Author: drglenndoyle

If our culture believes anything about personal growth, it’s the “ah-ha!” moment.

You know. The big, dramatic moment where everything suddenly becomes clear. When the scales fall from our eyes. When realizations crystalize. When lightning strikes, and we’re never the same.

The “ah-ha!” moment has been dramatized in our culture, almost to a comical extent. Many of our favorite movies and other stories include a variant of it. You know the part of the movie I mean— the moment where the hero suddenly has a revelation, accepts their quest, shifts their identity. That one, magic, golden moment.

I can’t tell you how many people have come into my office waiting, looking, earnestly searching for their own “ah-ha!” moment. The therapeutic breakthrough. The part of “Good Will Hunting” where Robin Williams grasps Matt Damon by the shoulders, looks deep into his eyes, and repeats, “It’s not your fault, Will,” until the latter embraces him in a sobbing heap of therapeutic progress.

It’s beautiful, man. And those dramatic, corner-turning moments do happen, in and out of the therapy room.

But they don’t tend to be particularly dramatic.

And, if we’re being honest, they don’t tend to be particularly important, for that matter. At least, not as important as we want them to be.

In fact, the “ah-ha!” moments we seek, and sometimes find, often set us up for disappointment.

Why? Because no matter how dramatic your “ah-ha!” moment may be; no matter how profound your revelation may strike you as; no matter how fundamental a change it may signal…there’s still a moment after it.

And a moment after that. And even a moment after that.

Unlike movie characters, our lives tend not to be one dramatic moment happening after another, as it turns out. The reality is, most of our lives deal with habit and routine, not earth-shattering turning points.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good “ah-ha!” moment as much as anyone. Hell, I have ADHD, thus my brain is, if anything, more susceptible to moments of heightened drama and emotion than most. It’s not that there’s something wrong with “ah-ha!” moments, or craving emotional breakthroughs. Seeking those moments are often what drive people into therapy in the first place.

However, there’s this delusion in our culture that once we have our “ah-ha” moment, the bulk of our work is done. As if the task of personal development is all about building up to that moment, gaining momentum, preparing ourselves for it, and once we crest that wave, our goal is accomplished— the spell’s been broken, the world is different, the credits can roll.

If only that were the case.

Yes, it’s the dramatic high point of the story when the prince kisses Sleeping Beauty, bringing her out of her slumber. It’s a beautiful moment when the Rebels blow up the Death Star. It’s a stunning development when Christ rises from the dead and appears to the Apostles. And I love it as much as anyone when Jerry Maguire solemnly tells Dorothy, “You complete me.”

What those stories don’t elaborate upon, however, is that now the prince and Sleeping Beauty have to figure out if they’re well-suited to live happily ever after.

Or whether the Rebels can make an intergalactic government, which in its previous iteration had fallen prey to corruption and infighting, halfway functional.

The Apostles, in the wake of the Resurrection, were now looking at the logistical problems of establishing a new religion and on the verge of centuries of bloody persecution.

And none of Jerry and Dorothy’s fundamental marital problems were actually solved by his player getting a contract and him deciding that she “completed” him.

Moments of profundity are important. Breakthroughs can be beautiful. Those glimpses of high emotion are often what we fantasize about when we set off on our journeys of personal growth, and what propel us along the way. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to experience those highs.

But the real work of therapy lies in integrating those profound “ah-ha!” moments into our daily existence. Modifying our ways of living, routines which have been conditioned by day after day, year after year, of thinking, feeling, and behaving in certain ways, to accommodate our new insights.

Chase your “ah-ha!” moment, by all means.

But know that that exciting moment is where the real work only begins.

 

Like it? How about liking and following the Dr. Glenn Doyle Facebook page, hm? Blog updates on Tuesdays and Thursdays, quotes from the Doc, messages from the Doc…c’mon, you know you wanna.

We often don’t get to decide the things that happen to us.

As many of you reading this blog are aware, our lives are often interrupted and punctuated by unexpected events. Accidents; deaths; setbacks. Events which, even if they seem predictable in retrospect, totally catch us by surprise at the time.

Even occurrences most of us consider positive sometimes hit us out of the blue. A lucky break; a fortunate near miss; an unexpected leg up.

Being human, of course,  we do everything we can to make life adhere to our schedule. We humans are nothing if not control freaks. However, despite our best attempts, life frequently seems to have other plans for us. It specializes in throwing curve balls.

Here’s the thing, though: while it’s true we often don’t get to decide the things that happen to us, we DO get to decide how important those events are to our lives.

We DO get a say in whether something that happens to us is a bump in the road, or a crippling setback.

