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Critics - VIP Audio

Hi, this is AJ. Welcome to this month’s VIP lesson, the topic this month ‘Critics’. Critics, a very important topic, a topic that I know holds back a lot of people, scares a lot of people, even if they don’t admit it. A lot of people won’t admit that they fear criticism, that they fear critics and, yet, all of us really at some level have this fear. Some of us have it very powerfully, very strongly, and it takes some time to get over it. So let’s talk about this.

First of all, what is a critic, in case you don’t know this word? A ‘critic’ is well…the really direct meaning is a critic is someone who criticizes. So to criticize is to say something negative about something or someone. A critic is someone who says negative things about other people. That’s sort of the most direct meaning.

This word can have different meanings in different situations, however. So, in a very general way, it can have kind of a negative feeling. Oh, he’s such a critic, if you say it like that. He’s such a critic or he’s just a critic. That’s someone who maybe is quite negative always criticizing other people all the time, always has something kind of negative to say, but it can also be an actual job description like a professional critic.

This is someone who writes, for example, in a newspaper about movies, like a movie critic, so a movie critic. What they do is they go watch movies and then they review it.

They say oh, this movie was terrible or sometimes they say this movie was very good.

So in that situation especially, a critic is not always someone who says something bad.

They might actually say something quite good. They might say oh, I loved this movie.

The movie is fantastic. So that’s a movie critic. There are music critics. So there are professional music critics. They write about music and they decide this is good, this is not good.

Today, I’m talking really more about the general meaning not the professional meaning.

I’m talking more about the general idea of people who criticize and we all have these people in our lives. The reason this is such an important topic is that, in my opinion, fear of criticism is one of the major obstacles, one of the major things that stops us from achieving success in our life.

When I say success I mean any kind of success. It depends on how you define it. I’m not just talking about making a bunch of money or something, which is one idea of success, but I mean just standing out. I mean becoming good at something, innovating, achieving something more than what you are now or who you are now and this fear of criticism is such a major, major, major fear that stops so many people and many times we don’t even realize it’s there.

I’ll give you an example I use many times, which is this idea of, you know, people are going to judge you. We have this fear that’s been put into us probably from school and many other ways, media, lots of other things, this fear that people are going to be judging us and the true problem with this is that it’s true. I mean, in fact, there are people out there who will criticize you and the more successful you become, the more noticeable you become and therefore the more you will be criticized.

This happens in business. It happens with health and fitness. It happens if you’re an artist. It doesn’t matter what it is. The more successful you become with something the more likely you are to be criticized and the criticism gets stronger and more vocal and more loud as you become more successful. See, if you’re not successful at all nobody says anything usually, right? If you’re just kind of average and not really doing anything, not trying to do anything, not trying to achieve anything, not trying to do anything different, well then you’re not noticed and therefore nobody says much, but if you take a step to try to be different and do something more that’s when people notice.

A lot of times people will criticize out of jealousy. Sometimes people just do it out of habit. The important part for you is to realize that it’s going to happen, but not to fear it and to know how to handle it. See, a lot of people don’t try things simply because of this fear. A lot of people will make excuses. They’ll say oh no, I can’t do it or this or that because they don’t want to admit that they’re afraid of criticism. I was like that myself.

So for a long time as an English teacher I taught in schools. I taught in universities. I taught in language centers, language institutes, lots of different areas and I had a lot of frustrations. You probably know my feelings about normal English teaching. So I had a lot of frustrations and I wanted to teach in my own way. I had this idea of having my own school or my own teaching program and eventually I had this idea of I’ll start my own company, but from when I had the idea to when I actually did it there was a large gap of time and one the problems, one of the things that stopped me was a fear of criticism and I didn’t even realize it.

I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t even admit to myself that I was afraid of this and, yet, when I finally started looking at myself and asking why haven’t I done this yet, why am I still working for these companies and at these schools where I’m not happy, why am I still doing it I realized I was a bit afraid of criticism. My fear was that I would fail. Yes, that’s another fear I’ve talked about in the past, a fear of failure, but the biggest part of that fear was that after failing I would be criticized somehow. My family would be oh, see AJ.

You’re always doing these crazy things. You know we told you. You should stay with this good job. Why did you do this? So this was going in my head.

Now, my family actually they’re wonderful and they never would actually do that, but it doesn’t matter. This was the fear in my head and, also, I feared criticism from other teachers, other schools, because I knew that when I was being more safe I could try my crazy ideas in my class. Nobody really knew about them only my students, but I knew that if I put them out in the world publicly and talked very publicly about it I knew that most traditional English teachers would not like it, not like what I was doing and would criticize me. I knew that school administrators and people like that would likely criticize me and they have, but of course it doesn’t matter anymore, but that fear was there.

So the first step, I guess, if we want to be practical again is that you must look at something in your life that you want to achieve and you really must identify your fear of criticism and you have to be honest about it. You have to say am I afraid of being criticized. Are there certain people I’m afraid are going to criticize me. You also can look at areas in your life where you’re already getting criticism and you need to look at how do you react to it. What’s the normal way you react?

Normally, when we get criticized we react defensively. ‘Defensively’ means in a defensive way. It means you defend yourself. So if someone says AJ, your teaching methods are terrible, they stink, well in the past I might get angry and feel like I have to attack them back, right? It would really upset me and so then I’m constantly worried about what everyone is saying. One person criticizes me in one way and then someone else criticizes in another way and I’m constantly responding and trying to defend myself all the time.

The problem with this is it takes so much energy. All your energy becomes focused on answering the different critics and it’s horrible. The problem with that is then you stop focusing on doing a great job, being creative, doing what you love, instead you’re focused on answering all of these critics all the time. What will eventually happen is this can drain your success. It can weaken your success. It cuts your confidence down. All these things are horrible. So let’s be really practical, how can you handle critics?

