Soren, welcome back!
Great to be here.
We're here again!
Yes, and today we're going to be discussing criticism.
Yeah, it's a topic that you and I have talked about before a couple times, and it's a topic
I've been talking with a lot of my adult colleagues and friends about it as well.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like criticism, the routes through with which you can receive it have
increased considerably across the last several years.
So obviously, criticism is increasing.
Yeah, you're thinking like with social media.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think social media to some extent encourages criticism by its nature.
The algorithm wants you to be angry because then you'll continue engaging with the platform,
right?
It increases viewer retention.
Yeah, and criticism is an interesting term because I think some of what we're talking
about...
So here's my bias.
When I think of criticism as a social worker, as somebody who has supervised students and
employees most of my professional career, I think of criticism in a similar way that
I think about feedback.
Criticism is feedback.
And for me, criticism feedback is intended to help somebody shape performance, make adjustments,
and it's intended to improve, right?
For me, criticism, constructive feedback, I know criticism has kind of a negative connotation
to it for sure.
But for the purposes of this conversation, we're kind of lumping this together.
Criticism, constructive feedback, all intended to shape and improve performance.
Yes.
Then we have this other bucket, which I tend to see more often on social media to your
point, where people are just spewing behind the protection of their accounts, whether
they're real or not, behind their keyboards.
And I don't necessarily think that kind of engagement is intended to be constructive
or to shape or mold performance.
Would you agree?
Ah, like it is all about intentionality.
I feel like a lot of the criticism that we see on online spaces is very hate motivated.
And it's not, like the internet is not a forum where people regulate their emotions very
effectively, nor are they incentivized to regulate their emotions very effectively.
So it sort of festers and can become something very negative.
But I do think in online forums, when people are spewing hate, it is indicative of an emotion
that they're feeling, whether that's like irrational or not.
Well, I guess we can tell.
But yeah, yeah, there's some signs.
Yeah, yeah.
But I think like there is still something that can be yielded from hate.
Obviously, it's very, it's not productive to allow it to affect you emotionally.
But like, if people are angry, then you must be doing something that is counter to their
worldview.
Yeah, it's triggering something.
Yeah, yeah, it's triggering something.
Yeah.
I mean, it's something that you and I as queer individuals have needed to navigate.
It's something that you as a student, as a child, with parents, as somebody who swam
competitively, you've had coaches work with you.
I mean, you, you, you live a life that you have the whole continuum of feedback, right?
Of criticism, constructive feedback.
And you and I, one of our similarities is that we live a life that, let's be real, just
the fact that an adult gay man and a queer adolescent are sitting together having conversations
in a podcast studio and putting it out to the worldwide webs is going to draw attention.
Yeah.
And our five listeners are going to probably see some negative comments on our social media
connected to inspired insights on personal attacks, email, it's going to happen.
And you and I have experienced this in our lives before.
Yeah.
I think some of the problem that I face when interacting with criticism is like throughout
my entire childhood, my family always engaged in like constructive criticism.
We were very blunt with each other.
We want each other to improve.
And through that we would critique.
And I never saw that as a negative thing.
And I always have worked hard to implement what I'm being like critiqued on and better
myself.
Is that because just to, let me pause you for a second.
It never bothered you.
Is that because you knew instinctually the spirit by which it like a hundred percent
coming in today into the studio, your mom had packed you some clothes, brought you a
toothbrush, told you to wet your hair, told you to put on a sweater.
Like you were getting some constructive feedback up until the moment we record today.
But watching those interactions with your mom, none of it looked adversarial.
You didn't look annoyed.
Like when I was a kid, I was annoyed as my mom was like, did you brush your teeth?
I was annoyed.
I know that I'm a hot mess.
So you welcome that.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Without my mother managing me, where would I be?
Where would I be?
Yeah.
And that presents a problem when I'm interacting with like very negative criticism, borrowing
on hate, because I want to implement it, right?
Like I have been conditioned to see criticism as a good thing and something that should
be applied.
So like this was a problem that I faced a lot in middle school because I was, I would
say ruthlessly bullied to some extent by a large portion of my friend group and a lot
of people that I interacted with on the football team.
And I would see their like critiques about who I was as like, obviously I knew that there
was hate behind it, but also like I just was trained to view criticism as trying to better
myself.
Yeah.
So then I would interact with it in the same way that I interact with like my mom telling
me that my hair looks like crap.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So I would recognize some of that and perhaps tell me if I'm off base here, perhaps it's,
well, geez, maybe I should tone this down.
Maybe I shouldn't dress like this.