We DO get to decide whether something is a lesson to be learned from, or a meaningless calamity.

In fact, when it comes down to it? We’re the ONLY ones who get to decide how important an event is to us. What an event MEANS to us, in the grand scheme of our lives.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people out there who are perfectly willing to try to tell you how important an event SHOULD be in your life, how you SHOULD feel about it, what an event SHOULD mean to you. In fact, that’s a lot of what comprises the Internet: people not just informing you of things that are happening in the world, but trying to tell you how important those things SHOULD be to your life, what you SHOULD do in response.

But the reality is, while others can influence how important we perceive events to be in our lives, in the end they don’t get a vote.

In the end, it is completely up to us to decide how important WE consider certain events to be, what their meaning is going to be for US.

It’s absolutely the case that the likelihood of some negative events happening in our lives is pretty high. Our lives are probably not going to unfold perfectly (I know, I know, spoiler alert).

We’e going to stumble. We’re going to lose people and things. Situations that had been idyllic are going to collapse. Lucky streaks tend to end.

Reality, as it turns out, is not perfect, and neither are we.

But the facts that roadblocks appear, that hot streaks cool, that relapses occur…doesn’t need to be particularly important to you.

You can decide that the fact that these things inevitably occur is, in fact, a relatively unimportant fact to you.

An inconvenience. An annoyance. A blip on the radar screen of your continued success.

Relapse doesn’t have to signal the end of a recovery.

An argument doesn’t have to signal the end of a relationship.

The end of a relationship doesn’t need to signal that one is unloveable and destined to be forever alone.

A bad mood doesn’t have to signal the beginning of a spiral into depression.

Of course, some events are easier to pull this trick with than others. Certain occurrences are objectively a big deal, and it’s silly to suggest that some simple mental gymnastics can turn them from life changing or interrupting events to mere inconveniences.

However, even with the big stuff— and I encourage you here to think of the biggest life-interrupting event you can possibly imagine— it still comes down to you, and only you, to determine what that event means to you, how it’s going to fit into your overall life story. How important it is to who you are, what you do, how you exist in the world.

Life doesn’t respect our schedule. But it has to bend to our decisions about how important any one thing is to us.

Those decisions, always and only, are on us.

I can tell you, as a psychologist, that our brains aren’t good at focusing on nothing.

One of the reasons why meditation seems such a revolutionary practice to us— not to mention one of the reasons why meditation is so difficult for so many of us— is that we’re neuropsychologically wired to focus on stuff.

Our attention seeks objects and activity to focus on. It’s part of our evolution as a species.

Our evolutionary ancestors that did not have an appetite for objects and activity didn’t last too long in the prehistoric wilderness, insofar as they missed important opportunities to, say, bond and eat, which turned out to be somewhat important for survival.

(Who knew?)

The main reason why boredom is so painful to us modern human beings is because boredom, essentially, boils down to a lack of stimulating objets and activity to engage our focus. It’s the modern day equivalent of our cave-person brains seeking opportunities to bond and eat, so we can successfully survive and multiply.

And, as it turns out, like many psychological quirks that were evolutionarily selected for because it aided our survival? Our antipathy for boredom doesn’t serve us so well in the present, either.

In fact, our brain’s constant demand that we entertain it, put objects and activity in front of it in order to keep it happy and interested, can significantly work to our detriment if we constantly cave to its demands.

Put another way: if we constantly cater to our brain’s appetite for shiny objects, we’re going to be screwed in the long run.

This is the Internet. You may have noticed, there is no lack of competition on this magic computer machine for your attention. Even within the world of self-help and psychology blogs in which I exist on your computer screen, there is a never-ending stream of therapists, coaches, motivators, and instigators peddling their catchy quotes and inspirational words-of-the-day.

The Internet is a constant blur and blender of objects and activity. If we hooked your brain up to an EEG while surfing the Internet, the damn thing would light up like a Christmas tree.

There’s no worry about there being a lack of objects and activity to look at on the Internet. Which makes your inner cave-person happy, if maybe a bit overwhelmed.

Thing is, in our constant quest to never be bored— to quench, again and again, our neurodevelopmentally-based thirst for objects and activity— we might be chipping away at our progress toward our meaningful, long-term personal goals.

Fact is, we’re no longer the prehistoric, still-evolving cave-people we once were. We no longer need to be hypervigilant toward every rustle in the bushes which might be a saber-toothed tiger looking to eat us (a lesson some of us must learn again and again as we slowly overcome PTSD). And we no longer need to be immersed 24/7 in the project of defending our tribe or hunting for food— a memo our brains haven’t quite processed yet.

