bias that we've developed to help us navigate the world. Our brain makes shortcuts so that we don't have to think too hard about everything. Without these shortcuts, or heuristics as they're actually called. We're either gonna be these prehistoric apes that couldn't think, or would be frozen to the spot every time we had to think about something. Unable to do anything else until we made a decision. So these shortcuts are helpful, but it also means that once we've made a decision about something, anything, buying a car, immigrating, having a tattoo on your arm of Winnie The Pooh having it off with Tigger. We create this bias towards our decision so as to protect our ego. And even in the face of evidence that our decisions are bad for us. Our brain deletes the evidence. Or devalues it and increases the value of anything that supports our decision. Our brains are brilliant, but they can also be sneaky little liars when they're trying to protect us. So you can't really trust that other people's opinions are even genuine anyway. You can actually trick people into making decisions about what artwork or attractive faces that they claim to prefer by asking them to put some pictures into an order of preference, and then you go back a week later with the order swapped around and you ask them why they made the decisions they did. And they'll lie to you and to themselves and they'll start making stuff up. Oh yeah. I just love the blue in the sky on that one. That's why I put it at number one last week. No, they didn't. We've swapped them round and we knew you'd forget what you'd chosen. But when you ask them if they want to change their mind and rearrange the order at all. They don't. If they make any changes, they're small little changes and they keep the top one the same because a part of them outside of conscious awareness is influencing their conscious opinions. This is why I rarely post any comments on social media. I'll post my own stuff and maybe share some other bits. But I won't comment on some public posts about how corrupt certain political parties might be. 'cause then you'll get complete strangers jumping onto the feed, telling everyone what idiots they are for not seeing them as the saviors of the country. So you rarely see someone on social media commenting with something like, Well, that's a different perspective to the one I already have. How interesting. I'd never thought of it that way before. Thank you. It'd be nice though if we did. Can you imagine a social media being a place of polite tea room chats? Nope. I can't see that happening either. We hope that was gonna happen with Blue Sky and it's better than Twitter by a hundred thousand percent. But it's still not perfect. Even in the real world we're guilty of these same biases. And when you are aware of it, it's a bit easier to not take things so personally when someone's being vile towards you. The author Albert Hubbard, in his old biography of John North Willys, wrote, Do nothing, say nothing and be nothing. And you'll never be criticised. And he's right. The only way to escape criticism is to vanish, and that's no life at all. But that's probably the only way to avoid criticism, isn't it? And that's why a fear of it has such a strong negative influence on us. Fear of judgment is the number one biggest fear above dying. More people fear criticism than fear dying, and I don't think it's because there's less fear of dying around. I mean, that'd be nice, but it's because that judgment, rejection, criticism is painful, and if you've always been an overachiever, thriving on praise and positivity from the external world, the reality of how nasty people can be sometimes can really bring us down to earth with a bump. So they need a thicker skin quickly, or they're gonna develop anxiety problems. People who are thin skinned spend a lot of time and effort doing things to make sure they're liked and it doesn't always pay off. It doesn't matter how kind, generous and friendly you are, people can still get angry at you, and if they do, it's worth looking underneath their anger. In most cases, anger is a secondary emotion, a reaction to something else. Usually if you're angry about something, it's because you feel hurt first. You might feel belittled, inferior, rejected, and it's that feeling that makes you angry. And understanding that is lesson one in anger management. So if someone's angry towards you specifically, maybe you were involved in something that they interpreted in a way that hurt them, it's a bit easier to feel sympathy for someone who's hurt than for someone who's angry. You just need to take a few deep breaths and think before you speak so that you don't fuel their fire by being defensive. 