Maybe I shouldn't talk like this.
Well, a hundred percent.
Like in my early middle school career, I was like, I was me, I was flaming.
I was, I was out there.
And then as I started to get like critiques about it, I did tone it down a lot.
And now in school, whether that be from like apathy or like self-consciousness, I just
wear very bland clothes for the most part.
And my entire like depressive era, I would just wear sweatpants and sweatshirt every
single day.
And I do think that me internalizing that criticism and like taking it in as though
it was constructive when really it was just mindless hate has significantly impacted the
way that I express myself and present myself like publicly today.
And you earlier were talking about how we need to differentiate the two.
But I think like obviously there's something that can be yielded from everybody's opinion
and we should listen to what everybody has to say.
But I don't know.
It's difficult because I think that blind hate, obviously it's coming from a place.
You can learn something from someone being hateful towards you.
Like I think a lot of the hate that I received in middle school was directly from the insecurities
of the men that were bullying me.
Because like in my friend group, we were fairly flamboyant until like all of my friends weren't
and I was left sitting there.
Not quite flamboyant.
And I was ridiculed to some extent for that.
Yeah, because you were different.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
You know, early on in our adventures here in the Inspired Insight podcast, we talked
about shine and we talked about sometimes we are our own biggest bullies and we dull
our shine.
Sometimes we let the world around us dull our shine.
And so much of what you're talking about, I think is a combination of the shine that
you had, the dulling of that shine.
And here you are three, four years later, still not sure where that shine is.
Yeah, yeah.
I agree with that.
Like I think I attempted to remove a part of myself and like in a time where it like
the mind is very dynamic and very adaptable in that time period.
And I think to some extent, I've lost it entirely.
Honestly, I still am quite out there, but not nearly to the extent that I was.
And I like, I don't know, I spend a lot of time struggling with that because I'm like,
have I allowed the people who ridiculed me to succeed in their task?
Did they win?
Yeah, yeah.
And then part of it is like, perhaps I just dulled with time, right?
Right.
And like...
That would have happened anyway.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think it's very difficult to weigh the impact of different things.
Yeah, maybe there's chicken and egg there and maybe some of it was how we redefine ourselves
as adolescents and the way year after year, like going into your senior year of high school
next year, who you'll be next year might look different than who you are today.
And that's what's cool about evolving.
And here's our sign, the best is yet to come.
For folks that are listening, we had a glow up part two in celebration of Pride Month.
Happy Pride by the way, Swann.
The best is yet to come.
And so I just personally believe that who I am tomorrow is going to be different than
who I am today.
And that might be for the better or the worse.
But I want to go back to something you said about what we can yield from even the blind
heat.
Yeah.
For me, as I look down at 50 years old on this planet, here's what I have learned from
that blind heat.
There's no place in my life anymore.
Yeah.
I, when met with that level of animosity, who I am as a person, as a social worker,
as a gay man, as a business owner, my brand is very important to me.
And I am not the kind of person who goes nose to nose, toe to toe with haters, whether it's
in person or whether it's through our keyboards on Facebook or other internet things.
That's not my brand.
What I've learned about myself is that when I react to criticism in a way that's not authentic
to my brand, I fall flat on my face every time.
When I have let the anger, the temptation, the just being pissed off at that person who's
coming at me.
When I let them get me to the place where I respond and it's not authentic to my brand,
I instantly regret it.
Instantly regret it.
And so I think for me, what's important, what's been important for me is to separate what
criticism is intended to do me well, to help me improve who I am, to help me evolve.
Like your mom telling you to wet your hair and brush your teeth, to help you evolve.
And then what criticism, the only purpose it serves is to shame and stigmatize and further
oppress me.
And that's the stuff I don't got room for in my life anymore.
I think that hate is inflammatory and infectious as an emotion.
It's very negative and yet it spreads so rapidly.
Yeah.
Well, you and I know this.
We've talked about this before.
Hate anger, being pissed off is an easier emotion than feeling guilt.
Yeah.
Than feeling embarrassment, than feeling sad.
Yeah.
Or anxious.
It is easier to get in touch with hate and anger than it is some of those other emotions.
And I think that hate is sort of unique among emotions with how rapidly and entirely it
removes you from your rationality.
I think sadness equally intense, but it doesn't rob you of your ability to use logic to the
same extent that hate does.
I feel.
I think you're spotting it.
Hate is a blinding force.
From the deliverer to the receiver.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah.
And you mentioned toe to toe.
And I think that that is the way that a lot of people react to hate.
But when I hear hate or see hate, I don't want to go toe to toe.