The constant blur of objects and activity that is the Internet is not going to slow down and ask you whether spending hours and hours scratching that evolutionary itch of stimulation is consistent with your long-term goals.

Believe me, if there’s one thing the Internet is NOT overly concerned with, it’s your development as a person.

Unlike your evolutionary ancestors, you have the ability to actually step back from your brain’s craving for stimulation, and ask yourself: you know all these hours I’m spending scrolling through my Facebook feed, watching movies on Amazon Prime, watching videos on Instagram— are they moving me closer to, or further away from, my goals?

Our cave-person ancestors didn’t have the luxury of asking questions like that. For one thing, they lacked the cognitive development to do so (cerebral cortex FTW). For another, long-term planning and the delay of gratification weren’t things that were rewarded in the prehistoric jungle— but they are in our modern world.

In our modern world, the ability to keep stimulation in perspective— to pick and choose when to indulge one’s appetite for objects and activity— often determines the difference between those who see their plans come to fruition in the long term, versus those who may be consistently entertained in the short term…but who struggle to achieve things that are meaningful in their lives in any larger sense.

Mind you, I’m not saying there’s anything inherently virtuous in boredom. Hell, I have ADHD; I hate being bored.

But I know that if I let my brain’s craving for stimulation, as well as the Internet’s enthusiasm for providing me with superficial stimulation, run my everyday life and determine my focus, I’m not truly living a life according to plan. I’m responding to a primitive impulse that makes me no more likely to be a success than my cave-person ancestors.

(Credit where it’s due, of course: they were good at hunting and gathering and not-dying. Not so great at pursuing long-term goals such as building a career, maintaining a relationship, or losing weight, though.)

You have a brain that is significantly more evolved than your evolutionary ancestors’. It may still balk at the idea of doing nothing, but don’t let that lure you into the trap of constantly seeking objects and activity to occupy your brain.

Your brain has spent eons evolving past the yearning for immediate gratification. Use it.

Here’s the thing about life: more often than not, it goes on.

We’ve been conditioned by movies in particular to think that, after a particularly significant event happens— a death, a graduation, an election, a revelation, whatever— that time goes into kind of a freeze frame. The music hits, the credits roll, and the audience wanders out into the street, maybe happy, maybe sad, maybe uplifted, maybe bummed out, at what they just saw.

But for most of us, that’s not how life works after major life events.

For most of us, we wake up the next morning, and that morning is, most often, a lot like all the mornings prior.

And we’re faced with the reality that whatever happened, as major as it was, did not remove the fact that we still have to live our life, adjusted to this new reality.

We still have to figure out a way to pay our bills.

We still have to figure out a way to get our interpersonal needs— our needs for interaction, for validation, for reality checking, for sexual gratification— met.

We still have to care for our pets. We still have to handle our families. We still have to provide value for our customers. We still have to connect with our version of the divine.

Sometimes, that significant thing that happened is a death. Maybe the death of a family member, or the death of a pet. I’ve experienced both of these, and believe me, I get it: after those events, your routine is altered. No question about it.

Those events can make you feel as if your world is turned upside down, and your routine can never be the same.

But the reality is, even after something as significant as a death of a person or animal who is absolutely beloved to you, maybe who was even the center of your world: life still goes on.

Everything in us wants to believe that such a fundamental shift means that the universal pause button gets pushed, while we cope and mourn— while the credits roll— but that’s not how it works.

As it turns out, we still have to get up, make breakfast, work out, make a living— even if we feel like there’s a huge hole in our heart where our loved one used to be.

Sometimes the significant thing that happens is, we get fired from our job. I’ve had that happen, too. In grand fashion, even: I had a dramatic falling out with a mentor, which left me feeling misunderstood and underappreciated (I can’t read her mind, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t feel the same way at the time).

Again, I felt that life as I knew it, at least professionally, had ended.

But again, the reality was that even after that professional relationship, which had been the most significant one in my life to that date, had ended, life went on. The next day, I had to pick up the pieces and start putting together the plan for my own practice instead of working for someone else.

The fact that I’d gotten fired didn’t mean there weren’t people who needed my help; it didn’t mean I didn’t have bills to pay; it didn’t mean that I didn’t have a whole caseload of patients who were willing to start over in my new practice with me.

As it turns out, the fact that I’d gotten fired from one job didn’t mean I still didn’t have work to do.

So often when major changes happen in life, especially when they hit unexpectedly, and especially when they rob us of the life and routine we used to have, we feel angry. We’re distracted and intimidated by the scale of the change. We’re furious that life had the audacity to change in such a significant way without our permission.

