You Are Your Own Worst Critic: How to Stop

You are your own worst critic. It’s keeping you from excelling at your job, at life, or at anything in general. While people are generally nice to strangers, we typically treat the ones we love the most badly. That’s what is happening when you are overly harshly criticizing yourself.

I used to be an avid piano player. Whenever I would go on piano competitions, after the final bow after finishing playing the song, I would immediately think, “well, that went badly”. This wasn’t public speaking, it was performing for another person who is an expert at playing the piano.

Lo and behold, when the award ceremony came along, I would get a silver medal to signal that I qualified to compete in the next stage of the competition. Whoa! Maybe I criticized myself too harshly because I thought back to all of the times I played video games instead of practicing the piano.

Whatever the reason may be, people oftentimes wrongly criticize themselves. People think they did bad when they actually did good and they think they did good when they actually did bad. The biggest thing to remember is that you are your own worst critic. Your opinion of your performance quite literally doesn’t matter.

When you finished the performance and took the final bow, all you can do is wait and be patient to see what the results are. While you’re waiting, remember that it’s not your opinion of yourself that matters, it’s the audience’s opinion of your performance that matters in how you did.

It’s necessary to recognize when you are too harshly evaluating your actions so that you can have peace of mind. Whether it’s for an interview, college admissions, promotion, or anything else, you need to stop criticizing your flaws.

You Are Your Own Worst Critic

You are your own worst critic because there is no middle ground of what you think of yourself. It’s either good or bad with no middle ground. Factually correct information is the true, neutral middle ground and what we should be thinking of ourselves. However, we do not factually correctly evaluate ourselves.

We’ve all been there. An interview that we thought went downright awful and horribly surprises us when HR calls back and says they’re interested in going forward in the next round. I recently went through an interview where I felt like everything was completely off.

Every answer I gave, they interrupted and asked the almost same question in different words. So I thought that I wasn’t doing a good job giving good answers for the company.

Then finally, the company extended an offer out to me for $95,000 salary + $24,000 bonus potential. It was shocking. I negotiated the job offer up to $110,000 + $27,500 bonus potential. The feeling of doubt never goes away for me. I’ve badly gauged interviews starting from college and I’m still badly gauging interviews now.

One way to tell if you are your own worst critic is to SMASH and DESTROY that share button for your friends to know how to stop being your own worst critic! It greatly helps with the Google algorithm and I appreciate it a lot as well. Let’s stop others from becoming their own worst critics!

In seriousness, I bet you felt that you are your own worst critic as well. You that that a presentation or a meeting went very badly until the guests congratulate and tell you how much you crushed the presentation. There are numerous reasons why people think that they did so badly that we will explore below.

Why Are You Your Own Worst Critic?

There are numerous reasons why you are your own worst critic. Some of it has to do with a lack of self belief but there are reasons that has nothing to do with who you are. It’s just the way that the game is designed, which is completely out of your control.

So don’t feel bad and let’s explore the reasons why you may feel in such a manner.

1) It’s Difficult to Gauge Own Performance

We’re not just our own worst critics because we are harsher towards ourselves than others. We’re our own worst critics because it literally is difficult to evaluate our own performance. What actually matters is what the audience thinks of your performance, not you.

Therefore, we are going through the exercise of trying to think of what the audience thinks of how you did. That’s a mind reading exercise. People have done some phenomenal things in the world. However, mind reading is one skill that people haven’t mastered and will never master in our lifetime.

Warren Buffett was so confident that he would get into Harvard, that he told a friend “join me at Harvard”. The interviewer promptly rejected him. It’s quite difficult, if not impossible, to gauge our own performance. We can’t get inside the mind of the other side to find out how we actually did.

Therefore, you are your own worst critic because it’s so hard to evaluate how you actually performed.

2) We Focus on the Worst of Ourselves

We spend the most amount of time with ourselves more than anyone in the world. You spend more time with yourself than your parents or your siblings. Therefore, we know exactly what our flaws and weaknesses are better than anyone else in the entire world.

So we can’t help but notice the flaws that we have versus what others don’t have.

Whether it’s how our teeth looks, how our hair looks, or anything else in between, we can’t help but think that others notice the same things. When I met up with a girl friend, the first thing she said wasn’t hi and how she was excited to hang out with me.

The first thing she said was how I was willing to still hang out with her even though she had crows feet. I didn’t even know she had crows feet until she brought it up. While I’m still good friends with her to this day, that taught me a lesson that I won’t forget.

You are your own worst critic because we notice our own flaws and differences more than others notice ours.

3) We Like to Surprise on the Upside

The last reason why we are our own worst critics is because we generally don’t like to be disappointed. We don’t like to have high expectations and hopes only be knocked down by the harsh reality of life. Therefore, we prefer to brace for impact and prepare for the worst and surprise on the upside by the end of it all.

We would prefer to do that rather than think about it from a factually correct perspective.

While it can be good to protect our ego and brace for negatives, harshly criticizing ourselves is still not the best way to go. Rather, it’s better to approach the evaluation of our performance from a neutral state and let whatever happen, happen.

Otherwise, that kind of thinking spills over to many other aspects of our lives and we start thinking more badly of ourselves. We should be overpromising and overdelivering. Underpromising and overdelivering is good but overpromising and overdelivering is even better.

