How To Be Less Sensitive To Criticism

How can you be less sensitive to criticism? This is a super important topic, especially when it comes to confidence. Because if you are very sensitive to criticism, you feel criticized easily or criticism just totally takes you down. It's really hard to sustain your confidence because then at any moment of the day, for any reason, someone says one thing and boom, your confidence is shattered for a day or for a week. This is a vulnerability that I don't mean that in the good kind of Brene Brown way of be vulnerable, but I mean like a liability. And so if you want to succeed in career and relationships and life, that's going to probably involve other people, you know, perhaps rising in your career, dealing with clients, customers, you're a manager, you're a leader, you know, social life, more friends, more extended community, a partner, family members, your partner's family. Like there's a lot of people that you're going to be in contact with and someone might not like you, someone might judge you, someone might say something critical of you. So how do you become less sensitive to it? You know, quote, thicker skin, more capable, more confident, more resilient in the face of criticism. Well, that's a really long answer there. Could, you know, I have a whole courses about how to build your confidence. Confidence University is probably the best way to really build that. You can click down below to find out more about that. But here's a few key tips. One is the criticisms that not all criticisms will bother you, right? Some criticisms are more hurtful than others, more painful than others. And the key thing to look at there is the criticisms that bother you most are ones that you already have of yourself that you buy into. So if someone said to you, I don't know, your smile is too big, that just makes me want to smile. I'm like, it's too big. That's a weird criticism, right? But let's say someone has been self conscious about their smile. And then someone says, oh, your smile is really big. And that person's like, and maybe that person even meant it as a compliment, but the other person's like, oh no, don't look at my, don't look at my mouth. Right? So if you're like, so I guess the thing to look at is where what? When you say I'm sensitive to criticism, rethink that. Where are you sensitive? What specific criticisms is it about your work performance? Okay, you're already probably judging yourself, I'm not productive enough or I don't know enough, or I'm not good enough at this. Is it about something in your appearance, right? Like, oh, I don't, I'm not pretty enough or I'm ugly or my nose looks bad or whatever. Then when someone says, oh, you know, I like that angle of you, it's not even a criticism. And you're like, oh, that's my bad angle. Oh, they're actually mocking me. Oh, ah. And you distort things to make them critical. And let alone if someone actually criticizes you, then you're just a mess. So the strong way to become strongest in the face of criticism is to go to, to the source and say the issue is not that they criticize me and that I'm sensitive to criticism from out there. The truth is I am highly critical of myself already. And so if you took something rough, like I got this little crystal here, it's cool, it's like a fluorite. And I took this fluorite and I just went like this against my arm, you can see that. But it's turning, it's turn. It's rubbing the skin off of my arm and it's making it white, right? It's a little annoying, it's a little rough. And if I sat here and did that like a crazed, you know, chimpanzee. Oh, that's already starting to hurt. What if I did that for an hour? I would have raw, bloody skin there. And then if someone just touched this area, you know, with a feather, I would be like, ah, right. So I am raw. Each one of these right here is a self criticism you're doing. I'm ugly, I'm no good people. So then someone just whiffles by you and a little bit of air touches this area and it's like, ow, you did this to me. They didn't do it to you. You did it to yourself. If there's no enemy within, there's no enemy without. And so you need to get control of that critic inside of your mind. That's why I was mentioning Confidence University, because that's what I teach inside that program, inside of the foundation of that program. So. And I have other videos. I also have a book called On My Own side that you can download and listen to from Audible or get on Amazon. And it's, it's, it'll teach you. You gotta get control of that inner criticism, otherwise you're just gonna be raw everywhere you go. And then you're trying to battle the outside world. You need to not say that, and you need to not say that, and this person needs to say that. I gotta control everything. Meanwhile, I am extremely just raw and open right now because I'm not in any way handled my own raging inner critic. So this is super important is to be able to understand the criticism that bothers you is the one that you're already critical of yourself. Now, having said that, you also need to develop a level of assertiveness to have boundaries with people. Because when people are being critical, let's say someone's being critical for real, they're not just touching a sore spot on you. I mean, maybe they are going right at your insecurity, but they're also going at it in an aggressive way. So you got to be able to identify what are called character attacks. When someone is saying, you are an idiot or you are stupid or you are incompetent and they're attacking your character, or it's 100% reasonable and within your rights to have a boundary and say, listen, the way that you're speaking with me right now, that's unacceptable to me. I understand that you're upset and there's a problem we need to work through, but attacking my character is not how we're going to do that. And you could say that. You could say that to a friend, you could say that to a partner. You could even say, I've had coach clients to say this with a manager or supervisor or boss and they think I can't say that to a boss, he or she's going to fire me. And I said, well, maybe, but this is an extremely toxic dynamic you're talking about. How long do you want to work under that? And I've had people come back and say, they didn't fire me. They actually changed the way they started treating me. And I was like, that's right, because you train people how to treat you. So if you have hyper critical around people around you, it could be that because you haven't set a boundary with them. And that's the other side of this. There's the inner work and then there's the outer work. And if you want more skills on how to set boundaries and be more assertive, definitely check out my book Not Nice as well as there's tools for that inside of Confidence University as well. So thanks for being with me until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. I'll talk to you soon.