We want our old life, even with its rough edges and imperfections, back. We don’t like unpredictability, and we definitely don’t like loss.

Make no mistake: it’s essential to mourn the losses that occur when major life shifts happen, especially when they happen unexpectedly and deprive us of something that had been central to us before. The presence of a family member; the love of a pet; the income of a job. Not taking time to mourn your loses is a recipe for your self-esteem to deteriorate: your brain notices if you’re skimping on your own emotional needs.

Something that can provide some unexpected solace, however, is the fact that life does, most often, go on.

The sun will rise, one way or another.

Even after things that feel like the end of the world.

 

 

On a very basic level, we think by asking and answering questions of ourselves.

See, right there, I made an assertion. Your brain immediately responded to it by asking a question. “Is he right?” “What does that mean?” “Why did he begin his blog that way?”

Whatever that question was, it was an illustration of the way our brains work: we’re constantly forming and testing hypotheses about the world. We’re always asking questions, then evaluating the evidence for what we think are valid answers.

It’s such a basic part of the way we think, that we barely even notice it. Even after our attention is called to it, we’re automatically doing it. Listen in on your own thought process right now, and you’ll see: right now you’re asking yourself “Really? Is he right? Am I doing this right now? Woah, how did he know that?”

(Spoiler: it’s not because I can read minds.)

This basic question-and-answer format forms such a fundamental part of our neuropsychology, our process of perception and reasoning, that we often forget that the answers we receive to any given question often depend strongly on the question itself.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s take this blog for example.

If you’ve been following the Facebook page of Dr. Glenn Doyle, and reading the comments that pop up whenever I post a link to a new entry here on Use Your Damn Skills, you may have noticed that there is a wide range of reactions people have had to some entries.

Some people have said, “AMEN! THANK YOU!”

Some have said, “I think you’re full of it, Doc.”

Some have said, “You need to get right with Jesus.”

Some have said, “This is perfectly applicable to my life right now.”

Some have said…well, you get the idea.

Partly, the diverse reactions to my writing have been because people approach the subjects about which I write— self-esteem, relationships, personal growth— from very different perspectives. Some people think all this personal development stuff is crap. Some people think it’s the key to the next step in their evolution. Some people approach personal development materials with skepticism because they’ve heard bad things about the self-help industry from the media. Some people believe self-help runs counter to what they’ve been taught from their spiritual tradition.

The way people arrive at such different perspectives, and such different reactions? They ask radically different questions.

Same material, mind you. It’s still the same blog, whatever your approach to it, or personal development in general, is. But your reaction depends almost entirely on the questions you ask yourself about that material.

The person who asks, “How is this applicable to me?” often has a different reaction than the person who asks, “What would my mom and dad (or my spouse, or my high school football coach, or my ex) say about this material?”

The person who asks, “In what was does this material potentially contradict what I’ve been taught in my spiritual tradition?” will have a different reaction from the person who asks, “In what way does this complement what I’ve been taught in my spiritual tradition?”

The person who asks, “Even if I don’t agree with everything this guy says, is there anything useful here for me?” will have a different reaction than the person who asks, “Since that part of what he wrote doesn’t apply to me, how can he possibly have anything useful to say?”

I’m not the first personal development or “self help” writer to point out the significance of questions. The reason why is because asking better questions is so essential to living a better life,. Real self-improvement is impossible without learning to ask questions that are more useful, more empowering, more beautiful than the questions we’ve seen asking.

See, this is why I love even the people who show up in my comments with negative things to say. Every time I post a blog, I’m putting something out there for you, my readers, to chew on, think about, ask questions about. When commenters respond, we get to see the questions they’ve clearly asked themselves about this material— and we get to observe the roads down which certain questions take us, as opposed to others.

People will show you exactly who they are— and what questions they like to ask— in the comments.

“How empty is the glass?”

“How full is the glass?”

No matter what the situation, how much pain is present, how much struggle, how much frustration, how much loss is involved: there is a productive question that can be asked about it.

That is, a better question that will lead to a better answer.

What kinds of questions do you like to ask? Are they helpful? Do they make you feel better, or worse? Do they open up possibilities, or shut them down?

Our brains will always, always answer the questions we ask it. It’s on us to make them good ones.

 

It’s an annoying, and uniquely human, quirk of our neuropsychology that we spend so much time thinking about what we’d like to do over.

Animals, which presumably lack our level of conscious awareness, or at least our level of conscious self-awareness, don’t seem to have this problem.

When something doesn’t go as planned, you rarely see your dog or cat berating themselves, fantasizing about doing something over, obsessing over that one special, specific point where it all went wrong, plotting retrospectively about how they’d do it differently if given the chance.

