I Can Remember All The Negative Feedback People Have Given Me
You likely clicked on this post because you’ve been called overly self-critical. You’ve been told you’re too hard on yourself, that you’re humble, that you don’t give yourself enough credit. You’re probably an amazing person as well, you’re just not seeing it right now. And if you’re anything like me, you may well be neurodivergent as well.
Why Neurodivergent People Internalize Criticism
When you’re someone who is neurodivergent, you’ve grown up knowing that you’re different in some way. This might be something you’ve ultimately ended up comfortable with, I personally love who I am at this point in my life, but as a kid all we want is to fit in, to be the same as other people, and anything that is different is automatically bad.
This means that we get reprimanded more, told more about what we’re doing wrong. In fact, Dr William Dodson, an expert in ADHD, has estimated that children with ADHD have received 20,000 more negative or corrective comments by age ten. If you’re someone with dyslexia you have almost definitely had work covered in corrections from people who didn’t understand that your brain works better with other things.
If you’re autistic you’ve actively absorbed those corrections to mask better, to appear more neurotypical. Regardless of your neurotype, you’ve received so many negative reprimands that are just because of how your brain works and have put so much effort into trying to improve yourself so that you won’t receive those reprimands again.
Of course this then means we start to self-police, to notice when we fall short of “The Rules” and critique ourselves for our failings.
And of course this doesn’t have to be just in terms of masking or appearing neurotypical. We do actually kinda struggle to compartmentalise so this self-criticism seeps in all over the place. Often we have these completely unrealistic expectations of ourselves and berate ourselves for not living up to those standards when really if someone we loved was in a similar situation we’d be appalled if anyone spoke to them like that.
I know first hand how easy it is to overthink feedback that can send us into a spiral.
The Pattern of Over-Focusing on Flaws
This is something that I find incredibly common among my leadership coaching clients. I’m very lucky to work with some amazing people who are recognised for how brilliant they are, but the one person that doesn’t realise how brilliant they are is themselves.
One client of mine is a new manager who has been in the position for about a year. I noticed a pattern when we were talking. They would tell me a story that would often have as part of it someone paying them quite frankly an excellent compliment, but it was phrased as a bit of side information in the story, something glossed over, something not important.
They literally would share things like: “My manager said I handled it exactly how they would have but I think I should have taken a bit more time to do it a little differently”. Or “they said I did an excellent job at this but I think for next time I should do”.
When I stopped and listened to the things my client was telling me, it ended up painting the picture of someone incredibly trusted by their manager, doing an excellent job in a difficult circumstance and building a reputation as someone incredibly competent and capable. But everything they heard? The things they could be doing better instead.
In fact at one point I asked them: “Did you just realise you told me your boss said you did a fantastic job at that?” and they gave me a guilty laugh as they admitted “yeah, I guess I did”.
They’re not the only client I’ve had that has done this. I often do strengths assessments with my clients so they can understand what it is they’re really great at. These strength assessments have a page and a half of detail for each strength saying why you’re amazing at it, and then right at the very end are two bullet points of things to watch out for.
It’s become a running joke now that I ban my clients from reading those two bullet points until they’ve stopped and internalised the positives because every single client I’ve worked with has immediately scrolled past the paragraphs of brilliant stuff just to get to the two things that might not be as great. Their brains are drawn to finding out what they might not be amazing at and working out how to fix it.
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Why Being Overly Self-Critical Slows Growth
Now is this such a bad thing? It’s good to be continually improving, personal growth is incredibly important and we get personal growth by improving all our flaws so we can be the best that we can be, right?
The problem isn’t just that we’re feeling bad about ourselves although I would argue that this is reason enough to switch our thought patterns because you deserve to feel good about yourself and not have so many negative emotions. But I know me telling you that you’re amazing and deserve to feel less self-critical isn’t going to do anything.
Instead I’m going to appeal to your sense of logic. Because if you’re not stopping to hear the positive feedback, how do you know you’re moving in the right direction?
Think about how video games work, and if you’re an ADHDer who craves dopamine this is particularly relevant to you. Think of your basic video game with levels, like Super Mario 64 for example, a personal favourite of mine. You can do whatever you want in that game really, play it however you intend to. If you want to play it where you have to read every single sign in the game as fast as you can, you’re absolutely allowed to.