I want to sit down and listen.
Right?
Interesting.
I don't feel like I'm interested in clapping back necessarily as listening to them.
Because even when someone's saying something absurd, you can learn a lot about them through
what they're saying.
Like I don't know.
I just like sitting down and listening to what people are saying.
Because even if it's awful and it's meant to hurt me, I don't, I feel like I am not
really emotionally impacted by people attempting to do that.
Because your behavior and your words is not a reflection of me.
It's a reflection of you.
So isn't that so hard to stay?
You impressed me every time we talk.
You know that this conversation.
I'm like blown away by you.
It's so hard.
It's so hard to stay in that place of I know this isn't about me.
You're saying more about yourself than you are me.
Yeah.
My, I think because as we've talked about our experiences through school were so different,
I too was the victim, I guess for lack of a better word, of bullying my entire elementary
school, middle school and early high school.
Something switched to like junior year-ish.
Maybe it was maturity maybe for all of us.
And so when I hear criticism that has that spirit of hate and contempt behind it, my
inclination is to shield it away from me.
And like I wish I had the bigger Wonder Woman bracelets to be able to deflect and go, yeah,
let's talk about this.
The trauma response that kicks up for me is off like I totally agree with you.
I was going to parallel that.
I feel like both of us when we receive criticism of that nature, it puts us back in the same
place that we were like ridiculed in our early youth, right?
The trauma response.
Yeah, exactly.
And my reaction then was always to fight and to go toe to toe and never did it end positively
for me.
Because it's not your brand.
Yeah.
It's not authentic to who you are.
And I think that we have two different reactions to that.
You choose to ignore it, which I think is a fantastic strategy, especially in like the
situation, like on the school board, you just can't interact with that in a positive fashion
in a forum.
Right.
There's no positive anything that's going to come from it.
Because engaging with it legitimizes it in situations like that.
So I think that your strategy of just entirely ignoring it is fantastic in that context.
But like, when I look back, I was like, man, if I had just sat there and listened to them
and had been like, well, they were like shitting on me ruthlessly, then like, really?
You know what?
I'll think about that.
They would have calmed down so quickly and been like, man, I don't really mean that.
But instead I would go and I'd agitate them because it spread to me.
And I like, and then it would just end with me getting ganged up on because I was a sole
individual and then I was getting like feisty.
And also, like I was giving them the reaction that they wanted.
Yeah.
Which is so cliche, right?
You hear this all the time.
As a former school social worker and someone who works today with a lot of schools, you
know, that's one of the, you know, don't give them the attention they're looking for.
Yeah.
It's so freaking hard.
It's very difficult.
It's hard.
You know, I think I want to, I also want to just say that ignoring for me is a part of
the strategy.
My favorite clap back is to shine even brighter.
Yeah.
You know, my favorite clap back is when it feels like there are people attacking and
coming after me.
My brand, my legacy is far more important down the road.
The best is yet to come.
It's far more important what's ahead than what's now.
And so for me, and I want to thank my girl, Taylor Swift, for some of this.
Taylor Swift has the best clap backs across her entire career.
When she's criticized, she makes a bigger album.
When she's accused of not writing or singing her own songs, she writes and sings the next
album completely by herself.
You know, she plants these subtle, well, some subtle, some not so subtle.
She plants stuff within her lyrics that only that person and she initially might know.
And so it brings me, our friend Elizabeth, who was just here with us today, taking a
few shots in the studio with us, introduced me to this idea of tall poppy syndrome a couple
months ago and offering me some support around the school board stuff and everything that
was going on professionally for me.
And I have gone all the way down that rabbit hole.
I love it.
I love this idea that it is human nature to cut down that which is taller, shinier, brighter.
The taller poppies in the field were the ones that were directed to be cut down because
you don't want people to think that it's good to grow beyond your means.
Yeah.
You know, stay humble.
This whole idea of tall poppying, cutting the tall poppies in the field acts as a social
leveling system.
We don't want anybody to think that they're better than anybody else.
And so for me, Soren, my new approach to that hate, not constructive criticism where it's
a dialogue, but that hateful spewing of this is who you are and I can't stand you just
because of who you are and who you love and what you represent, all of that stuff.
It's not to clap back.
It's not going toe to toe.
It's to continue to grow.
Yeah.
And in full transparency, and you know this, your mom knows this, part of the getting this
podcast off the ground, we had been talking about it for a long time, but part of getting
this podcast finally off the ground was my desire to grow a little taller in that field
of poppies.
I feel like that's such an elegant way to respond to negative commentary as well.