The first thing you have to admit is that it’s going to happen. The more successful you become the more criticism you will get. There will be critics out there, so you have to accept that first and not be afraid of it anymore, just accept it. The second thing is how can you handle it, what do you do? So here are a few very practical strategies.

The first one is to fire them when you can. There’s a term called ‘haters’ that’s kind of a slang term now. A hater is someone who’s always saying nasty, negative things. They’re always saying hateful things about other people. Well, in some respects you have control over some of the critics and you can just get rid of them. We do this in our VIP Club all the time. Well, not all the time. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes we do.

If we get a member who comes in and they’re criticizing other members, they’re always complaining, they’re always causing problems, I don’t care about whatever money they’re paying, we just fire them. We say thank you, but you’re not for us. You really don’t belong in this group. You don’t understand what we’re doing. So good luck, find another teacher and goodbye because I don’t want to waste all my energy and I don’t want our other members to be drained by those kinds of people.

So on our regular general forums in the VIP Club we just fire them. So when you have that ability, do it. And if you have a business you can fire some customers, it’s okay.

Some customers are really difficult and demanding and they’re just criticizing and they’re not fair. They seem like they don’t even like you and you really don’t like them, so just get rid of them. It’s not worth it. The money is not worth it, just say goodbye. So whenever you have the power to do so, you can say goodbye to critics.

Now, if someone gives you just some nice helpful advice, that’s fine, but critics usually are not very respectful and they don’t make you feel better. Someone who’s being helpful and trying to help you they build your confidence. You’ll feel more confident after getting their advice. If someone is making you feel less confident, that’s a sign that you can get rid of them.

So, number one, fire them. Fire the critics when you can. If they’re in your own company or in your own organization and you have the ability to, get rid of them. If you can’t actually fire them, you can at least avoid them. That would be the next step. If it’s not possible to totally get rid of them, you can at least limit the amount of interaction you have with them.

If you have like a Facebook page, for example, and somebody is always saying nasty things to you and leaving nasty comments, I’m surprised that people actually do this, even to their friends, but I’ve seen it, just get rid of them. De-friend them or un-friend them, whatever it’s called, or you can hid them from your facebook page. If you have a blog you can just delete the comments. Moderate your comments.

We moderate the comments on our website. If someone has a positive suggestion or a problem that’s genuine and real we’ll leave it on there, that’s fine, but if someone is just being nasty like some other English teaching saying you suck, we hate you, we just delete it. We’re not going to deal with those people.

A third thing to do to kind of balance the critics is to focus on the people who really love what you’re doing, you’re fans. Everyone has them. This, number one, is a great business strategy. You cannot please everyone, so who do you want to focus on. Focus on the people who love what you’re doing. This is also true just in your own job. Focus on working with people who love what you do, who love your ideas, people that you love working with, people who build your confidence and you build theirs, then you’re building on strengths and that will accelerate, that will speed up your success.

It will speed up your improvement. It’s a much, much, much more effective strategy than worrying about the critics and trying to defend against them and answer what they’re saying. That will just waste your time and it’s horrible. It doesn’t work. We have this idea that we have to correct all our weaknesses, we don’t. It’s okay to have weaknesses. We all have weaknesses. Instead, focus on the people who love you. Focus on your fans.

Focus on building that group and making it stronger and stronger and stronger. It’s a much better strategy.

Finally, you can kind of welcome the criticism. Eventually, as your confidence gets a little stronger, you can actually welcome it and see it as a sign of success, see it as a good sign. Seth Godin the Internet Marketing guy talks about this. He says that the worst possible thing is no criticism at all because that means you’re just being ordinary.

Nobody cares. So he’s saying that in business the best thing in the world is to have people who love you and others who hate you, to create strong opinions and that companies that do that are actually much more successful because there’s a passion.

There’s an energy there.

So, if you’re getting criticized in a strong way and it’s getting stronger and stronger, see that as a good sign. See that wow. I’m creating a stronger emotional reaction. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that is a sign that I’m achieving success, that I’m reaching deeper, that I am connecting more deeply to people, that I’m getting a stronger reaction.

Now, if every single person hates you, that might be a bad sign, but usually that’s not the case. Usually if you have people who are very strongly attacking you, on the other hand you have other people who now love you even more and more.

That has certainly been the case with Effortless English. We get more and more stronger attacks from traditional teachers in schools and people who just love grammar and all that kind of stuff. Those attacks get stronger and stronger and louder and louder, but at the same time we’re getting more and more and more members who really love what we’re doing and who are just saying oh, we love Effortless English. I’m getting such great results. So I focus on them and I laugh about these other guys because they’re just complaining and criticizing me and we’re building a really great program and having a good time.

So you can eventually learn to just enjoy that and the final thing you can learn is just to laugh about it. Eventually you can kind of see the critics for what they are. Many critics are not successful themselves. They’re frustrated. They are afraid to take a chance themselves and so instead of doing something themselves they sit back and they criticize and say negative things about other people who are actually trying. While they can be safe and pretend to be an expert or pretend to be important, but they’re not actually doing anything because they’re afraid to.

So eventually you’ll be able to see that in people. Every critic is not like that, but many are and eventually you’ll be able to see that and you can just laugh about it. Whatever they say, even if it’s really mean and nasty, you can kind of laugh about it and say oh yeah, I see. This poor person, they’re just afraid.

So that’s our little quick strategy. We’ll talk more about it the commentary, more practical ways to deal with criticism and to handle it and to grow from it. All right, I’ll see you in the commentary. Bye-bye.