Yet we humans do that all the time. We’re blessed with a level of neurodevelopment that makes us conscious of ourselves, and aware of the past and the future as concepts. So naturally we humans regularly use our big, overdeveloped brains to replaying the past, or hypothetically constructing the future.

This isn’t always bad, mind you. There’s a lot to be said for remembering the past. In fact, I highly encourage my patients to remember some parts of the past, particularly moments when they felt powerful, capable, and clear-headed. Reliving those times can put us in incredibly powerful states of mind.

Likewise, imagining the future isn’t necessarily bad, either. Particularly when we’ve hit a rough spot in our current lives, fast forwarding in our heads to a more pleasant time to come is often how we make it through. I use this technique while running— often times, running up a hill is no fun, but you can do it if you stay focused on how nice it’ll feel to run down the hill and finish the race.

Imagination can be a powerful tool. So why is it we humans insist so often on using that tool to tear down our confidence and self-esteem, rather than building it up?

Imagining “do-overs,” as I call them, is particularly dangerous. That is, using your gift of imagination to go over something that hasn’t gone well in your life, and for which you blame yourself. We’ve all done this— imagined what we would “do over” if we had the opportunity. It’s an almost irresistible impulse to do this.

Unfortunately, it’s also a particularly fraught impulse to compulsively imagine “do-over” scenarios. Because, no matter how vividly we imagine doing something over differently? We can’t.

“But Doc,” you might say, “By imagining what I might have done differently the last time, I might figure out what to do next time! I might learn something by examining my mistakes!”

Yes, it’s true that, as the famous quote instructs us, “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat history.” I would never tell anyone to not take what lessons they could from how things went in the past. Examining our failures in particular can provide important insights into how we function, how we work under pressure, how we respond when things go haywire.

But there comes a point where obsessively reflecting on the past, and imagining a different outcome, can consume us. There’s a point at which it becomes a literal waste of energy, insofar as no amount of energy directed toward a fantasized “do-over” will bring that exact opportunity back around again.

No matter how much we wish, no matter how much we want, no matter how much we pray, we can’t go back and have a better past.

What we can do, though, is the next right thing.

The next constructive thing. The next thing that, having examined our past with compassion and realism, we’ve determined will be beneficial to our goals.

Both successes and failures use their imaginations to envision the future and relive the past. The difference is that successful people do so with the explicit purpose of enhancing the present moment. They resist the urge to get lost in either what happened last, or what will happen next.

Developing high-self esteem demands us to live neither in the past or the future. Our self-appraisal  will notice if we’re trying to escape the present moment, and it’ll want to know why.

How are you using your imagination? Are you trying to go back and do the right thing in a past moment?

Stop.

Take a deep breath.

And do the next right thing.

 

One of the keys to having realistic, healthy self-esteem is letting go.

I know, I know. We hear a lot about “letting go,” it seems.

We’re urged to let go of negative feelings. We’re told to let go of the past. We’re lectured about letting go of resentments.

Everywhere we turn, it seems people are full of advice about how we have to “let go,” and what we have to let go of, in order to be happy.

And sure, I suppose it’s a good idea to let go of feelings that don’t serve you well. Or to not focus on or ruminate about parts of the past that don’t make you feel good. And letting go of resentments certainly is a good idea, if all they’re doing is taking up space in your brain that could be devoted to more empowering things.

But that’s the easy, obvious stuff. Of course you should let go of things that don’t make you feel good. Most everybody wants to let go of that stuff.

That’s not the type of “letting go” I had in mind.

Sometimes, in order to be the person we can be— in order to be a person with confidence; a person who can take criticism well; a person who can clearly define their values and serve their priorities effectively— we have to let go of some things that, well, we’d kinda rather hang on to.

Specifically, we often have to let go our fantasies and ideas about what life was “supposed” to be, what kind of person we were “supposed” to become when we grew up, how the world is “supposed” to work.

Those…are a little tougher to let go of than negative feelings, or negative memories, or other stuff that we want to get rid of anyway.

Last week on this blog many were disturbed to discover they were not mind-readers. (Of course, the point of that article had little to nothing to do with actual telekenesis; it was about how we invalidate and risk hurting the people around us when we become too attached to our own ideas about what somebody may be thinking. But that’s beside the point.)

This week, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you again, because the fact is: we’re not fortune-tellers. We don’t know the future.

We want to know the future, though. Just like we want the certainty, the reduction of anxiety, that might come with being able to read someone’s mind? We’d also love the certainty, the reduction in anxiety, that might come from knowing what the future will bring.