How You Can Stop Being Your Own Worst Critic

So that you understand why you are your own worst critic, let’s go over how you can stop it. Someone who underpromises and overdelivers will always be given fewer opportunities than someone who overpromises and overdelivers.

1) Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

This is one of the biggest factors. When we notice the differences between ourselves versus others, we start to get nervous that we don’t have what they don’t have. You don’t focus on what you have versus what they don’t have, but you focus on the vice versa.

Stop comparing yourself to others. Chances are, others are jealous of the things that you have as well. Maybe even more so than the jealousy you feel towards what others have. What matters is what you do, not what others do. Other people’s successes are not your failures.

Instead, compare yourself versus an earlier version of yourself. As long as you are making the kind of progress that you would like, you are doing just fine. You are on the path to success. Remember that all it takes is a 1% improvement every day for a year to be 38x of what you were on January 1st of the year.

You can stop being your own worst critic by not comparing yourself to others.

2) Start Caring Less

Once upon a time, I interviewed with Apple. The interviewer asked me “what do you want to do with your career?” It was so nerve racking that I shouted a joke as an answer and you could feel the nervous energy seep in the room. Do you know how long the interview lasted for? A grand total of five minutes.

I was dismissed shortly thereafter.

These days, I don’t even think of that as a funny event. It’s just something that happened and I don’t care anymore about it. I’m at a successful place now and that’s all that matters. You are your own worst critic because you care too much. We’ve all been through multiple embarrassing public events.

You’re not the only one who has an embarrassing story. Stop caring so much and just let those moments pass. I’ve been fired before from an internship and I really don’t care. It happens. There are many more failures and embarrassing stories than I can count to list.

I know that there will be countless more failures and embarrassing stories going forward too. That’s quite OK.

Remember that whatever embarrassing thing you did, I did it 10 times worse.

3) Stop Focusing On Your Weaknesses

As highlighted above, you are your own worst critic because you are aware of your weaknesses better than anyone else. You spend the most time with yourself than anyone else on Earth. Therefore, it becomes easy to focus on wrinkling skin or droopy shoulders.

However, stop focusing on those things. Nobody really cares about them but you. I’m willing to bet that no one really even notices those things but you. Your weaknesses don’t stick out like a sore thumb. Why is that? Your weaknesses are mixed in with your strengths.

Others don’t have this amazing ability to only pinpoint and notice your flaws while ignoring your strengths. That’s just not how it works. If others don’t focus on them, you shouldn’t either. You have both positives and negatives. Don’t neglect to celebrate the many positives of yourself.

4) Ignore Others

We remember other people’s criticisms of us more so than our own criticisms of ourselves. We have this misguided notion that others know ourselves better than we know ourselves. That’s plain incorrect. There are famous and very attractive models out there who get plastic surgery to avoid criticism about their bodies.

Warren Buffett is also famous for acting in such a way to avoid criticism. The ones who care about your bad moments are your enemies. All you have to do is ignore them and continue on with your life like normal. It is impossible to avoid or prevent haters in your life. It’s a fact of life.

Don’t let others use those things against you. Chance are great that you’re fine and all you need to do is stay the course and keep crushing it. Otherwise, you’re letting other people’s words manipulate you into doing something you didn’t want to do in the first place.

5) Don’t Focus on Your Internal Thoughts

You are your own worst critic because of your inner thoughts. They meddle with your ability to think clearly and correctly. We all had that nagging annoying voice at one point or another. The thought that we can’t shake off that we’re not good enough. Even if we are.

Ignore that nagging voice. If you lose because others were better than you or others thought you weren’t good enough, then that’s fine. However, you don’t want to lose because you thought you weren’t good enough. Don’t let others win when the game hasn’t even started. Lose because others were just better than you.

That nagging voice in our head is oftentimes wrong. We have that voice because the media loves to highlight exceptional and bright individuals who’ve crushed it beyond our wildest dreams. That’s where our attention goes to the most. However, those are the exception OF the exceptions.

Don’t focus on the child prodigies. Instead, focus your attention on more productive ventures like what else you need to do to continue crushing your goals. Or what things you need to cross off your to-do list. Stop evaluating and start progressing.

You Are Your Own Worst Critic, Stop it

It’s just a fact that you are your own worst critic. I outlined the reasons why you are and how you can take steps to stop it. When we stop harshly criticizing ourselves, we can truly start to live a good life without any distractions from our paths forward. It’s almost a waste of time to evaluate how we did after an interview.

It’s already ancient history and it doesn’t even matter anymore. You gave it the best effort you possibly could now all you have to do is wait. How long do you have to wait? As long as it takes. Don’t think about it anymore. Go outside, take a breather, and relax. Get some ice cream. Is your heartbeat back to normal?

Better yet, you can meditate and clear your head. Let thoughts come and go. After an eventful event like that, we start to think about all the things that we should have said. There’s nothing else you can do about it. Instead of dwelling on the past, think about what you need to do for the future.

Then after you finish clearing both your head and heart, move on to your next goals. Do you need to get back to work? Then immerse yourself back to your work. When you learn to control your emotions and just let things be and trust that things will turn out the way that they’re supposed to, that’s when you win.

It’s no secret that you are your own worst critic. As long as you find out the reasons why you criticize yourself the most and take active steps to stop the behavior, everything will turn out just fine. Trust your decisions and just let time do its magic.