Last week a client told me our coaching sessions had been more effective for her than years of therapy or EMDR. I almost immediately dissociated.
Which was interesting. Because I can receive criticism pretty easily.
Praise? Apparently my nervous system would like to leave the building.
And it made me realise something I think is really important:
External criticism only really gets under your skin when some part of you already believes it.
Otherwise you can hear it and think: Well, that’s interesting. What’s for lunch.
But the same is true of praise. Someone can tell you you’re brilliant, beautiful, talented, kind, successful, whatever… And if that doesn’t match the way you see yourself? It just sort of… bounces.
Why is praise so hard to hear when criticism is so easy?
What my reaction made me realise was that my almost-dissociation wasn’t really about the compliment. It was about the gap between what she saw in me and what I still sometimes see in myself.
Because I spent so much of my life with low self-worth – and it’s really only been the past decade that I’ve stopped believing that story. And sometimes BIG praise seems to take me back to that hollow place. Sometimes my brain just pings back to the old habitual ways of thinking that I am not good enough, not credible – and definitely not the best. Despite all the evidence I have after 7 years as a coach – and despite someone actually saying it To My Face.
Healing doesn’t mean you never hear the criticism
I suspect my brain will always do this at times. And that’s ok. Because I don’t think healing means becoming so confident that criticism never bothers you.
Or collecting enough praise to finally believe you’re good enough.
It’s changing the internal picture of yourself so other people’s opinions stop having quite so much power. And to keep going with that every time you fall back into old patterns. Honestly that’s the real resilience here – when those patterns rear their head again and you can experience them without either feeling shame for their resurgence or even for a second taking them seriously.
What do you do when someone says something wonderful about you?
If someone says something wonderful about you and your immediate instinct is to dismiss it, minimise it or explain why they’re wrong… that’s useful information.
Maybe the person who needs convincing isn’t them. Maybe there is a part of you that still needs to catch up with your current reality instead of being stuck somewhere darker and more painful from years ago.
Unwinding the impact of the past in resilience coaching
There is a reason why ‘unwinding the impact of the past’ is one of my 5 pillars of resilience coaching. Because until we break the ties with who we used to be and how we used to see ourselves they keep us caught in that old, lesser version. And because our brains are so often running out of date programming about who we are and what’s possible for us – and so much changes when we just end that programming and start focusing instead on the new one. In my case it is: I am now the kind of coaching who helps clients get incredible results when other types of therapies have failed. Oooooh goosebumps (and a twinge of fear) saying that out loud.
So back I go to the starting point of undoing my resistance to praise. Well not the starting point – another branch on the tree of continuously undoing former programming on not being good enough that I no longer want for me.
Anyone else joining me?
Book your free resilience coaching intro call and let’s help you get free of those out of date narratives too. It’s time to really BELIEVE in yourself and what you’re capable of. That process is much more straightforward and scientific than you might think.