The fact is, however, we just don’t know. We can form some hypotheses, take some reasonable guesses, but in the end, we just don’t know. Life turns on a dime, the unexpected happens way more often than we, uh, expect, and ten years pass in the blink of an eye.

How many times have you had the experience of kind of blinking, looking around at your life, and saying to yourself, “How on earth did I arrive here? Doing this?  With this person?

Life, as John Lennon once sang, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. And this tends to alarm us, quite a bit.

Life is SUPPOSED to go a certain way, right?

I’m SUPPOSED to be a certain person, right?

I’m SUPPOSED to be doing this thing, especially by THIS time in my life, I’m SUPPOSED to have X many children, I’m SUPPOSED to have this degree, I’m SUPPOSED to be in this sort of relationship, I’m SUPPOSED to have traveled to these countries, I’m SUPPOSED to make this much money, I’m SUPPOSED to be this weight.

I’m SUPPOSED to have, you know, figured out this whole life thing by now, right? Aren’t I?

Those, our “supposed-to’s”, are the things we’re not so hot on letting go of.

It’s as if we let go of them, it feels like we’re giving up on all those beautiful, aspirational “supposed-to’s.” It feels, in a way, like we’ve failed.

Oof. Now there’s a word. “Failed.”

No wonder we don’t want to give up our beloved “supposed-to’s,” even if they’re making us miserable. We definitely don’t like to feel like we’ve failed.

But what if that’s not the case?

What if the fact that our “supposed-to’s” haven’t materialized in our life doesn’t mean we’ve failed?

What if it simply means that, well, when we came up with those “supposed-to’s”, we lacked the ability to see the future, who we would become, who we would meet, what experiences we would have, what circumstances we would endure?

What if it means that when we came up with those “supposed-to’s”, we were responding largely to other peoples’ ideas of what our life was “supposed to” look like? And just like us, they didn’t know who we would eventually become, what would be important to us, pleasurable to us, essential to us, irrelevant to us?

“Supposed to’s’” are ideas that are rigid. They lock us in to one vision of what our life “should” be like.

They rob us of the ability to be flexible about our goals and priorities.

They also rob us of something that is absolutely essential to healthy self-esteem: the capacity to perceive and acknowledge when our needs have changed, and to change our life plans and expectations in order to accommodate those changes.

By all means, hang on to your “supposed to’s” if you feel they’re enhancing your life. I’m not the one lugging them around, I don’t get a vote on what you hang on to or let go of.

But you can, you know. Let go of those “supposed-to’s.”

If you want to.

So why does criticism destroy us like it does, anyway?

We don’t have to deny that it does.

I mean, you may be reading this, right now, thinking, “Criticism doesn’t destroy me. I’m as cool as a cucumber. I can take criticism in stride. I’m a grown up about it. There’s no way the Doc is talking about me.”

To which I respectfully respond: yeah, right.

Criticism wounds all of us.

Some of us have learned skills with which to handle it a little better than we otherwise might, and some of us have learned how to not let it show outwardly how much it stings. But for the vast majority of people, it hurts to be criticized.

Really. There’s no need to pretend it doesn’t. We’re all in the same boat, here.

To be stung by criticism is to be human. Whether we acknowledge it or not (and, if you’re in the business of building healthy self-esteem, you’d better be in the business of acknowledging your emotions with empathy and accuracy, by the way), it hurts.

But why does it hurt? And why does it hurt so much sometimes?

After all, we can agree, most of the time, most of the stuff we get criticized for, doesn’t really matter all THAT much.

Sure, sometimes it does matter. For example, to be repeatedly criticized about one’s job performance might be an indication that your employment status may be in jeopardy. Or to be regularly or harshly criticized by our romantic partner about how we choose to interact with them might be an indication that we’re on the fast track to being single. It’s not the case that criticism NEVER matters.

But that kind of criticism usually builds up to a boiling point, after which something happens— we get fired, we get dumped. That kind of criticism is corrective, it has an actionable POINT. That’s constructive criticism, useful feedback; that’s not what I’m talking about here.

I’m talking about the kind of criticism that tends to get offered by people who don’t seem to have any stake in criticizing you.

Nor do they seem to have any interest in helping you make any kind of improvement.

Nor do they seem to care whether the impact of their criticism knocks you off your game and makes it impossible to focus on what’s right about you, because they’ve brought your attention to what’s wrong with you.

Most of the criticism we get of this variety doesn’t matter. It comes from sources that don’t matter, people who don’t matter, who have opinions that don’t matter.

