Why Criticism Is Your Greatest Growth Tool

Criticism is uncomfortable, but it can be one of the fastest ways to grow. In this episode, we explore how your reactions to criticism reveal valuable insights about yourself and your work, and why the most successful entrepreneurs don't avoid criticism, they use it to improve, adapt, and keep moving forward.

Follow on Linkedin: Olivier Egli 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm your host Olivier and this is the Do Happy Work Podcast where we look at work in a different, more natural, and more peaceful way. Welcome back. And here with me is Vera. And I told her that today I want to talk about something personal. Something that I had to overcome and I'm still working on and that I think will resonate with a lot of people. And that's criticism. How to deal with criticism. How do you do how how do you deal with criticism?

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Offline, we were giving each other feedback, and I was thinking, how am I feeling about this feedback that Olivier is giving me? Because it's like its own version of criticism, right? And I I think it's a really relevant topic because I really want to think about how I deal with criticism. I think it hits my ego right away.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

How do most people deal with criticism?

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Like, I mean, I think we like to tell ourselves that we're open to constructive criticism and that it helps us grow. But don't you think that all of us feel a little butthurt, if you will, when we hear about um ourselves being told that we could be better?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Yeah. The reason why I brought it up is because for the longest time, and mind you, I'm still not completely over it. I think nobody's ever completely healed from the effects of criticism, but for the longest time it stood in my way. The inability to uh take criticism, to be exposed to the possibility of criticism, because I thought that people were out to get me or to like somehow tear me down or stop my forward movement. What I would do instead is kind of like tuck myself away from possible criticism, not show up, not even uh engage in the public sphere where criticism is a possibility. But over time I realized that when you do that, when you avoid criticism, which is the same as taking feedback as criticism, you actually decline one of the most valuable teachers there are. Because criticism is an offered opportunity for knowledge. Because I I believe strongly, and I have made this point many times before, that as within, so without, as without, so within, right? So the criticism that we perceive is actually a reflection of a criticism that we already hold. And of course, me coming from my professional background in my career, I didn't see it that way. I just saw it as people trying to get, you know, in my way. Or people not getting it, people not understanding what I am about. But think about it, what is the content of criticism that makes it difficult? It's not what a person says, it's not even the the situation, it's the way we take it.

unknown 3:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Right? It's the way we take it. That is the only difference between constructive criticism and destructive criticism. It's a reality that's entirely homemade in our heads. It's not real, it's not objective. There's no such thing as an objective criticism. And you remind me of that very often because I sometimes get triggered by things which you don't even see. You don't even see them. And then you ask me what's going on, I tell you, you know, like, oh, that's funny, I didn't perceive it as such at all. Which goes to show again that the reality is created in our minds, criticism, the value, or rather, like the stopping value of criticism is entirely mental. But for work, it's an immense problem because criticism is like trauma. It's it's a teacher or it's a captor. Right? Depending on your approach to life, depending on your mentality, criticism is an opportunity to realize that something inside of you requires you to take a look.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

Well, you said the word um you mentioned trauma, and I think everyone has experienced criticism. And I think even the person with I mean everyone has trauma, but let's say you didn't really experience something super traumatic. I feel like criticism still impacts you no matter what. And it's like the question of is it gonna stunt me, as you said, like capture me, or am I gonna take it and say, okay, maybe it is something that I need to work on? Because I think there it's some criticism really is it's feed, it's truly feedback.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

What is what is feedback else than a loop that is trying to mirror something back at you?

SPEAKER_01 5:11

So, okay, um let's say um a long time ago you said I find that you speak very fast sometimes in workshops. And I was like, I do? Oh, but I I thought, okay, well, maybe I do need to slow down, right? So at the moment, I maybe took it a little bit like, why are you criticizing me? But what do you mean by the feedback loop?

