So as long as you're addicted to praise and addicted to fantasies in life,
you're going to criticize yourself and you're going to keep attracting
criticism. It's there to get you to set authentic goals,
be authentic and help you grow. Hi everyone.
This is Dr. John Demartini.
My special vignette today is on the topic of criticism
and I'd be willing to bet that everybody who's listening to this has had moments
in their life where they've been wounded by criticism,
or at least thought they were.
And I think that everybody has facing that somewhere in their life from
childhood all the way to, I always say from cradle to casket.
So I'd like to address criticism from an angle that you may never have thought
about. So get your pens and paper out on this one and think this through,
because I'll try to do it, and I may have to get deeper on this one.
First of all in your life, your maximum growth and development,
will be at the border of being supported and challenged.
Now think that, I want you to write that down.
Maximum growth and development will be at the border of both support and
challenge. You need both support and challenge to grow.
Let me give you an example. Every human being lives by a set of priorities,
a set of values,
things that are most important to least important in their life.
And they're filtering their reality according to those values and anything that
they perceive is supporting their values they tend to open up to,
and they become vulnerable to, and it's like primitive,
biochemistry goes on the brain.
We can stimulate dopamine and oxytocin and encephalon's and endorphins and
vasopressin and serotonin.
And we tend to create an addiction and a pleasure and a bonding and a
fantasy about taking that in that support. We like that.
But the problem with the support side and the praise side, if you will,
is that we minimize ourselves and become juveniley dependent on it.
So if somebody does nothing but support you support you,
support you and praise you and acknowledge you,
you end up becoming dependent on them like an addict.
And you end up having a situation where you become juveniley dependent and you
can't stand on your own two feet,
you become more juveniley dependent the more people support and enable you.
It's called enabling and rescuing people.
So people who are looking for praise all the time,
actually undermine their growth. Now, the other side,
when somebody challenges your values, you create a sympathetic response,
a fight or flight response, tend to withdraw from it, close down on it,
create cortisol and histamine and prolactin.
And you get to epinephrine and norepinephrine and you have substance P,
you tend to withdraw from it. But at the same time,
you become precociously independent,
and you tend to rise up and get stronger from the challenge.
If you get challenged without support, you get into precocious independence,
you get support without challenge in your perception,
you get juvenile dependence. But if you get a nice balance, you get stability.
That's why maximum growth and development occurs at the border of support and
challenge. You need both. And so support could be in the form of praise.
Challenge can be form of criticism. So criticism, believe it or not,
is an absolutely essential component of growth. Without it you don't grow.
Now. Here's where I want you to think and get a little deeper.
And you're going to have to wrap your head around this because most people
really have to stop and reflect on this to get this. And then from now on,
you need to stop and look at your life and see how this is working.
The moment you get addicted and search for praise is when you attract
the criticism. The second you get search for praise,
and you get puffed up cause people praise you and you feel, 'Oh my God,
I feel really good. I feel really happy.' That's when the criticizer comes in.
The criticizer is trying to break your addiction to praise.
And you might think, 'Well, why are they there? Why do they have to be there?
Why can't I just get praise?' You don't grow there.
You stay juveniley dependent and you get into a fantasy.
You build fantasies by support. You break your fantasies by the criticism.
And it makes you go back and get into things,
It's the same as success and failure.
People have this fantasy that I want to be successful and never a failure,
but the success makes you do low priority things,
cause you think 'I'm successful.
I can relax.' And failure makes you get back to high priority things.
You need a combination of both in order to keep you steady on your mission.
I always say that let neither pleasure nor pain interfere with pursuit of
purpose.
A purpose is much more powerful than the success or failure or the happy or the
sad or the pleasure of the pain, the support and the challenge,
praise and reprimands. You need both to grow.
That's why your life is filled with both. That's why in your life,
you'll find out if your mother was overly protective and supportive,
your father probably became the critical one.
Or if both your parents were over protective and supportive,
your brother kept beating you up.
Or if your whole family was over protecting you and supporting you,
then you ended up having the bully come into your life.
You must have both to grow.
And that's why the universe keeps bringing both into your life.
So trying to run from one and seek the other is futility.
Searching for praise without reprimand, searching for ease,
without difficulty searching for support without challenge, is futile.
