Responding to Criticism, and Accepting the Way Things Are | Being Well Podcast

Subtitles section Play video

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, this is where we explore the practical science of personal growth. And if you've listened before, welcome back.
I would like to start today's episode by sharing a selection of some of the, let's say, more critical reviews the podcast has received over the past year. I tuned in to listen to the episode with Dr. Mary Frances O'Connor. Dr. O'Connor was brilliant, but Forrest, not so much. Out of his depth to the point that I felt secondhand embarrassment. Great interview with Gabor Maté. He is a gift to us all. I was a little nervous Forrest would talk too much, but he was pretty quiet on this one. All was going well, discussing abundance and scarcity mindset, until they turned against capitalism. What is this podcast if not a capitalist endeavor? I'm sick of being lectured by hypocrites. And then finally, I really enjoyed this one. This would be a lot better if Forrest relaxed a lot and stopped croaking into the back of his throat. He also laughs throatily and it makes him sound fake. Otherwise,
I love Dr. Rick Hansen's wise and steady demeanor.
Now, criticism is an unavoidable part of life. Sometimes it's overt, like in these reviews, and sometimes it comes in more subtle forms, like advice giving or comparing ourselves negatively to other people. Sometimes we can take it with some good grace and are able to accept the useful parts of it without too much discomfort, like, you know, apparently
I should work with a vocal coach, and other times it really stings. And then, a lot of the time, most of the time, there's probably a little bit of both. But even though we're all going to be criticized from time to time, many of us spend a lot of our lives living in fear of criticism. Speaking personally, my behavior is totally influenced by wanting to avoid criticism. And then on the flip side, we're all critics ourselves. We've all been in situations that aren't quite the way that we want them to be, so we either need to do something to change them or accept them as they are. And that's what we're going to be focusing on today. On the one hand, how to take criticism well, receiving the useful parts without feeling a lot of the bonus pain. And then, on the other, learning to avoid chronic complaining and learning to accept things when they're not quite the way we'd like them to be. So to help us do that, I'm joined by the impeccable, not back-of-throat talking Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is a clinical psychologist, he's a bestselling author, and he's also my dad. So, Dad, how are you doing today?
Oh, man, I'm already stirred up on your behalf. Like, wait a minute here. I'm a walking demonstration right now of not necessarily good ways to react to criticism, just in that. But still, that said, if somebody were to say to you on the street, hey, your head is made of green cheese and you were to say, well, actually, no, it's not. Then they would say, well, you're being defensive. And then you might say, I'm not being defensive. I'm just saying my head's not made of green cheese. And then they would say, now you're being defensive about being defensive. So it can become kind of circular here, right?
Oh, totally. So what is the sweet spot where we receive the input? And I'm, myself, actually, on reflection, very aware in these podcast conversations with you of multiple things I either did poorly or could do better.
Same. Totally. Every time. Yeah. And I would like to state for the record that the enormous and overwhelming majority of the reviews and comments we get on the podcast are positive.
And I had to kind of go out of my way to dive into the reviews to find those. And also,
I think it illustrates a really key point here that we're probably going to talk about a little bit more today, which is that so much of life is about what you choose to focus on, right? It often really pops out to me when we get a negative review, when somebody leaves a one-star review and they complain about some aspect of what we're doing. And
I go, oh my God, I can feel the sting of that. And then we get so many five-star reviews that just kind of blend into the background for me. And you don't really pay attention to them because they're not rocking the boat of my experience in the same way. I appreciate them. I don't want to act like I don't appreciate them. I really do. People say some incredibly touching things about the show. But it's really easy for them to just slip right through my mental sieve without me really paying a lot of attention to it. One of the things that I've been really conscious of in my own life recently is paying attention to where
I am placing my attention and being a lot more thoughtful about focusing on the elements of my experience that are more positive and taking in the good, of course, as you like to say, and to really be wearing what I've started calling the mood of complaint, which is just our tendency sometimes to fall into these cycles where just everything is not quite right. I am really looking forward to this exploration, right? Because we can fall into trouble either way. On the one hand, we can be reactive to criticism. And second, we can be critical ourselves. For me, it's been a real journey initially to claim my voice to be able to critique the things that weren't so good. Because when I was a kid, we were really muzzled. My parents had a monopoly on anger, and I was really scared of sticking my neck out. It took a long time for me to be the proverbial kid at the parade saying, the emperor's wearing boxer shorts with polka dots, or Oliver Twist walking up to the table and saying, please, may I have another bowl of oatmeal? That took me a while to do, but then I began to really have to pay attention to being overly critical and also paying attention to the ways that the content of the correction—let's just think of it in terms of the distinction between what could be and what is, what realistically could be and what is, between standard and actual, let's say, goal and actual—whatever that information might be, because that's what that is, that's information, wrapped around it can be a lot of topspin, including topspin that's just conferred by your privilege in where you stand in society. So as a male, older, professional person, I can offer a piece of information about a gap between what is and what actually could be with good intentions, and yet it can really sting. Because in ways
I'm not entirely aware of, it can have an impact, understandably, way out of proportion to what I actually intended. And yet, if we also bring in the dimension for us of criticizing ourselves, there is no way to get through this life without screwing up, including in ways that you regret every single day and in ways that fill you with pain and remorse whenever you think about them. But that's simply part of the stew of life. Call it the hot pepper in the stew of life. There's just no way around it, and it burns every time you taste it. And you got to accept that and not be too hard on yourself about that.