Like, it's not ignoring, but it is fighting in your own way.
It's continuing to win the battle of life rather than picking a battle with someone
else, right?
Yeah.
Well, and I know you roll my eyes every time I bring up a girl here, but you know, on her
newest album, Taylor released a song called Thank You Amy.
And for those that aren't familiar with it, in the title of the song, the K and thank
and the I and the M and Amy spelled A-I-M-E-E are capitalized.
So the word Kim is there.
So if folks know anything about Taylor, you might know the Kim and Kanye and Taylor beef.
I'm not going to get into it here.
And in that song, Thank You Amy, there's a lyric that says, I built a legacy that you
can't undo, but when I count the scars, there's a moment of truth that there wouldn't be this
if there hadn't been you.
Yeah.
And for me, that resonates to my soul.
I would not be the human I am today, right, wrong or indifferent, depends on who you ask.
I would not be the human I am today if I didn't have the school experience I had, if I didn't
have the school board experience that I've had most recently, or I didn't have periods
in my life where people have come at me swinging for no other reason than who I am or what
I represent.
And as I'm talking this out loud, I'm going back in my mind to what you said earlier about
there's something to be yielded, that kind of hate.
And maybe what I'm yielding by listening to that is not how I dull my shine.
It's not how I change who I am.
It's how I grow even taller, how I evolve my poppydum to get even bigger, cast a bigger
shadow and continue to work on the legacy.
I totally agree.
With the greatest adversity comes the greatest change.
I don't think that I...
Obviously it was quite damaging for me.
However, if I hadn't had that time period of adversity, I think I would still be a little
know-it-all shit.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm agreeing with you.
With very little maturity.
I think I was very privileged in my youth and that resulted in an extreme lack of charisma.
And through experiencing adversity, I've gained so much more empathy for others' emotions.
And I've experienced a depth and breadth of emotion that I think requires years of regular
civilian life to acquire.
And I've matured quite quickly as a result of that.
You've had two.
We talked about that.
We talked about the experiences you had when you were in crisis on our last podcast episode.
You've had two.
And I think about...
I just want you to sit with this for a second.
The truth of the matter might be you and I would not be sitting here talking about the
topics we're talking about if we didn't face the adversity we had faced.
100%.
I just think for me, as a social worker, as a clinician, there's this whole concept of
post-traumatic growth where it's the process of going through hard times that we discover
unique, new skills, qualities, depths of ourselves that we wouldn't be the person we are today
if we didn't experience the loss or the traumatic event.
It's fascinating.
I totally agree.
And I think that that mindset is something that really allowed me to recover very quickly.
I changed from seeing hardship as an irretrievable attack upon myself, like losing a piece of
myself with each difficulty into the mindset of gaining a piece of myself with every difficulty.
Hardship was no longer adversity.
It was opportunity.
Right?
There's something so beautiful about that.
And I know I don't want to speak for you, but for me, when I'm sitting in that adversity,
when I'm sitting reading the comments about me, seeing the videos that have been posted
online about me, reading the comments to the news story about me, or hearing what townspeople
or others are saying in public forums about me, when in that moment, the furthest thing
from my mind is, oh, this is making me a stronger person.
Oh, this is helping me grow.
Right?
Because in my mind, I go back to being eight years old or 14 years old or 24 years old.
22 years old.
And in my mind, I'm back there.
And that's trauma.
We know, you and I know that that is the trauma response and the ability to grow taller doesn't
happen until a little bit later.
Well, I think you can only grow by using hindsight.
In the moment, it feels like you're being cut.
Right?
Yeah.
Deep.
It's so challenging to overcome.
But I now have adapted to where whenever I'm faced with a difficult emotional situation,
I try to because I used to react extremely emotionally very quickly.
It wouldn't be necessarily super visible emotion, but I would immediately start internally spiraling.
It was there.
Yeah.
It was there.
I would then engage in super risky behaviors just because I was hurting.
I wouldn't know what to do.
I would revert to a very childish state of scared running.
It's regression.
But now I think through my recovery, I've adapted the scale of the second I'm faced
with a negative hardship.
Yes, I feel the pain of it, but I immediately attempt to roll back and gather hindsight
as quickly as possible.
So that you can then get to the place where you can learn from it.
I try to tamper my emotion so that I can engage with rationality.
And then once I've come to terms with something, then I can experience the emotion so that
I can get the whole experience and yield everything that I can.
Obviously, I'm not ignoring the negative emotional experience, but I am very quickly transitioning
to rationality so it doesn't lead me into a spiral.
