From the course: Reframing: The Power of Changing Your Perspective

Beating the critics

From the course: Reframing: The Power of Changing Your Perspective

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Beating the critics

- In thinking about all of the tools I have learned over the years around quieting the inner critic around feedback, the most powerful of all is to get in touch with the questions you're asking yourself and reframe them from why to what. In this lesson, I'll walk you through how to use reframing questions to exorcize those feedback demons. Until you stop and reflect, you often don't even notice the horrible and negative questions you berate yourself with every single day. And they often begin with the word why. While why has an important place in analysis and explanations, you don't need to ask yourself why all the time when it comes to your behaviors. Executive coaches use questions as the foundation for helping clients think about their circumstances and roadblocks from a new lens. And the secret is that the most thought-provoking questions often begin with the word what. When you find yourself stuck in a spiral of self-criticism, you can quickly change the line of thinking you're on just be reframing your questions. Instead of, "Why did I do that, why me?" try "What happened?" "What about this situation is specific to me?" "What role did I play?" Not bad, right? You can already see how your mind starts to open up and more feels possible. When you get a piece of feedback that isn't quite sitting with you, ask yourself a question like, "What was actually said?" This allows you to explore the objective facts. You can then unpack what was said and consider where there might be some value in the feedback you received. You can also triangulate with what you just heard with other pieces of feedback you might have heard in the past and decide how you want to respond based on this more complete picture. This works especially well for the dreaded imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome preys on feedback that is about something you're already self-conscious about. You think to yourself, "See, I knew I wasn't fooling anyone. "I'm not cut out for this." Pause. Ask yourself a reframing question. What happened? And then consider what else is true. Oftentimes in stopping for a moment to explore the other data we've received, we find that we've actually gotten quite a lot of positive feedback as well. Now, to start practicing this, download the exercise file for this lesson. You're going to hate me, but I'm going to ask you to go back and think about a time when you didn't handle receiving a piece of feedback as well as you would've liked to. Maybe you were defensive. Maybe you were dismissive. Whatever it was, you've been overthinking it. Once you have a piece of feedback in mind, write down three of the why questions you commonly ask yourself when your inner critic is going strong. Then rewrite these as what questions and take a few minutes to answer each one. For example, "Why is my boss always criticizing me?" can be reframed as, "What is my boss actually telling me?" Go for it. There is no wrong answer. And you can use reframing questions over and over any time you find yourself stuck in a place where you're down on yourself.

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