And for me, really look down deeply. Do you have basically good intentions? Do you act in basically good faith? Have you learned from screwing up? That's really important.
Are you still doing it? Or have you learned from doing it? And can you go forward?
Totally. And I think that inside of that, it's useful to separate out different kinds of complaints. And people often break complaint into two big categories. The first one are called instrumental complaints. And these are constructive complaints. They're complaints that somebody could actually do something about. And then the second category are expressive complaints. And they're called expressive because they're about expressing your feelings.
And they often include relatively little chance of somebody doing something. They're not fundamentally about problem solving. And I think that there's actually really a place for both of these forms of complaint. It's really easy to look at instrumental complaints as good complaints and expressive complaints as bad complaints. But I think that that's probably a little overly simplistic. But it is helpful for us to just take a look at the reality that a lot of the time when we're complaining, we're doing it for a reason other than actually trying to change our circumstances. And there's a place there for really taking a look at that and going, wow, is that really what we want to do?
When I look back on my own history, some things that I've started to highlight for some time now around how to offer feedback or how to express wants, including wanting something to stop happening or something to start happening that there's been some real stakes on the table for. That's a real important thing. As soon as I start getting worked up and then we're in trouble, right? Or I start getting identified with my complaint, my criticism, or righteous about it. I start adding a mass to it, developing a case around it. And then
I know I'm in trouble. Moving into a stance of feeling outraged about something that really does not deserve outrage. I think some things do deserve outrage, right? But I can't believe that yet again, you left your plate in the sink. After all I've done for you, you still leave your damn plate in the sink, right? Like, no, that just doesn't deserve that kind of almost like flip switching. And I can feel it coming over me. It's like a bad version of Braveheart in the movie of just this total warrior around something that's just way out of proportion to what the real issue is on the table. So markers, whatever those internal red lights are on your inner dashboard that let you know that you're getting in trouble about something that's really good to pay attention to. Last one I'll just say is accelerating, starting to speed up, making points rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, or getting more intense with gestures, accelerating in body movements. That also is kind of a giveaway. Accelerating and contracting are both giveaways of maybe you're getting into some trouble territory here that is wrapping around the useful information you're trying to convey or the experience you're trying to share. But it's going to get you in trouble. You don't need to add all that to it. Anyway, that's been something that I've been really trying to learn about.
Yeah, totally. And we're talking here a little bit, starting the episode basically by talking about how can we give more effective criticism and be a better complainer, if you want to kind of put it that way. And one of the big questions that I've started to ask myself about this mood of complaint that I can sometimes find myself in is, what is my actual objective?
What is my primary motivation? What do I want to accomplish with whatever it is that I'm saying to the other person? Because there are a lot of reasons for complaining that, like I was saying earlier, have nothing to do with problem-solving. People complain to bond socially. They also complain for mood regulation purposes. A lot of people vent just to kind of get it out of their system, right? Now, basically, that's dumping your negative mood on somebody else, so it could be a mixed bag, but it's a reason people complain.
They deserved it.
Yeah, they deserved it. And again, like vengeance. Vengeance is a reason that people complain, right? Or they might be like seeking attention. Sometimes I seek attention with my complaints.
I want somebody to pay attention to my experience more, so it becomes like a kind of cry for help. And those are all reasons that somebody might complain that are really understandable.
Bonding is an okay motivation to complain, and sharing your feelings is an okay motivation, but it's really helpful to understand why you're doing this thing, and if there might be something else that could fulfill that purpose better than offering a complaint.