The desire for that which is unavailable and the desire to avoid that which is
unavoidable is the source of human suffering. So it's wise to embrace both. Now,
here's how to deal with it if all of a sudden somebody criticizes you,
this really helps the process. The first question you do is,
when somebody criticizes you, you stop and reflect;
What specifically is it about what they said
bothers you or hurts? Okay. Get really clear on it.
Then ask yourself; where and when do I, or have I said,
or done a similar thing or the same thing? That means own it.
Cause until you can own what it is,
because the reason why the criticism on the outside is hurting so much,
is because we have some part of us that's feeling guilty in the past where we've
done this and we're doing,
and we're being reminded of our wounds and what our actions are.
So if we asked where and when have I done the same action,
who have I done it to, who's seen me do it? And own it.
That's the first step.
Because what you do is you realize that whenever you challenge a person's
values, they're going to be critical. Whenever you support somebody's values,
they're going to be praising. That's normal, that's human behavior.
To ever expect a person not to be critical at times is futility. It's crazy.
Every human being has both a praiser and a reprimander,
or a positive and a negative side.
So if you expect them to be praising you all the time and never criticizing,
that's delusional. So if you're supporting their values,
they'll probably open up to you and praise you. If you challenge their values,
they're probably criticizing you. So if you see somebody that's criticizing,
you ask where and when have I done this? You might even want to go and ask,
what role am I playing in making sure this happens?
Am I addicted to praise and needing that to bring me back down into reality?
And then you want to ask, how is it serving me?
How specifically is this criticism helping me? Is it making me self reflect?
Is it making me a better communicator?
Is it making me be aware that I'm projecting my values onto people and not
really caring about their values and not being a good communicator?
Are they helping me learn how to sell and how to communicate more effectively?
Are they making me stop and become more intelligent and maybe go and really make
sure I'm doing and saying things that are accurate? How's it serving me?
How's it helping me in my spiritual quest?
How has it helped me in my mind development? How's helped me in my career,
my financial development, my relationship, my social life,
my physical health and my quest in life?
Once you ask that and find enough benefits there,
you can actually say thank you. If you look in your life,
some of the greatest growth that ever occurred in your life,
occurred when you were challenged and ridiculed and put down or criticized,
et cetera, some of the greatest growth came out of that.
And you can get stopped and stagnant by getting praise all the time.
The addiction to praise is what makes you attract the criticism.
I keep telling people that and they keep thinking, 'well, I want praise.
I don't want that.' You need both. You're doing it to yourself. And by the way,
no one will ever criticize you as much as you.
And the moment you set up a fantasy for your life,
that's not really aligned to your own values you'll beat yourself up with your
own ABCDs and negativity. You're going to be critical of yourself.
No one will ever criticize you as much as you've done yourself. If you stopped,
looked carefully.
So as long as you're addicted to praise and addicted to fantasies in life,
you're going to criticize yourself and you're going to keep attracting
criticism. It's there to get you to set authentic goals,
be authentic and help you grow.
I know that most people will keep thinking of positive thinking, they go, 'Oh,
I want to get rid of all my negativity and pop rubber bands and try to escape
that and go off to only positive world and live in a fantasy.' That's not the
way you grow. That's not how you become a master of your life. So,
another question you want to ask is,
at the exact moment when I'm being criticized, who is praising me?
They may not be in the same space, but they're always at the same time.
They may be somebody at work and maybe somebody at your house and maybe friends,
maybe on the internet, maybe somebody on the telephone.
But if you look carefully, you're never getting one without the other.
And if you're feeling puffed up and all high,
because somebody is praising you and you're becoming dependent on them,
just know the criticism is helping you break your little babyhood and helping
you grow and maturing you and making you more independent.
It's the challenges in life and the criticisms in life that probably makes the
entrepreneur more so than the person that supports.
People who get overprotected over supported in life usually go work for other
people.
People that take on the challenges and criticism become the entrepreneurs.
I watch that every weekend in the Breakthrough Experience show up that way.
So when you see the criticism and you experience it, ask those questions;
Where have I done it? When have I done it? Who have I done it to?
Who sees it in me? And keep doing it until you own it as much as them.
Find out how it serves you. Find out who's doing the opposite,
who's praising at that moment, put it back into balance.
And you'll say thank you. Because it's never what happens to you.
It's your perception and decisions and actions that may make it happen,
what happens. So if you actually go in there and follow those little questions,
awaken your mind to the balance, you'll see that you're here to grow.
Be thankful for the criticisms and the praises.
You need both in order to be a master of your life.
Thank you for joining me for this presentation today.
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