'cause they'll feel even more ignored and belittled because from their perspective you don't understand them, you are not listening. So listen to their perspective and try and be calm. Talk normally, slowly and with kindness. It'll probably throw them off balance and make them respond similarly. It's not easy in the moment, I know. But even just slowing your voice down a notch can completely change the temperature of the conversation. No matter what, it's gonna give you confidence that you can handle those sorts of situations, especially if you're just a messenger. It's not your fault that the overtime rotas have been changed, but to angrily say that to your team member who's missing their sister's 50th birthday party isn't gonna improve your day, but agreeing with how they feel might do. Saying, I know, mate. It's a right pain, isn't it? I wish it could be different. It diverts the anger that they have away from you and onto the situation instead helps you to see that they're angry at the situation, not angry at you. So it won't affect your ego, your self-esteem. Although if we're honest here, not all criticism is angry, is it? Sometimes feedback directed at us can be put across quite calmly and professionally, and that usually hurts the most 'cause you can't blame their anger for them telling you that you're not performing well in your job. It might be you're not. It might be you are and they can't see it, but it might be that that's not what they even said anyway. It's important to see the difference between what people say and what you hear. If the person you had a job interview with contacts you and says, thanks for your time last week, but you were unsuccessful in your application, then that's what they've said, but you might hear You're crap. No one wants you and you'll never get a job. Which are two completely different things. If someone says something calmly and professionally and it sends you into a two day depressive episode, it's worth asking the question, what did them saying that mean about me and my world? Because probably it doesn't mean anything about you personally, because it's all about them and their world. So don't make things up by interpreting things people say in ways that would hurt you. And after all they might be wrong. I'll be honest with you, I get my fear of criticism as well, even though I'm very much on the outskirts of the public eye. I'm a therapist writer with a podcast who makes his living outta people being unwell. And if someone believes that people like that are exploiting others rather than helping them, then it leaves us open to criticism. Now, I know that's not the case. 'cause bizarrely I'm in the line of work that goes against everything that business strategies suggest. My job is to make myself redundant to my customers. I don't want them to need me. And most businesses don't work that way. So if someone has a history of being exploited, they'll see evidence of exploitation everywhere they look because it's something that their brain has been primed to see. Someone who gets bitten by a dog when they're young will be the first one to spot a dog in the street when they're older, because they were unconsciously, in the back of their mind, looking for one. And we always find what we look for. And this process helps me to deal with the critics. I get reviews on my podcast in various places with people disagreeing with my perspective on things. It happens. And it's gonna happen again. It'd be impossible for it not to. I was updating the website for my amateur dramatics group that I helped run last week, and I wanted to embed a map of where we rehearse for new members. It's in this old church hall, and when I went on to Google Maps to copy the embed code, I saw that someone had left a one star review of this church, a few years ago. The reviewer said, and I quote, word for word. Carolyn said it was a pub. It wasn't one out of 10 for misinformation. Well, that doesn't make any sense. Why would you? What? They made a mistake because people do, and people will make mistakes about you. They will misunderstand and misjudge, although there is the possibility that they're right, isn't there? Sometimes criticism is due and it can be useful. It really can be. The wake up call needed to motivate us to push ourselves. I was a dreadful Manager when I used to work in civil engineering. It was only for a few years. It just showed what the gift of the gab can bring you when you're in the right place at the right time. But I had no management experience and ended up being, well, not taken advantage of by my staff as such, but I ended up doing a lot of the work myself. And wasn't even managing with a lowercase m let alone as a Manager, and whilst having my verbal warning about it, my boss said he'd never had someone agree so much when given a list of things they were doing wrong. But I'd just finished my training as a therapist and I was learning a lot about self at the time, and I was able to see where I needed to improve. And rather than seeing that criticism as a negative thing, I saw it as helpful advice. Maybe I'm a bit weird. I was still end up redundant that Christmas. Mind you, that was the best thing that ever happened to me. I probably wouldn't have become a full-time therapist without it. So listen to criticism because sometimes there is helpful advice wrapped up inside negative feedback. Anyway, have you seen the time? We need to finish off. As the first of the month is a Monday. This month there's an extra episode for my listeners that are also subscribers to my Patreon page, and today the weekly hypnotherapy track is my Protective Shield visualisation. Like I always say, the brain can't separate fact from fiction and imagining that you have this force field around you that allows other people's words and actions to just bounce off and never get through might be useful to some of you. If you're not a patron and you'd like to have a listen to my hypnotherapy stuff as well as my Monday morning episodes. Do please consider coming on board. It's only six pound a month and you can pay more than that for a pint in some places. Anyway, time to go. Have a super week and I'll speak to you again very soon. Take care.