Another thing that I really ask myself is, is it possible for what I'm complaining about to actually change? Like, can the person that I'm talking to really do something about this thing in a focused way?
Yeah, I find it's also super helpful. This gets a little bit at the distinction, which
I'd never heard before. One thing that's great about working with you is that you forest to a deep dive into the psychology and the current research related to our topics, and you bring stuff forward that, wow, you're educating me. So, you know, instrumental and expressive forms of complaining. To say it maybe a little differently, the way I would put it, is the distinction between asserting information and sharing an experience.
Yeah.
And let me get at that point with a little story, which had to do when I was maybe 21 or 2, and I just started getting involved with the EST training. And I recall being in a seminar room with this just powerhouse of a teacher, and she would have one person after another come to the front of the room and practice leading the very first part of this guest seminar, this workshop. And then people would give feedback. So, the person would come up to the front of the room and give a little talk for 3 to 5 minutes. Then
Marsha would say, okay, feedback. And people would start saying things like, well, I think you ought to have done X, or when you did Y, it would be better if you did Z. Marsha would cut them off again and again. She would say, I don't want your infinite wisdom. I want your experience. What were you experiencing while this person was talking? And then people would start to share, well, in the very beginning, what I was experiencing was a lot of attentiveness to you and a feeling of liking you. And after about half a minute, while you were moving into this sort of long list of details, my experience was I started feeling kind of bored and my mind began to wander, and I was becoming more interested in other things. That's gold, sharing your experience. And I think both in terms of giving feedback and receiving feedback, it's helpful to get a factual-based information or statements of values. Okay, that's good. But what's really, really valuable is what was your experience? What was it like for you? How did it land on you? Which is usually a lot more vulnerable and challenging to share. So we tend to go into the assertions of fact or assertions of values, assertions of information to avoid the vulnerability, right, of just laying out our own experience.
And it's paradoxical because, or ironic in that, there's this kind of fear that our experience itself doesn't have authority. It'll be dismissed or disregarded, maybe because it was.
I think that's really good, Dad. This is a really important point. I don't know if I've heard this one before. I really like this.
Good, yeah. And so we start then asserting facts and asserting values, which we actually have much less natural authority for, and other people think they have authority about what the facts are and what ought to be. And so then they'll start arguing with us about that. But where we have complete authority, actually, is the honest revelation, the honest sharing of our own direct experience. When that was happening, my mind was wandering.
When that was happening, on the other hand, I felt really close to you and interested in what you were having to say. Because we are the world's greatest experts on our own experience, right? We are the great authorities on it. And that's where we have the ultimate refuge because people can argue forever about facts and values, but they cannot argue about the fact that you are actually experiencing something at the time.
Yeah, and that reminds me immediately of formal systems of communication like nonviolent communication, which is probably relevant to name here, which has a specific structure attached to it. We've done an episode on nonviolent communication. And the basic idea behind it is that you're doing exactly what you're talking about, Dad. You're operating from the stance of revealing your experience with the other person, and then expressing some desire attached to that experience. And that takes me to probably the single best piece of advice that I've ever received about communication. I think I got it from you. And it's start by joining.
And so if you're offering a complaint, it is 99.99% of the time best to start by joining.
Is it possible for you to find a place where you can overlap with the other person, integrate with your experience with them, come a little closer, operate from a stance of vulnerability, give them a compliment, you know, whatever? Can you achieve a team? And from that team with them, can you go, hey, here's some ideas I've had about how we can improve this team.
So it's not you and them. It's both of you together, working toward the resolution of an issue. And that was totally transformative for me in my life when I started to operate more from that stance. I'm still trying to learn it.
Yeah. It's not always easy to be quick.
I know. I think there's a certain kind of special embarrassment when you've been training to do something for a long time, like training to play the bagpipes for a really long time. And you're, you know, you're reasonably good at it. And then you suddenly realize that you've been playing a song wrong, or you've been falling back into some kind of beginner's mistake, and I've definitely been going through some of that recently in my own personal life.
I want to add one thing, if I could, just to what you said there, which is that it's really understandable that we are afraid to share our experience with others, especially if we've had a history in which that did not go well. We got attacked for it or shunned for it. It was not the culture or whatever it was. So it's really, really understandable. And I think that the world would be a lot better if people, me included, just clocked more time in sort of vulnerable revealing of their experiencing in real time. It's quite remarkable when you do that.
Yeah, totally. And I think that a great indicator inside of our relationships with other people is how open are they to accepting your vulnerability in that way.
