“Who are you letting inside your head?”

So today I want to tell you about a podcast that I don't recommend you listen to, and I'll explain what I mean in a minute there. But this podcast I came across, I'd had it recommended by a few people and most recently, some good friends of mine back from secondary school. Actually, we all met up, and this may surprise some of you more than others, but back in secondary school, I was a massive nerd, and these are my nerd friends. And we've stayed. We stayed in touch. We stay good friends to this day. And being closet nerds, we would all kind of talk about, what have you been, like, listening to lately? What have you been learning? What nonfiction have you been reading? And we'd always do this every time we meet up. And one of them mentioned this podcast. I'm not going to name it because I don't want it to get personal, but the idea of it sounded really good. And the other person said, oh, I really like that as well. And it was basically, it's a podcast where they look at successful people and they look at what makes them successful, and they would look at, you know, what they're doing, what makes them different. And I thought it was a little bit like Diary of a CEO, this kind of thing of like, okay, let's. Let's analyze what these people are doing well, and we can all learn from that. And I thought, great, that's brilliant. And then I listened to an episode, and this episode was very clear from the start that before they even recorded it, they made their mind up about this person, and they didn't like them. They thought that they were just rubbish. They were full of bs and. And they basically picked one of their episodes and tore the whole thing apart. And it wasn't just that it was, like a constructive criticism. It was just quite personal. There was a lot of, like, fairly mean comments about who this person is. It wasn't really like, here's how we could avoid this mistake. It was just kind of like, here's why this guy's rubbish. And, you know, I think when I hear that, I was like, well, that's not really what I'm into. I don't really want to focus on why someone's rubbish, why you don't like somebody. But I thought maybe I just got a bad episode. I don't want to go and listen to another two or three, because that's quite a bit of time, frankly. But what I often like to do when I'm trying to get a sense of something is I look at the Audience, I look at the community of people around this thing. So I went to where they all hang out and I looked and it became very, very clear that, nope, this was a standard episode. And you could tell because all the people suggesting future get not guess because they want on the thing. But I future topics future people on influence this because they hated them. It was like, yeah, take down this person next. Yeah, I hate this person. Do them next. And I couldn't find any evidence of them having done an episode that was talking about how somebody was good or doing well. It was basically a podcast. And it's interesting they often picked other podcasters. I think that's telling. But it was a podcast talking about how these other people were like rubbish and full of BS and like, no one should listen to them. And the reason I'm sharing that today is it reminded me of a quote I heard that often gets attributed to Denzel Washington. I looked into, as far as I can tell, it's not attributed to him or, well, it's not actually said by him. There's no evidence of it, but it's a good quote. And the quote says, you will never be criticized by somebody who's doing more than you, only somebody who's doing less. And in this context, I read that as criticism, as negative criticism, like someone trying to tear you down. Constructive criticism. I love that. I'm often trying to encourage people to share more of that with me because that's how we can improve. But, you know, you're never going to be torn down by someone who's doing more than you. It's only people who do less. And this, in my experience, has been very true. You know, when I first started patient centered training, when I first started putting content out there publicly, the old imposter syndrome that I dealt with in chiropractic kind of came back up a little bit. And I had one or two people making some fairly personal, fairly non constructive critiques of me that were, you know, a little bit mean, a little bit personal. And being who I am, that kind of struck a call that struck home a little bit. And somebody shared this with me and I looked at it and went, yeah, that's true. Like, and it was. It wasn't a lot. It was only a couple of people. I'm like, they're not doing anything. They're not doing anything to help grow the profession. They're just sat there taking potshots of people who are. And it made me realize that, you know, what the people that I have learned the most from the people that I look up to, the people who've been lasting mentors for me, are all people who are focused on growing things. They're focused on improving, they're focused on what we could all do better, how to help other people. And I have had people, fairly short term movementals who are mainly focused on negatives. They were focused on, this is why everyone else is rubbish, this is why these people are bad. And as I got to know them, one of the reasons I drifted away is I was like, you're not really practicing what you preach and you're actually, by focusing on the negative, you're putting yourself in quite a negative state. And they were trying to seem more like happy and positive, but when you got to know them a little bit, it was clear they weren't. So I thought I'd share that today because I think it's really important to occasionally look at the people that we are letting into our head, the people that we are letting, you know, shape our ideas of who we are or what we should be doing or how good we are and to stop and think. Are these people who are focused on growth or are they people who have maybe a bit of a fixed mindset, people who are focused on tearing other people down? Constructive criticism is great, I don't mind that at all. But when somebody's main thing is talking about how everyone else is rubbish, it just makes me question now, how much value does this person have to add? Because if your way of looking good is by bringing other people lower than you, it implies you don't much, you don't have a lot of positivity to add into the world. So I thought I'd share that. My advice would be if you think of somebody who is influencing you, think of somebody who you maybe don't sort of admire to want to be the same as, but somebody think I listen to what this person says, I would listen to their ideas on XYZ and just ask yourself, is this somebody who is focused on the positives or it's somebody who's just trying to tear other people down? Because I would posit that the ones who are trying to tear people down, they're not going to help you grow. They're not interested in helping others grow. They're just more interested in their own status and making that look better compared to everyone else. So have a think about that. I hope that's useful for some of you and I'll see you soon for another video. Take care.