And yet, it still hurts. It hijacks our mental focus by magnifying our real or imagined flaws. It makes us insecure, afraid to speak our minds. It inhibits us from being ourselves because we’re afraid of what someone might find to attack.

It sucks. But our psychological evolution, as a species, does offer some answers.

Criticism hurts us mostly because we, as human beings, have learned to overvalue the opinions of other people. It’s an artifact of the socialization process that needed to happen in order for us to evolve to cohesive societies of human beings that got along and weren’t always trying to kill each other and mate with each others’ life partners.

Understand, this is mostly a good thing. The trait of valuing other humans’ opinions— and feeling bad when we violated other peoples’ expectations— was selected for by Mother Nature, and thank goodness it was. It’s important that we get along with our fellow humans, for the most part.

However, in internalizing and conditioning this mostly positive trait of valuing others’ opinions, we forgot how to nurture true self-esteem.

The esteem of others will not, cannot, ever take the place of authentic self-esteem. The reputation we acquire with others only holds for those others. Even if the ENTIRE WORLD thinks you’re awesome, in other words, you still have the task of convincing YOURSELF you’re awesome. 

It was in becoming over reliant on the opinions of others, and forgetting how to nurture self-esteem, that we also developed this acute vulnerability to the criticism of others. Which makes sense, when you think about it: if others are our primary source of esteem, they can yank that esteem at any time— which leaves us devastated, because we didn’t work at developing something to put in its place if it disappeared.

So, what now?

If criticism destroys us, it should be a loud and clear wake-up call: We need to develop authentic, unshakeable, internally-generated self-esteem.

Society isn’t going to help us with that. We have to choose that on our own.

Part of which involves learning to keep non-constructive criticism in its proper place: as an interesting artifact of human socialization. No more, no less.

Screw ‘em, in other words.

I have a feeling we’ll be returning to this subject on UseYourDamnSkills.com.

 

You are your behaviors, not your intentions.

Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say: to other people, you are your behaviors, not your intentions.

It’s an inconvenient fact, I’ll grant you, made unavoidable by the fact that we human beings are ill-equipped to read minds.

Now, I realize this comes as a shock to a subset of my readers, who seem thoroughly convinced that they can, in fact, read minds.

For that matter, if often seems to be the case that people assume they know whats going on inside other peoples’ heads. They form judgments about what motivates other people; they leap to conclusions about what other people want or need; sometimes they’re so confident in their abilities that they actually label themselves “psychic” or “telekinetic.”

(Because labels make things more official and convincing, see.)

A lot of us put a lot of stock in our non-existent ability to read others’ minds.

This leads, of course, to a lot of us feeling misunderstood and invisible when other people shockingly fail to accurately discern our intentions, motivations, or needs.

I’ll ruin the suspense: you can’t read other peoples’ minds. Even if it really, really, really feels like you can. Even if you feel SO SURE you know what they’re thinking: you don’t.

What you can do, however, is observe other peoples’ behaviors, and form hypotheses about what’s going on in their heads.

Taking educated guesses as to what other people are thinking, feeling, and needing— that’s a good thing, an adaptive thing. That’s a thing that requires sensitivity to others’ reactions and cues, it requires us to pay attention to other peoples’ contexts and histories, it requires us to hone our ability to observe and ask “what if.”

Observation and the generation of hypotheses are at the core of this wacky thing we call the “scientific method.”

Thing is, though? We can’t allow ourselves to get too attached to our own hypotheses. Once we decide that a hypothesis is true, because we’ve decided its sufficiently supported by the data we have available, and we stop trying to test that hypothesis? Then we’re no longer scientists.

What differentiates science from superstition is the willingness to keep questioning, even those things we’re pretty sure are true.

The thing is, just like we can’t read other peoples’ minds? They can’t read yours, either.

Understand, they, just like you, think they can read your mind— but what they’re really doing is exactly what you’re doing: they’re observing your behavior and making inferences.

Those inferences may be accurate or wildly inaccurate, because—here’s another thing some people may have difficulty swallowing— sometimes, for whatever reason, our behaviors don’t match up with our intentions.

I KNOW. Blows your mind, right?

But, like it or not, in the absence of actual mind-reading ability, all any of us have to go on in understanding other peoples’ motivations, intentions, needs— that is to say, understanding other people? Is their behavior. What they say (communicating is a behavior), what they do, what they don’t do— that’s the entire body of data we have to work with.

It’s also the only data other people trying to understand you have to work with.

All of which is to say: if you don’t wish to be misunderstood, unfairly and inaccurately judged, held responsible for things you don’t actually think, need, want, or intend? Then it’s really important to take your own behavior seriously.