And if you're in a relationship with somebody where it just really feels like they are not available for that, man, it's tough. It's a tough relationship. And I'm not saying that that means that relationship can't exist, but it might mean that there are some ways to protect yourself emotionally that the basis of the relationship needs to change a little bit. You've talked a lot,
Dad, about changing the size of the foundation of a relationship to match its foundation, is a better way to put it, because there's only so much that can be held up by an interpersonal relationship where they're just not open to your vulnerability.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one thing that can come forward when people are just really revealed about what it's like to be you is that what it's like to be you is to feel chronically let down by other people. Yeah, for sure. Chronically disrespected, unsupported, mistreated, usually because it's pretty much been true. And what do you do if that's very much in your history or because it's been in your history, there's an understandable, not quite expectation, but a concern that is going to happen yet again?
And that's real for people. Now, sometimes it is true that people can take that real sense of just being let down, a kind of inner slump. They can add to it with a certain amount of what in therapy world we could call secondary gains by kind of working their mood of reproach as like, you know, that wound is almost a badge of honor that presents itself as a claim on other people.
And they're kind of afraid that if they don't lead with that complaint and that claim, then there won't be a basis for other people to come through for them.
And they'll be abandoned as a result. So sometimes there is that add-on, there is that add-on, okay. But underneath it all often for people is a very genuine and understandable sense of just having been really let down. And so what do you do with that, right? What do you do with that? There's a lot of stuff about becoming mindful of it, becoming aware of it, bringing compassion to yourself about it, respecting yourself, recognizing that, of course, you feel this way, of course, you feel let down, of course, you're afraid of being let down again. That's where we start.
Ideally, though, it's not where we end. And ideally, we look for other people in other situations to the extent we can, who are more reliable, more trustworthy, more operating in good faith, more loyal, more going to come through for you, more open to you. We look for that. That's really important to do that. Another thing that's really important is to start differentiating between the past and the present and see the ways in which in the now, in the present, it's not happening. That old bad stuff is not happening now. It probably will not happen tomorrow. That's really, really good too. And then third, of course, it's really, really useful if what I'm talking about applies to you. And I think it applies to a lot of people, including some people really acutely, and most of us to some extent. It's also really important to internalize, yep, taken the good, of the antidotes or the counters to that history of being disappointed. In other words, really internalize it. When other people do include you, they do treat you with respect. They do keep their agreements. They don't cheat on you.
Really take that in and take in the fact of that and the fact that you are being regarded by them as someone who is important to treat well and to be loyal to and deal with respect and not let down and so forth. Those are things you can really do yourself if you've got this kind of bucket inside you, a big bucket that has felt really let down. Yeah. And I think that's a great angle to approach it from, particularly from the tolerance building or the strengths building perspective. And I'm going to approach it from a slightly different angle because I think I was guilty of this to an extent. And I think that I was operating inside of something of a mood of complaint for a pretty extended period of time. And it might have been due to what you're describing, Dad. Maybe I did have experiences where I was kind of let down in various ways by people. But I looked at those experiences a little bit more deeply. And I think that the truth is that most of the time, what I was let down by was not the other people. What I was let down by was my desire to have things be a certain kind of way. And then essentially placing that desire onto other people in ways in which they could never realistically fulfill. Because it's not their job to make me happy. It's my job to be content. And that's really the way that I kind of look at it, increasingly, these days. And I think that just such a huge percentage of our unhappiness in life comes from wanting things to be different than the way that they are. And I was really creating a lot of situations where I was not clear about what my actual wants and needs were with other people. I was bundling up resentment until it bubbled out of me in ineffective ways.
I was not direct with the expression of my desire. I didn't start by joining. I didn't operate from a stance of vulnerability until we got to a place where everything just like boiled out in pretty ineffective ways. And I think that this is really indicative of a lot of people's experience. The dissatisfaction is not about the circumstance. The dissatisfaction is a secondary gain. You are getting something from it psychologically. Or it's a way in which
I could never quite be satisfied with what was going on around me. Because there was a desire for this vague thing, but then I never really actually knew what it was. I just knew that what was happening wasn't what I wanted. So that was something that I was wrestling with recently that might speak to this topic a little bit. How did you move forward? What did you do?
