“BELIEVE in yourself! Have faith in your abilities. Without humble and reasonable confidence in your own powers you can’t be successful or enjoy happiness. But with sound self-confidence you can be successful. A sense of inferiority and inadequacy interfers with the attainment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-reliance and successful achievement,” once articulated Norman V Peale. Many things do affect confidence. One of them is criticism. Yes, I mean criticism.
By Steve Nyambe
Unjust or seemingly justified criticism will always find its way into your wonderful camp of life. Because that’s how life is suppose to be. It can’t have a proper meaning without such.
Remember, life will always have such characters that will assassinate your character until you feel like there is no need to live anymore.
Whether you have planned it or not, you will face it. Period. This is so because that’s how life was designed. It was just made to be thus.
Learn to live with criticism
Criticism is one thing that you should learn to live with. Denying it or rejecting it, is in a sense denying that which can’t be denied.
Running away from it, is just like running away from your shadow. So if ones run away from his own shadow is it not a true and a higher degree of saturated insanity? Yes, that’s a true exaltation of it.
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Thus you must accept and appreciate that criticism exist. Criticism make you stronger. It gives you power over circumstances. It is important to know that there will always be a group of impoverished idle minds that have all the negative armoury to throw on your way.
So if you be unwise, you will be entangled into usual venom of unwarranted attack.
Remember to “count it all joy when you fall into divers temptation. Knowing this that the trying of your faith worketh patience,” thunders James 1:2-3.
Your critics, are your critics no matter what. Because they are critics, they will criticise you for doing the wrong things. And they will still criticise you again for doing the right ones.
So what is the best way forward? Which strong foot must you put forward then? How are you supposed to swim through this ocean of criticism?
Dale Carnage once said: “Do the very best you can, and then put up your old umbrella and keep the rain of criticism from running down the back of your neck.”
Here is the solution
A story is told of Charles Schwab when he was addressing a student body at Princeton. He told them that some of the important things he had learnt was from an old German who worked in his steel company.
This man got involved in a “hot wartime argument with the other steel workers and they tossed him into the river”.
After this pitiful incident, he then walked into Schwab’s office “covered with mud and water”.
Schwab asked what he had said to the men who had thrown him into the river. Obviously, he might have expected utterance of harsh words.
But he replied with a different response: “I just laughed.”
Laughing? How can one laugh under such a circumstance? Yes, that’s what he did. It takes knowing yourself beyond ordinary perceived knowledge.
Laugh your way out
Sometimes you just need to laugh. Sometimes you need to take life in a simple way. You don’t need to approach life like a complicated mathematical problem or like an uphill task that is suppose to be complicated in seconds. No! Live it to the fullest and take full responsibility of what comes and goes.
Approach it with laughter and you will be surprised seeing your challenges (mind you they are not called problems) smiling at you. Laughter has huge capacity to dissolve your challenges into inspiring excitements.
“No thought of any form can be impressed upon original substance without causing the creation of form. A person is a thinking centre and can originate powerful thought,” goes again Norman V Peale in his great book The Power of Positive Thinking.
It is very paramount to note that Schwab later declared that he had adopted that old German’s words as a motto: “Just laugh.” Yes, I am saying “just laugh” even if you are in front of disturbing danger. Laugh.
Why not laugh your lungs out in front of your critics? “Laugh! Laugh!Laugh!” It can be done. Be blessed.
Steve Nyambe is a motivational speaker and leadership coach. He can be contacted on +263 784 583 761 or his email: [email protected]
