The Critics

​I have a slight obsession with Brene Brown. I love her books, but I prefer to watch her talks on YouTube because her sense of humor, spunk, and wit are second to none. When she talks, it's like my ADHD runs and hides.

​While there are many essential topics she translates into digestible information, my most recent favorite was addressing critics. She says that when you go into the arena, you can expect to get dirty. Your clothes get torn. Your knuckles get scraped. You get the wind knocked out of you. You might even break a rib or two. So she decided that when it comes to criticism, she’s only going to listen to it if it comes from other people who are in the arena with her. 

So what is the difference between the people in there with you and those sitting in the stands? The people in the arena give advice and suggestions. They offer some sort of guidance that they acquired from their own time spent in the arena. The people in the stands? They commentate, speculate, assume and decide. Very rarely do they ever say, “Hey, how can I get in there with you? What can I do to help?

Among those people in the stands is where you will find your critics, so you need to know how to deal with them. In my opinion, this is where Brene Brown really gets it right. To sum it up, she says that you know your critics are going to be in the stands and you probably know the types of things they are going to say, so you save them a seat right next to your self-doubt. Then you tell them all, "I see you, I hear you, but I'm going to do this anyway."