I think that what has actually been useful for me, I was getting trapped in this kind of Goldilocks problem. Everything was either too cold or too hot. And so a lot of life for me has been about expanding my window of tolerance or my window of acceptance. How could I accept a situation just as it was without trying to change it? And when I saw the machinery in my mind of wanting something to be different operating, I got better about taking a step back from it and going, huh, what is it that I want to be different? Can I actually make it that way? And if not, can I let it go? And that became a really active practice for me. Also seeing like the functions that my behavior was serving, how I used to have a part of me that got pretty resentful for a little while socially because I felt like I was putting in all the legwork for my friend group to coordinate things. And then I took a look at that behavior and I went, okay, you're getting really wrapped up in this resentment around it, but what are you getting from this? And what I'm getting is control.
I get to influence what the group does. I get to influence when we hang out. I want a lot of social interactions. So I get to make that happen, all of those things. And so getting real about what the functions were that my behavior was serving that I was now starting to complain about was really, really profoundly useful for me because it made me go, oh, okay, I am getting all of these things actually. So when we get negative feedback, call it, and complaints come in many forms. And to be clear, I think they're very legitimate. If you, I don't know what, sit down at a restaurant and you get some food and they bring the soup and it's ice cold and it's not supposed to be ice cold, you complain about it. There's a place for that. So when we're on the receiving end of a complaint, hmm, what to do about it? I can tell you that there's something that has really helped me about this, which is to slow down my response, which might initially be pretty defensive, and to zero in on what is the maximum reasonable thing I can do to make this complaint go away. Now, sometimes I admit it, I just want to get them out of my hair.
So what can I do to get it to go away? Usually, I try to be better than that and to also have goodwill and compassion for the person and be truly motivated by that in a sincere way, to really open to their complaint, and especially the experience behind it.
Even if I don't quite agree with their assertion of facts or values, underneath it all,
I can get that there was some suffering, there's some discontent they were feeling that led them to bring this complaint, and then really zero in on what can I do about it?
How can I respond to it? What's useful in what they've had to say, which to me is the winner strategy for two reasons. One is, well, really three. One, it's moral because it takes care of other people. Two, it just resolves a negative interaction and prevents a similar one in the future. And third, it makes you feel good because you're walking in the light, you're being virtuous, you're taking the higher road. I don't always do that, but as the clock keeps ticking away, hopefully I start moving in that direction. One of the things that I've noticed is that you're really good at separating out the useful parts of a piece of feedback from the parts that are just causing you suffering. And maybe along the same lines, I've definitely really tried to walk through a process when I receive a complaint from somebody where I can manage my reactions around it in ways that are more useful. And that typically starts for me with just feeling my feelings and getting real about the fact that criticism hurts. And it's really natural and understandable to feel a little wince around it. And then from there, I try to filter out the emotional topspin from the other person, particularly if it's not somebody that I have a deep emotional relationship with. If it's just a person, like if I'm receiving a review through iTunes or something like that, or if I have somebody who's kind of a little bit more distant make a request of me. And I try to figure out what would they have said if I took out all of the spin and the intensity and the this, that. What's the actual instrumental communication inside of their complaint? And can I do something about that? Or is this person just looking for a little bit of emotional commiseration? And do they just want me to be like, oh, I see you and I hear you, and the seeing and the hearing is enough. And they're not really looking for something to change functionally. That's been really useful for me personally. In the deeper emotional relationships, like with my partner, it's been super helpful for me to try to go a layer down. This is not an example for me, but it's a very classic example. Hey Forrest, I want you to come home from work a little bit sooner. You're getting home so late. You're leaving me all these tasks. Oh my god, whatever it is. And that kind of classic heteronormative relationship function that you see a lot of the time. What the person is really communicating is about their loneliness, their valuing of the relationship with you, their desire to be more around you. And that communication is getting kind of lost sometimes in very understandable ways in a lot of other stuff that's just floating around the field. But the core, the heart of the communication is often really beautiful. And so if you can kind of go a layer down and try to see what the person really, really wants emotionally underneath everything else, that can be really powerful because then you can speak to that desire in a more effective way. Okay, but what about people who are actually not acting in good faith with their complaint? Sure, yeah, totally. Yeah, they're complaining to put themselves one up, to be to more power. They want to be the dominator and they're right, you're wrong, so forth. Or they're just trying to complain about X to divert you from your path toward Y. And they're bringing up a side issue or there's some kind of troll trying to spin you up to distract you.
What do we do with people who, in a way, complain about things? Gosh, I'm just kind of sorting it out here. Where basically, A, their complaint is an assertion of a fact that from our perspective is actually not a fact at all. It's just not true. Or they're complaining because they have a value that's different than we do. And we just don't care that much about that particular thing.