I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit because I think maybe for some of our
listeners, whether they are 17 or 70, they might be sitting there going, yeah, that all
sounds great, you two.
How?
Yeah.
So I'm curious if you have a sense of now, today, what skills you go through to get yourself
to that place of hindsight so that the best learning is there.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
The other day, me and my friends after ushering for Penobscot Theatre went to Walmart.
And we were shouted at by two gentlemen in a pickup truck with a variety of slurs and
such.
And my friend was very shocked and started crying from that.
And I gave the two gentlemen a quick twerk because I thought that they would enjoy it.
And my immediate reaction internally was shocked and it brought me back to the locker room
where I was having the F slur yelled at me.
And I started crawling into myself.
And then my brain recognizes the patterns that I start going into.
So I think my main strategy is get an understanding of the patterns emotionally that you go through
whenever you start to spiral or react negatively.
Start being...
Yeah.
Embrace mindfulness.
Be very mindful of the way that you're thinking.
And by the time we had entered the Walmart, I was then in a quite rational spot because
my initial reaction was to laugh and shove it off my back, whatever.
But I couldn't do that to some extent.
And I needed to process through it.
And I was quite scared in the moment.
And then I just very quickly transitioned to a rational state by seeing that I was scared.
I was like, okay, I'm scared.
What do I do now?
It takes a lot, a lot, a lot of practice.
And I had to be very mindful and think about it a lot over months, years in order to adapt
this because I always used to just immediately go into the fight or flight response.
Yeah, trauma.
Yeah.
And I would be curled in a ball crying.
But it really is just about effort, practice, and mindfulness.
And you will get there.
It's very difficult at first, but you will get there if you put in the effort.
And what I love about what you're saying is the ability to be in touch with, yeah, I'm
scared right now.
Yeah.
Or, yeah, I'm feeling threatened.
Or, yep, I've just been traumatized.
Or I'm triggered and going back to other traumatic events in my life.
And so I think that mindfulness is such an important skill.
Sometimes I think people hear the word mindful and they think they have to do yoga or Pilates
or do this guided meditation to get there.
And mindfulness is as simple as just being still and just saying, okay, what do I feel?
What do I smell?
Yeah.
What do I taste?
What do I touch?
What do I see?
What do I hear?
And if you're not going through those senses, you can achieve a state of mindfulness.
But what you're also saying, Soren, is you've got to be honest with yourself and not run
from the stigma of saying, I'm scared.
When people think, react calmly to a difficult situation, they think, oh, you just ignore
it.
No, you need to acknowledge it so then you can move past it.
Because by ignoring it, you're putting it in front of you.
You're kicking the can down the road.
Whereas by acknowledging it, you can allow it to pass through you.
And that's very difficult because I think, especially men, do not want to be permeable
to their emotions.
They do not want to allow it to seep in.
They kick the can down the road and eventually they're rolling a snowball that will crush
them in front of them.
Getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Yeah, so I mean, as always, you're so insightful about this.
Just attending to it in the moment prevents it perhaps of getting even more unmanageable
down the road.
As we wrap up this conversation, which I have loved, there's another philosophy that's been
getting a lot of social media time going around.
I see it on many posts.
I'm seeing a lot of folks tattooing this.
If I were more of a tattoo person, I'd be like, I might consider something like this.
But maybe you've seen this too.
It's the whole let them philosophy.
Mel Robbins and her podcast has talked a lot about let them.
And it goes something like this.
If they want to criticize you, if they want to attack you, if they want to diminish you,
if they want to dull your shine, let them.
Because where you put your energy into the response is more important than where they
are putting their energy into the attack.
And so let them is all about boundaries.
It's all about being able to recognize what you need in that moment to better yourself,
to heal, and to recognize that our best selves are still ahead.
The best is yet to come.
And if we can stay focused on what you're talking about of just knowing thyself and
attending to our growth and evolution and not letting the bullies, because let's be
honest, that's what they are, whether they're eight years old or 80 years old, that's what
they are as bullies.
Not letting the bullies cut us in our field of poppies.
Let them try and let them watch us grow.
Yeah.
Great point to end off the episode.
Dang.
Well, this has been another really, for me, helpful conversation with you, Soren.
This has been Inspired Insights Podcast.
Stick around for our next episode.
And I'm Chris McClellan.
I'm Soren Pedersen.
Thanks for listening in.
Bye.
Bye, y'all.
The Inspired Insights Podcast has been brought to you by Inspired Consulting Group, LLC,
created and produced by Amanda Seidel.
Music by Eric Herter.
Copyright 2024.
All rights reserved.