Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially

Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement—along with a good cup of coffee!—to start the day. Today we discuss "criticizing."

Hopefully, the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter along to others who you think would benefit from the content.

Criticizing

I’m going to go out on a limb here—or not:

• People don’t like to be criticized.

OK, so the above should be pretty obvious. However, that doesn’t mean that we all take heed of the obvious and modify our actions accordingly. For example:

• Have you ever been overly critical of your children’s performance in some aspect of their life?
• Have you ever been overly critical of how your spouse handled a situation?
• Have you ever been overly critical of the decisions a friend made?
• Have you ever been overly critical of how your boss is managing you or others?

I’m guessing you get the picture. We all know that criticizing does NOT go over well; however, our all-too-human nature has us falling back into the criticizing trap more than we would like.

I’d like to offer a potential way to help in this area:

• Stop reacting and start responding.

What’s the difference? Simple: About three seconds! When we fall prey to our knee-jerk reaction to respond, we often offer criticism. Conversely, when we pause for three seconds, we can often change the criticism to a constructive conversation. Implementing this one simple change can be incredibly powerful.

That brings us to this week’s question:

• Are you criticizing others?

Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning.  

Have a great week!

Blog post from this past week:

Monday Morning Motivation - Pessimistic