Or we think other things are more important. Or we don't think that thing they think is good is good at all. And then beyond that, what do we do when they're blaming us for their experience, but in fact, we can see that we've acted appropriately and their inner experience of, let's say, suffering and upset, anger, sadness, hurt, is pretty much entirely their own making, their own constructing. Any one of those three. I just kind of in my sorry force. You know me,
I'm like a list maker. I can't help it. I'm sorry. We're going to get complaints. Oh,
Rick, you keep making those stupid lists. But anyway, that's how I think.
I think people like the list by and large.
That was my three. And it was pretty good, right?
Yeah, yeah. No, I thought it was great. And I'm going to try to slice the Gordian knot here, Dad, and kind of try to speak to all of them in my experience at the same time.
Maybe the single biggest change I've made in my life related to all of this is I've released my attachment to changing other people. No.
I've just tried to release my attachment to changing other people. People are going to think what they think. Sometimes I don't have a lot of influence over it. And I've just gotten real about the fact that I don't have a lot of influence over it most of the time.
Again, it's expanding the window of acceptance. Like, yeah.
Wow, that's your view, dude. I'm sorry to hear that. Like, sometimes that's all you can do, right? But I think that to your point, Dad, having the insight, having the moment of insight where you go, oh, this is what this person is doing is so, so, so powerful because it frees you from attachment to their view. You see the inner machinery in a different kind of way.
And for me, often when I really get what's going on there, oh, this person's trying to express power over me. We're like, oh, this person is trying to export responsibility for their circumstance. Oh, this person just has a view difference with me. And we just kind of disagree.
All of a sudden, you can lighten up about it.
Yeah. Or that person just gets off on feeling that they're superior.
Yeah. I'm working at a restaurant as a waiter, and the one way that this person gets to feel powerful in their life is by bossing me around. Like, oh, okay. It's not about me anymore.
It's about them. I am a psychological tool to their ends. And that doesn't feel great.
But when you can step out of the play and go, this is the dance we're performing right now, and I'm just not going to fulfill that function for this person, you really circumvent so much of the thrashing around about it. And honestly, most of the time when I've been able to do this, it's moved me towards empathy. Almost always it's moved me towards empathy. Even when they're being a total a**hole, it's moved me towards empathy.
Because I go, oh, I can see the child inside of them. I can see the emotional desire that maybe they can't express in healthier ways. And frankly, sometimes if I can really see that,
I can get kind of okay about serving that function for them in a way where I'm totally clear about what my boundaries are and that I'm going to do this because I want to do it. And I'm kind of giving them a gift in the action of doing it where I go, oh, you know what? That was really my bad. What's not always easy, of course, is to be able to do both. On the one hand, claim for yourself the right to decide whether or not another person's complaint is accurate or useful as far as you're concerned. And that kind of way I set it up around do you reserve to yourself the right to disagree about the facts, to have different values, or to discern that and decide for yourself that it's really not your fault that the other person is having the experience they're having, that they are constructing it themselves. Okay, on the one hand. On the other hand, especially if you have a place of privilege in society, I think it's especially important, or you have more power than another person in any situation. Yeah, it's a great point.
You're the doctor, they're the patient, you're the parent, they're the child.
It's especially important to lean into validating and being modest and humble enough to be really receptive about their complaint, including recognizing that there can be a distinction between your intent and your impact. Your intent may have been neutral or just clueless, not malevolent, and yet your impact, understandably, landed really hard on that other person, and to be super receptive to that. And yeah, actually, it's been helpful for me to kind of grow in my capacity to do both. To, on the one hand, be more at peace with people rather than ruminating and obsessing about pretty much a groundless complaint, on the one hand, while on the other hand, really trying to be a lot better, and I'm still a work in progress, about recognizing my impact on others. And to just kind of like add on to what you're saying there, because I think that's actually a really important point inside of all of this. It's easy for me to say, sometimes you can kind of give them a little bit of what they want because you got a lot more to give, because I am in that position socially, where I'm a white man, and I'm often in positions of power or authority, and so it's important to kind of be conscious about it. I think inside of everything that you're saying, there's just a point that comes up for me a lot, which is this idea that most complaints, to me, at bottom, assuming that somebody's operating in vaguely good faith here, they come from emotional dissatisfaction.
There's a hurt, there's a pain, there's a sadness, there's a fear, there's a whatever.
And often that feeling is cloaked in a lot of other stuff. It comes out funky, people aren't quite clear about what they want from you, whatever it is. But most of the time, if we can feed the hungry heart a little tiny bit, feed the hungry bee, as you like to say sometimes, Dad, all of these complaints just go away. And I don't mean that in a manipulative way where you're trying to stop somebody from complaining to you. I mean, no, just in a very practical way.
