Since I wrote the article "10 Rules for Brilliant Women" at Huffington Post few months ago, one rule in particular has been getting a lot of attention. Women want to work on this one:
Get A Thick Skin. If you take risks, sometimes you'll get a standing ovation, and sometimes, people will throw tomatoes. Can you think of any leader you admire who doesn't have enthusiastic fans and harsh critics? Get used to wins and losses, praise and pans, getting a call back and being ignored. Work on letting go of needing to be liked and universally known as a nice person.
We all dislike criticism, but for women, it is difficult in particular ways. Our culture's focus on women's beauty sends us the message that how we are seen by others is more important than our own lived experience. Second, we've been socialized to to prioritize harmony and not create conflict. Plus, studies show women are more adept than men at reading others' emotions. We are therefore more likely than our male counterparts to perceive subtle criticism from others.
For all these reasons, the experience of criticism is uncomfortable, even shattering, for many women. So we stop doing things that involve the risk of criticism. We don't launch the business or lead the community project. We don't share a risky idea. We don't do the unconventional things that would bring us fulfillment and joy.
There's a way out of this, and it involves learning to ask yourself two questions.
Question 1: What Am I Making This Criticism Mean?
When you receive criticism that weakens your confidence, activates your inner critic, or otherwise leaves you stuck, ask yourself, "What am I making this criticism mean? How am I interpreting it?"
Without realizing it, women often automatically interpret criticism to mean they did something wrong. That's a big leap! It involves making lots of assumptions -- about yourself, and about the validity of the criticism.
Here are just a few alternative ways to interpret criticism:
Those are just six options for ways to interpret criticism; I could go on and on.
I know, you don't want to delude yourself and rationalize away negative feedback that was in fact on point. You value feedback and want to improve yourself.
The point here is to incorporate feedback wisely and with discernment. Do what you need to do in order to understand where the criticism is coming from. That might mean asking lots of follow-up questions. It also means checking in with your own intuition about the motive for and accuracy of the criticism. Sit quietly with yourself and feel that out. Trust your inner wisdom's knowing rather than your inner critic's worst fears. Discern what in the criticism you find valuable, what sits in you as true and helpful.
By the way, you also have permission to decide that a piece of feedback is true but not worth working on right now. Maybe you are controlling, but you'd like to just launch the project while being controlling. As women, we often think we need to fix up all our deficits and make everyone like us before we move forward, but then we never get to doing the bold things we want to do. You can have plenty of brilliant success with your weaknesses. Lord knows the Wall Street guys and Fortune 500 CEOs have done just fine with all kinds of flaws in their approaches and their judgment.
Question 2: Where's the Match Up?
The second question to ask when criticism trips you up is, "How does this criticism touch upon a negative belief I hold about myself?"
Try this experiment: think of one positive thing you absolutely know about yourself. Maybe you know you are kind, or organized, or that you love your children dearly. Imagine that someone walked over to you and accused you of being the opposite. If you know you're kind, imagine they said, "You are mean!" If you know you are organized, imagine they said, "Your stuff is a chaotic, disorganized mess!"
How would you respond? Perhaps you'd laugh. Perhaps you'd feel angry, but would you be wounded by what they said? No, because you know it's not true. There's no place for that arrow to land in you. It bounces right off the skin.
Now imagine the kind of criticism that does get to you. How does that criticism touch on what you believe about you?
The criticism that gets to us finds a "match-up" with a belief we hold about ourselves. We're upset not because so and so said what they said, but because we're feeling the pain of what we believe about ourselves.
My client Kristie wasn't good at standardized tests, and was tracked with the struggling students in school. Kristie got the message that "she wasn't smart enough." Fifteen years later, Kristie has a successful career, but she feels like she has to hide and overcome being "not as smart" as her peers at work.
When Kristie gets any kind of negative feedback at work (for example, "These slides in the presentation don't communicate what we want them to"), it touches that "I'm not smart enough" wound. Her work is to look at this belief of "not smart enough" to question it, to come up with a new belief, "I am smart enough," and claim that belief for herself.
Changing beliefs can sometimes happen instantly (and it's delightful when it does!), but more often the process doesn't follow a quick or linear path. We look into the old belief and question it. We explore when and how it was formed.
We articulate a new self-concept and try it on. The old belief pops up again. We get stuck in it. We remember about the alternative. We choose again and again to hold the new self-concept and take action based on that new self-perception. As we see the results of doing that, as we start to see what's true about the new belief and the positive results it brings in our lives, we start to move into naturally living in the new belief.
So that's your work. When criticism threatens to silence your voice, cause you to step back or step down, ask yourself: What am I making this criticism mean? What other interpretations are available to me? What interpretation really resonates with my own inner wisdom? Then ask yourself, what belief that I hold about myself is this criticism touching upon, mirroring, or evoking? What do I want to replace that old belief with? What new belief would serve me better?
Tara Sophia Mohr is a writer, life coach, and the author of Wise Living blog. Click here to subscribe to the blog by RSS, or here to receive it via email. Sign up here to receive Tara's free Goals Guide, Turning Your Goals Upside Down and Inside Out (To Get What You Really Want).
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Sasha Cagen: VIDEO: How to Make Friends with Your Inner Critic
The Happiness Project: Relationships: Eight tips for dealing with ...
11 tips for dealing with criticism - Manage Your Life on Shine
1) get support from other women in similar positions, outside of the company or environment where you work (it can be from a wise man who understands what women go through too)
2) acknowledge that there are still very few women at the top and since most men associate women in power with their mothers, there are likely to be a lot of mother issues triggered when they report to you - just accept it, but make sure to talk to them like peers even when they act like little boys
3) accept that life is not fair; it just isn't so there is no point complaining - the only thing we can do is to work harder and smarter
4) practice bouncing back from failures - identify even the smallest failures that arise in a day, and the biggest ones that are completely humiliating, and catalog all the things you learned from them
5) find your sweet spot, the one thing (or several) that make you truly unique in comparison with others and play to that - forget about trying to do better with your weaknesses, just delegate them to someone for whom they are strengths
Criticism is useful, but so is getting on with the job.
Thanks for these great tips!
t
Now that's a huge load to digest. Where do you get this idea that men don't get affected negatively? And no, don't tell me it's a question of women "more likely" to be affected. It's just that men are pressured to internalize their emotions and go on pretending as if nothing happened. They internalize their hurt and that's not healthy.
My work place has plenty of women and they are way more controlling than the men. In fact, some of them purposely pick on men who are nice guys almost as if to "get revenge" for women's oppression throughout history. And these women have to be relevant in everything. Gawd. Insecure much? So yeh...stop making this issue of insecurity as if it affects only women. It just so happens that men don't go about making a whole parade out of it (but the issue is a legitimate one, and it affects BOTH genders).
At any rate, I have made a note to myself never to work for a woman in the future.
Nobody said men don't get affected negatively. It says "more likely to perceive subtle criticism". Key concept being "likely to perceive". There's a huge gap between that concept and your statement.
For what it's worth, the men I know tend to be less emotionally perceptive than the women. It's neither an excuse nor a crime. That's just an observation.,,,, or maybe my perception.