SPEAKER_00 5:39

But this is now, this is a good thing. I I actually like this example because it goes to show that as always, uh, information exists at two levels. There's the thing that's being said, and there's how the thing is perceived. Yeah. If somebody gives you the feedback that you're talking too fast, that's information that you can do with it whatever you want. Maybe you are talking too fast, or maybe maybe you're only talking too fast in relation to that person, and that is not an objectively valid thing. But what's more interesting is the information about how you perceive that. So that's the real subtext. If you take that criticism poorly and you have a reaction rather than a response, it shows that you're insecure. It shows that for whatever reason, that that specific thing that was said stings you at a point where you yourself know that something is not right. Where there is, and I will use the word, there's unresolved trauma, but I mean trauma more in the sense of like a wound. Yeah. And insecurity also comes from something that was severed at some point that exists in you, but because it's not really bad or tragic, you kind of paint over it and you think you're okay. But now comes a criticism, and suddenly you're butthurt. And you're actually not really butthurt in most cases because of the thing that was said, you're butthurt because the fact that something was said that has something to do with something specific that inside of you is unresolved. And so now light is shed on that. And and I honestly think that the best way to see it is like something has been put on stage, and the worst thing we can do is to have a strong reaction and just dismiss it, and we just chase it off the stage instead of working on it in the sense of like, what is it that makes it impossible for me to be criticized or b receive feedback with regard to something that I potentially have to work on.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting, especially in the moment like now where you're constantly getting surveyed and feedback and feedback and criticized in so many ways.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Feedback has always existed, and I think if we look back to our very early days, the earliest feedback we got was from our parents. And a lot of it came kind of at the weight of if you don't do this, then this will happen. So early on, we learned that feedback is essential to exist within society, but the feedback that we got, most of us, is not really valid. It's not really valid for who we are, who we truly are meant to be. So the most in most cases, education provided us with feedback, you know, marks and grades and and notes and remarks and from our teachers and elders that kind of made us feel disconnected from ourselves. So so now when we get feedback and we're trying to be our own people, we're trying to be individuals that grow as our own self. Now feedback is given to us that is a traumatic response to the early feedback that we got when we were little that kind of removed us from ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Well, I think you said something that is very important about your parents or your or your guardians giving you feedback to understand how to be in society. For example, in my family, and criticism goes deep, right? So in my family, they would say things to some of us like, wow, you're so chubby. Like you don't want to, the boys are not gonna like you if you're like that. That's a crazy piece of criticism for a child to endure, for a teenager to endure, right? And then so you take that into the world, and now any type of criticism that comes at you, it had nothing to do with your weight, might still be like, if I'm not following this, maybe society's gonna reject me.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

Yeah, good. You expose to that, you realize you you don't fit into it, you're traumatized, you're traumatized because you think like I'm not part of it, I'm different, I'm weird. Like it makes you from the ground up, you're gonna reject criticism or rather feedback, and you will always see it as something that's trying to attack you. Because now you have a mentality of scarcity. The mentality of scarcity cannot deal with feedback, it cannot deal with any kind of feedback because feedback means in the scarcity sense, it means criticism. It means you being critiqued, right? Not you being guided or you're being educated or you're being supported.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

So you're not rejecting the criticism, you're actually absorbing it because you your scarce mind is like, yeah, that's me. I suck.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

Like I mean, yes and no. The problem is that people will they will critique you for whatever reason. We don't understand what people are, you know, where people are coming from. We don't understand where their criticism comes from. And when it rings true, we should open up to it, but when it rings false, we have to give the benefit of the doubt and take a step back and say, like, okay, this is information uh that you think is correct, and I will validate that information when I can. That's really good. But the emotional response, or rather, the reaction, that's that's the point that I'm trying to make here. When you give in to feedback with an emotional reaction that just you know fends it off, you make it impossible for you to work on that point that the criticism triggered. It is every time you feel something about a feedback you get, it's an opportunity for you to grow. It's an opportunity for you to uncover knowledge that you already have, but that you're dismissing or that you have not acquired yet. Every single time. And this is how we actually learn. Every time we learn, we truly learn something, we are presented with a piece of information that is new to us and that we have to embed. So when somebody gives us feedback, that is a new piece of information and we have to validate it. But imagine if before validating it we rejected emotionally already. Now we don't learn. Now that treasure trove of knowledge that we hold within, because you know, I believe that we all know everything because we connected to the universal intelligence. But feedback, learning through feedback, is the way we can uncover that. This is the way we learn. But when we reject it the way I did, we reject knowledge. And when we reject knowledge, we reject growth. And now all we have is that echo chamber, the feedback loop of wherever we stand right now, where we shield ourselves from external knowledge trying to uncover something in us. We reject foreign teachers to come and nudge us. That's what they're trying to do. And in closing, really, the thing that I had to learn at every level is that whatever happens, it never happens to you. You happen to it. Criticism never happens to you. Nobody criticizes you until the moment you turn the feedback into a destructive critique in your mind. So that's the power you have to own if you want to do your best possible work. Your best possible work includes criticism. It uses it as wind that is blown into your sail to move you forward faster, better, more efficiently. We have to use all those energy.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

I love how you how you ended with that. And it's just making me think um or realize that I need to reflect anytime I get a piece of feedback and look at it as growth. Thank you for listening.