Just go, oh, if you can, you can have a moment where you go, oh, I feel like this is what I'm hearing. Is that right? Is that feeling accurate? Okay, what can we do about that feeling?
And that can really just cut through so much of the clutter here.
That's great. By the way, credit where credit's due, that's the line, feed the hungry bee from Ken Kesey of the Merry Pranksters.
Oh, great.
So I give credit there. I definitely have taken it along. And I think you're so right too that when people, they've got something they're complaining about, let's say, and it doesn't always come across perfectly clean in the form of nonviolent communication or something like that.
So what do you do? Natural instinct, speaking for myself, could be to lean away or counterattack.
And what's often really helpful kind of counterintuitively is to lean in and ask for more. Could you say more about that? Or help me understand more about that. Let me really, really understand that. That's useful. And to also try to get at the deeper matter, like, why has this bothered you? Or what's important for you underneath it all about this?
Which is useful information because even if you're not prepared to act differently related to some specific behavior, some specific thing, if you understand the deeper want or priority that they have, maybe there are other ways to give it to them. That's really, really, really helpful.
And then I think it's also really helpful to do the best you can in the most generous way, reasonably possible, to declare yourself going forward. How will you attempt to be going forward, including checking in with the other person? If you got what you wanted here, would it look like that I would do more of this and less of that in the days to come? Or what would it look like if this was resolved for you, etc.? And make it clear. Yeah, you got it. That's great. Good input, I'm going to do less of that. Or good input, I'm going to do more of that.
And declare yourself. That's a pretty good package in response to somebody bringing you a complaint. Totally. And I think to maybe wrap up this episode, because we've explored a lot here, and this is clearly a pretty nuanced topic with a lot in it.
For me, I would just loop back to that feeling that when I understand the assignment, when I understand what somebody really wants from me underneath it all, or what somebody is actually expressing to me underneath it all, it is so much easier to take a step in and relate to them from that stance. And I think that that is a great roadmap, both if you're the person giving the complaint, and if you're the person receiving the complaint. If you're giving it, be really clear about what you actually want, the actual feeling that you're expressing, the reasons that you're offering this thing. And then on the other hand, really try to see that when somebody offers one of those things to you, even if it is wreathed in all sorts of other stuff that's getting in the way of the communication, because it can really help you. Just get to the heart of the matter, and give the person what they actually want. And get more of what you actually want yourself. I had a great time today talking with Rick about how we can get better at both giving and receiving criticism. And alongside that, how we can work on not getting caught up in a mood of complaint. And I began the episode by reading a couple of critical reviews that the podcast, and really specifically me, had received from listeners over the past year. And this helped to just illustrate a point that such a huge part of life comes down to what are you paying attention to right now? Because we get so many reviews that are incredibly positive, but if I just clip out that tiny little piece of the whole pie that's negative, well, that's what we really tend to fixate on. And that's certainly what really captures my attention when I just casually scan through the reviews for the podcast. And that's one example, but this is just so true of life in general, right? If we're operating from a stance of the person offering correction, the criticizer, then we can focus on the elements of the situation that displease us, that we don't like, the things that we want to have be different in some way. Or we can orient toward the part of a situation that is more useful or enjoyable. And if there's nothing about it that's useful and enjoyable, well, we can at least kind of take it as an opportunity to practice, or as an indication to us that we should really just go somewhere else. And then on the other hand, as the criticizee, as the person who's receiving the criticism, we can focus on all of the parts of the person's communication that weren't quite right. We can pick nits, we can get wrapped up in their view, we can feel a lot of excessive shame, we can be oppositional, or we can try to separate out some of the useful bits of what they're saying and see how the person's take might be influenced by their own unique circumstance, or really deliberately exercise some agency by saying, hey, okay, this is the part of that criticism that I'm comfortable taking in, and these are the parts of it that I'm going to kind of leave at the door. And the fact that so much of life is open to interpretation really takes us to what I've been calling the mood of complaint. How for many people, including myself, you can really move toward a stance where everything is just not quite the way that you want it to be, where you're constantly looking for the ways in which situations are disappointing, or not quite right, or it was good, but was it great? And I really found myself getting trapped in that mood for a pretty long time. And so much of the unhappiness that we find in life, and certainly that I find in life, comes from wanting things to be different from the way that they are. And when we feel that way, we might complain because we think that we're moving things from unlikable to more likable. But how often does that actually happen, right? How often does complaining actually solve the problem? And so a much more effective way to solve the problem is to do what we can to widen our window of acceptance, to get more okay with things being the way that they are. Now at the same time, there are obviously situations where it is more than appropriate to want to change them in some kind of way. And so we spent a little while talking about some of the ways that we can get better at offering a complaint. And a lot of it really came down again and again to this idea of starting by joining. What can we do to get on the same team in one way or another as the person that we're complaining to? Can we lead with emotional connection? Can we get on the same team in any kind of way? Is there even a sliver of what the other person is doing that we can look at and go, okay, yeah, I can get on board with that?