What does your behavior communicate to the world about who you are? What motivates you? What’s important or unimportant to you? What signals are you sending by what you say and do— or what you refrain from saying and doing?

We can’t read minds. So when we’re trying to understand other people, or other people are trying to understand us, we’re gonna get it wrong sometimes. It’s inevitable— it’s going to happen. We can’t keep misunderstandings from happening.

What we can do is do everything we can to make sure our behavior is aligned with who we really are and what we really want.

Which just so happens, not incidentally, to be the basis of genuine self-esteem.

Believe it or not, there is an Internet full of people hoping you’ll do exactly what the title of this post says— don’t actually read their work, just have an emotional reaction to their title. They’d also appreciate it if you “liked” and “forwarded” it, if it’s not too much trouble.

That’s kind of the world in which we live. Content creators (writers, producers, social media strategists, all the people who actually write the words in these blog posts and quote pictures we forward around our Facebooks) often don’t churn out their products so they’ll actually get read, or thought about, or, God forbid, somehow change peoples’ lives. They put things on the Internet to build brand awareness; to gain attention; to get as popular as is practical without you catching on that that’s what they’re doing.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. There’s nothing wrong with building brand awareness on the Internet. Hell, that’s part of what this blog, and what my professional Facebook page are all about. The more people who see and like my things on Facebook, the more people I have paying attention to the things I say, the more lives I can positively affect. That is consistent with my personal and professional life goals.

That said: it’s really, really important, as we like and love and forward and repost things we come across online, that we’re actually reading and digesting what we’re forwarding and commenting upon and giving a “thumbs up.”

Why?

Well, for starters, we can end up looking kind of silly if we don’t read something, but instead just post a gut-level emotional reaction to its title in a comments section.

For example, last Tuesday, my blog post was titled, “Suck it up and mourn your losses.” Those who actually read the article know that my title was actually making fun of people who approach loss and mourning with a “suck it up” attitude; that, instead, we have to give ourselves time, space, and compassion to mourn our losses, even the little ones. But there was a subset of people who chose to comment on that blog entry, not realizing that its title was tongue-in-cheek; and, consequently, ended up informing the world, via their comments, that they were the type of people who couldn’t be bothered to read past the title (but could be bothered to post a comment).

But another, really important reason we need to be carefully reading and digesting the things we like and forward and repost online is because our self-esteem is inextricably entwined with the degree to which we think for ourselves as opposed to just parroting someone else’s thoughts or views.

“Self esteem,” when we break it down, is not a complicated concept. It is the esteem in which we hold ourselves. The reputation we acquire of ourselves. The opinions we form about what kind of a person we are, what we deserve, what we should and shouldn’t tolerate for ourselves.

Our self-esteem is important, because if we develop low self-esteem— if we come to dislike and disrespect ourselves— we will be resistant to doing the things we need to do to improve our lives and reach our goals.

Nobody is particularly inclined to work hard on behalf of someone we dislike or disrespect. People with low self-esteem settle for less than they deserve; they aren’t motivated to use their talents and skills; and, since they often feel they don’t “deserve” happiness, won’t do the things that need to be done to become and remain happy.

Self-esteem has many components, but one of its most basic principles is: our brains pay attention to how we behave. We observe ourselves all the time, and those observations inform the esteem in which we hold ourselves, the reputation we acquire with ourselves.

If we behave in ways that we wouldn’t respect in others, if we behave in ways that violate our own values system, it takes a toll on our self-esteem, whether we know it or not in the moment.

Actually reading and thinking about things, especially the things that are shoved at us online, is one of those behaviors our brains pay attention to. People who struggle with self-esteem distrust their own judgment, so they often look to others to tell them how to think, what to think, what to believe. They’re immensely relieved when they come across something online that seems to remove the necessity of actually thinking— something they can just like, or forward, or comment on, even though they’ve only read the post title.

Your brain notices your choices, whether to think or not think. Your self-esteem registers it.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I often go out of my way to challenge you. I don’t just write snappy titles that lead to easily-swallowed platitudes. Half of my blog entries make people angry enough to write me emails or leave nasty comments, some of which are reflective of my blog’s actual content, some of which seem to be knee-jerk reactions to their titles. But my goal, always, whether you agree with what I have to say or not, is to get you to THINK— because in getting you to think, rather than just existing on autopilot, I’m forcing you to perform one of the basic tasks that self-esteem requires.

Yes, yes, you’re welcome.

Now. Let’s go see how many commenters actually think I meant the title of this blog entry literally. If you read this far, way to go— we’re in this fight for self-esteem together.