12 Ways To Beat Your Critics.

Everybody has an opinion.

Sometimes you wish other people kept their opinion to themselves.

Criticism hurts.

No matter how thick a skin you have, it’s hard not to get worn down by other people’s negative opinions.

You can spend weeks, months, even years being the best at what you do and it all seems to fall apart when that one person misjudges your priorities and mocks your intentions.

It makes you angry. You’re frustrated and confused.  It makes you want to give up.

But that’s what the critics expect from you.  They want you to go away. Which leaves you only one option

To beat the critics at their own game.

Instead of running away, you have to change how you look at criticism.  You have to reframe the negative feedback to your advantage.

Here are a few ideas to help you:

1. State your intentions more clearly (up front) next time.

2. Practice what still feels uncomfortable.

3. Apologize if you’ve offended someone else (even accidentally close).

4. Take notes on what did not get criticized.

5. Resist the urge to defend yourself publicly.

6. Be brutally honest about how much preparation you actually put into the project.

7. Ask for professional help (i.e. pay for a coach or therapist).

8. Write down how you’re going to do it the next time.

9. Spend time each day meditating on your mission.

10. Try it again (and again and again and again).

11. Focus on helping someone else instead of staying mad.

12. Take a breath.  Let off some steam.  Take another breath.

Beating the critics isn’t really about the critics at all.

It’s about you.

It’s about how you feel when things go wrong. It’s about your motivation. It’s about your reason for doing what you do.

It’s all too easy to just do things because people agree with you. That’s easy.

What is hard is to practice and prepare day after day until you get it right.

But that’s also the way you beat your critics.

You beat your self.

You beat back the fear and frustration and your pain and focus on “why” you do what you’re doing.  And an amazing thing begins to happen.

The clarity of your focus and the extra hard work combine to not just build your own confidence but allow you to see the people that you’re actually helping.  And then it doesn’t matter what the experts say.  Because you can see the good that you’re doing all around you.

You can see you’ve beaten the critics.