And then from that stance, when we offer some kind of a desire for things to be different in the future, a way that we wish that they could be better, something we want to see changed, we are operating from such a more powerful stance. And frankly, it's just so much more likely that the other person is going to receive your comment and give you what you want. And then from there, we talked about some operational stuff. We talked about avoiding excessive emotional topspin with other people and being thoughtful about the tone of communication. And Rick had a really great point about speaking in terms of your experience, because we often try to be a subject expert about whatever it is that we're complaining about or talking about. And you can get into fights about content all day long. But the person who is an expert on your experience is you. And so when you operate from talking about, hey, here's how that made me feel, it's really hard to find fault with that. And if you're in relationship with somebody who is constantly finding fault with how you feel, wow, that's a real red flag. And from there, we went to the other side of the coin. How can we get a bit better at receiving the complaints of other people? And we began with some just kind of basic good operational advice, things like, can you take a little bit of space from the criticism? Can you feel your feelings? Can you calm down? Can you try to run the communication through a sort of internal translator where you filter out any messiness that got mixed up in it? But when we were doing that, Rick kind of pushed on me a little bit by asking me, hey, but what about when somebody is complaining to you and they're not operating in good faith? What if they're just trying to mess with you? What if they're trying to express power over you? And this got us, I think, to a really important point, which is that end of the day, it's really hard to change other people. It's really, really hard to make them something different from the way that they want to be, right? It's not my job to change them. And then once we release that attachment to other people just agreeing with us all the time, we can really start to see why somebody is doing what they're doing a lot more clearly. And we can take a step back and look at the whole emotional structure that's going on inside of them, and maybe ask some useful questions around like, okay, what could I give this person authentically that would make them feel better? And that might really address their complaint in a more whole way, dealing with the core of the problem, rather than just all the symptoms of it. And this took us to the idea that really, in their heart, most complaints have an emotional component.
There's a desire to be seen in some way, to be met in some way, to receive some psychological or emotional supply that the person hasn't been getting yet. And once we can kind of start to see complaints through that lens, it becomes so much more possible to meet the other person where they actually want to be met. And in the same way, when we can communicate our complaints through that lens, wow, it is so much more likely that you'll get what you actually want from other people. But this is a really vulnerable place to go. It's a very emotionally vulnerable place for us. It's a vulnerable place for other people. Sometimes they don't want to be seen in that way. Sometimes we don't want to be seen in that way. We've all had that moment where we have seen the sink full of dirty dishes, right? And it is so much easier to just snip at our partner about how they haven't done the dishes yet. And that's one kind of communication that gets you into one kind of conversation, right? But it can be a lot harder to look at it, have a heartfelt moment inside of ourselves and go, ah, I just feel like you don't care about this.
And because you don't care about this, there's a part of me that feels like you don't care about me. And those conversations are a lot more emotionally dangerous, right? That's a bigger conversation. But it's also a conversation that, if it's really engaged authentically, presents an opportunity for things to change in meaningful ways. Whereas just kind of complaining about the dishes in a generic sort of way might not have led to that result. If you've been enjoying the podcast, we'd really appreciate it if you took a moment to subscribe to it on the platform of your choice, wherever you're listening to it now on is great. And hey, you can maybe even leave a comment and a review. I hope it's a positive review, but maybe it's not, you know, you could just say whatever is in your heart. And know that I really do read most of them, for better or worse.
And if you've been enjoying us for a while, and you would like to support the podcast in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash being well podcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and you'll get a whole bunch of bonuses in return.
These are things like transcripts and ad free versions of the episodes, and also deep dives into the research that goes into every episode in the form of expanded show notes. Also, a quick reminder about Rick's new and revamped version of the Foundations of Wellbeing program. I've included a link to it in the summary and description of today's episode. And you can use code being well 25 for 25% off the purchase price. I really hope that you check that out. Until next time, thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.