02 | DON’T TAKE ANYTHING PERSONALLY.

When criticism comes out, it’s really hard to not take it personally. Why is this? From a young age, we were raised by parents or other adult figures who, at one time or another, couldn’t take responsibility for their own shame and projected it onto us. Remember, they were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had at the time. But it was easier to make the child the wrong one than take responsibility for their own feelings. As we grow up to be adults, we believe we carry the responsibility for anything that is negative. We grow up into adults that take everything personally; whenever anyone reacts to anything negatively we instantly think its our fault, that we are ones to blame. But we must realize the truth: Whatever is said is oftentimes a reflection of where that person is at and has nothing to do with you. A great resource for mastering this is The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz, a teacher of Toltec tradition. “Don’t take anything personally” is the second agreement. Here are some of my favorite quotes from his book that summarize this point well:

• “Taking things personally makes you easy prey for those predators who try to send you emotional poison. They can hook you easily with one little opinion, and feed you all their emotional garbage. When you take it personally, you eat it up, and now it becomes your garbage. But if you don’t take it personally, you are immune to their poison; you will not eat it. Immunity to emotional poison is the gift of this agreement.”
• “When you take things personally, you feel offended, and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflicts. You make something big out of something little, because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong.”
• “In the same way, others are going to have their own opinion according to their belief system. Nothing they think about me is really about me; it is about them. If I understand this, then when you get mad at me, I know you are dealing with yourself. I am the excuse for you to get mad.”

Something I’ve also been working through this year is finding self responsibility without self blame. Responsibility is about having choice and taking responsibility for your current conditions in life. But when responsibility becomes extreme, it becomes toxic. It becomes self blame, which would include taking things personally.

I realized that self blame is actually a way for survivors of different forms of abuse–especially sexual assault–to feel a sense of control over what happened to them. The hardest thing to get an abused person to do is to convince them that the assault wasn’t their fault because self blame is the only thing that separates the survivor from complete victimization. If you can hold yourself accountable for the abuse you went through it gives you some sort of control over what happened to you versus being totally at the mercy of the world. I saw this in myself and tried to find patterns of all the different ways I had taken things personally beyond the internet critics.

04 | IDENTIFY THE CRITICISM AS TRUE OR FALSE

False. Words lose their power to hurt you if you know they invalid. If someone told you that you had blue hair, but you know you have blonde hair, then that wouldn’t necessarily make you feel bad about yourself would it? Rather, you would ride off their ignorance because you know your hair is blonde and not blue! You would see the judgment for what it was, a reflection of that person’s perception. If someone attacks you for lying, etc. and you know this to be false, the same thing happens: The words lose their power. But when you are left questioning the claim’s validity, and in turn your self worth, is when their words can gain power over you.
True. Perhaps the criticism really does have some aspects that are true, but you don’t want to face them. If the criticism is directed at apart of your shadow you have not been willing to face, it will most certainly trigger you and you will find the need to defend it. The trick is to learn to embrace your duality. If you are able to reclaim the parts of yourself that have been rejected, when criticism is directed at these parts, you can honestly say, yes, there is a part of me that be like that. But perhaps you choose not to act on it. Either way, because you have faced your shadows when others poke at them you no longer feel the need to defend. So again, the more you are aware of your shadows, the less power they will have over you. Here is a post I wrote about embracing your duality earlier in the year:

“Man and woman, yin and yang, rain and drought, sun and moon, light and shadow. Life is full of dualities 🌚🌝 One of our greatest lessons is learning to embrace the duality within ourselves. This is what it means to go from “broken” to “whole” again. Putting back the pieces… and in the process you’ll find they have been within you the whole time.

Here’s how it works. As we grow up we are praised and rewarded for some values or ways of acting, and punished or humiliated for others. We learn through this process of rewards and punishments to build some parts of ourselves up while disowning other parts. We are strong and not weak. We are quiet and not loud. We are hard working and not lazy. We are independent and not dependent. We are this and not that.

The parts of yourselves you disown are called your “shadows” that drown in the subconscious. Why would you want to go digging up your shadows? 🧐 Here’s why. The less you are aware of your shadows the more they will rule your life and have power over you. You will find yourself easily triggered, judgmental and reactive. As soon as you shine the light on them however, the shadows disappear and their power over you immediately lessens. Understanding your own shadows allows you to understand the shadows of others. And with understanding comes compassion ❤️ Doing this work is an especially important obligation we have to our horses if we want to stay calm, quiet and grounded, even when they have reactions. If you react back to a wild horse’s reactions, the fear cycle is fueled. If you respond back with compassion, you break the cycle. Same with humans 🙃 Being aware of your shadows will help you stay grounded when others around you react.”

A lot of clinicians try to show only the perfectly edited scenes that make them look great, all the time, and their horses like star students. And I had made a vow from the beginning of my career to always be real, no matter what it would take or how it would make me look. The world needs more of that, I believe.

We all struggle. We all experience hardship. We all run into walls, regardless of your accomplishments or experience level. And by sharing this, we can use our own struggles to empower others. Thank you, Willie, for showing us this important lesson.

I will close with one of my favorite quotes about criticism that gives me strength when I am feeling the weakest:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” -Brene Brown