April 2024 - Criticism

Criticism can reinforce feelings of inadequacy.

It can enable our self-preservation mode by focusing on rectifying what others believe to be perceived flaws. This then intensifies people-pleasing behaviors.

These people-pleasing behaviors then work overtime to obtain the praise we desire to offset the criticism we've received. The only trouble is that it feeds our impostor syndrome.

Why? Because the praise we receive is for the adapted, fawning, triggered version of ourselves rather than our true selves - so we feel like an impostor.

This is why it is so important that we come to recognize how much we are impacted by the criticism and the praise of others. Because, as Bill Johnson says, “If we live by the praises of man, we'll die by their criticisms.”

We all have an innate desire for approval, to be accepted for who we are. So when we feel like we are being criticized in an area of our lives, it can prevent us from taking risks.

But, at the end of the day, we get to choose how much we allow the opinions of others to affect us. Of course, this is a much easier choice to make if our hearts are already full in the confidence we have about who we are and whose we are.

If this is lacking, we can become sensitive to the opinions of others. We can allow their words to carry much more weight than they ought to. So, we must work to uncover the lies we believe about ourselves and replace them with truth.

One way to do this is to pay attention to the sensitivity we have towards the criticism of others because that will reveal what we believe to be true about ourselves!