But the game has an intended way of you progressing so that you can beat Bowser and rescue Princess Peach because that is the purpose of the game, they’ve designed it for you to have fun that way.
I know this is the wrong game but I really like these Mariokart figures!
Video Game Analogy: Why YOU Need Positive Feedback
Now in this analogy, you being overly self-critical of yourself is the equivalent of the Mario 64 world being filled with goombas and bob-ombs and lava so that you are reprimanded for every time you go the wrong way, and it’s true that some of those goombas and bob-ombs do exist to reprimand you from going the wrong way, it’s also true that some of them are just obstacles to overcome. I’m not saying that negative feedback is useless.
But if the world was just full of things that would damage you, causing you to die and start the level over again and again, you would get frustrated. It would be constant trial and error to find the right way forward and you’d probably get fed up and quit the game, unless you’re a dark souls player or whatever.
But fortunately, Mario 64 isn’t structured like that. Instead of just giving you negative, corrective feedback all the time, it balances that with positive feedback. Some interesting hidden area that you might not see? Here are some coins leading there. You progressed through this level doing all the things we wanted you to do? Here’s a star as a reward.
A simple example, but this is even more important for open world games. They’re deliberately designed with things to catch your attention to let you know that you can progress that way, to let you know that you’re on the right path, or at least one potential right path from the situation you’re in. We’ve all had that experience of playing a game and thinking: “huh, this looks a bit different, let’s go check it out” and been rewarded for following that path.
So what I’m saying is that by focusing on the self-criticism and ignoring the praise, we’re behaving like my first example, aimlessly wandering around bob-omb battlefield, being blown up left and right and getting frustrated because we have no information to tell us we’re on the right track!
Sorry if you’re a non-gamer and I’ve lost you but I hope this analogy gets across why this being overly self-critical is actually holding you back, making personal growth much slower than it needs to be. Your goals and humility are admirable, but they’re not serving you in the best possible way.
Why Being Overly Self-Critical Slows Growth
So now that I’ve got you feeling bad about feeling bad about yourself, sorry about that, what can we actually do about it?
Well the first thing is to actually acknowledge when people say something positive about us. And I don’t just mean say thank you on autopilot and pat yourself on the back. Saying thank you is a huge part of this, but don’t just say thank you and dismiss it. You have to mean it.
In fact, I often suggest that my clients might want to start collecting these nice things that people say about them, whereby collecting them is forcing them to stop and acknowledge it. One of my clients calls it his “smile pile”. I’m not sure whether he has it physically or it’s a metaphor but somewhere he keeps track of nice things people have said to him and looks through it whenever he needs a bit of a confidence boost.
And honestly, writing them down, or getting them in writing is a huge part of this. Because we’re often easily distracted, it can be easy to only half listen to the compliment we’re receiving and then in a moment it’s gone and we’ve forgotten it completely, which makes it even easier to brush off. But if we’ve written it down then we can stop and sit with it. Seeing it on paper makes it so much harder to ignore.
And of course once you have that information you can do exciting things with it! You can spot patterns, signs that you’re on the right track, metaphorical Super Mario 64 stars that tell you what you’re doing right. And then you can do more of it! And then you can do even better and feel even better because you’re doing cool things!!
There’s nothing an ADHDer loves more than an opportunity to buy a fresh notebook.
One thing I like to do in this vein is go back to my strengths assessment that I did four years ago that tells me exactly what I’m good at. Because it reminds me of the skills that serve me the most and that I can get my biggest benefit from using those skills.
But also, in those days that I’m feeling most insecure or defeated about entrepreneurship because maybe a client I really wanted to work with turned me down or I’m just not feeling at my best, I go back and read one line because it’s important, and it’s written there so that I can’t ignore it.
It says: “Choose roles that allow you to contribute your ideas about the future. For example, you might excel in entrepreneurial or startup situations”.
And then I remember that even when I’m feeling insecure about myself, I have strengths that I can lean on that will keep me putting one foot in front of the other so that when things get tough, I don’t get going.
So that’s it for today! If you read this post all the way until the end I have a very special challenge for you: I need you to email me at leigh@ttncoaching.com to tell me one thing for your smile pile. Let’s get it started here so it can help you wherever you need to go.
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References
Stack Overflow Developer with ADHD? You’re not alone
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