Why you should stop all self-criticism

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is an absolute pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm excited to bring you today's episode about the need to stop self-criticism. Yes, I'm talking to clinician researchers, clinicians who are trying to succeed as academics, succeed in their research program forward, in moving a program of scholarship forward, and it is so important that you do not allow self-criticism to be part of your strategy for moving yourself forward.

1:39 I will say that I know that self-criticism has been an important, and I will say important, strategy in terms of succeeding because we're critical before others are critical so that we figure out where we need to improve. As part of our training, where we're always managing the subjective evaluations of others, we come to be able to do that before others judge us. We judge ourselves first before others judge us so that we know exactly what to say when it comes to the time for evaluation. You may remember or may still be having those conversations where you start by saying, well, the procedure went well, but I could have X, Y, Z, right?

2:21 Insert whatever challenge you had in there. We're so used to doing that that we bring it to our faculty positions, this whole idea that, okay, I've got to criticize myself. What that means is that we're so hyper-focused on what we're not doing well, and instead we're missing the things that we're doing well, and we're also creating an environment that does not necessarily allow us to thrive. I'm going to talk today about seven reasons why you should stop criticizing yourself and other things that you can do instead. I will tell you that this episode was really generated for me through a conversation that I had earlier in a community of physicians to which I belong. This is a community of physicians who are part of a research network, and there was just a lot of talk about, well, you've got to sit down and look at your gaps and figure out what your deficits are.

3:13 There was this whole focus in that specific conversation just around how much we don't have. I remember wanting to just stop the conversation and say, wait, wait, wait. I don't want us to focus on what we don't have as a way of, well, this is how I have to shape up, but we focus on what we don't have as a way of thinking, okay, well, this is an opportunity. At the end of the day, we may be looking at the same thing, but we're interpreting it differently. All right, so I'm going to talk about seven ways that criticism can hurt you and what you should do instead. One of the most important things, and you probably know this already, I am preaching to the choir, is that criticism erodes your self-esteem.

3:58 Criticism erodes your self-esteem. If you are trying to succeed in an area in which you haven't had much training, you don't have much skill, every time you look at yourself and criticize yourself harshly, you minimize your capacity to feel confident and go forward in building the skills that you need to build. So recall that as clinicians who have been through medical school, been through residency, gone through fellowship maybe, now are early career faculty, and even beyond, there are some skills that just weren't built into your clinical training program. So research is one of those skills that's not built into your clinical training program.

4:42 And so when you're surrounded by PhD scientists who've done research for pretty much all of their training and their faculty career, you may feel like, oh, well, I need to shape up. Look at what I'm missing. I just want to say it's so important to give ourselves grace to recognize that, hey, you weren't training this. You're now starting to do the training that other people have been doing for a long time, and you're doing it as a mature adult, really. People are looking at you saying, how come you don't know how to walk? What do you mean you don't know how to walk? You're 30 years old. And in reality, we're just learning to walk, so to speak, when it comes to our research and comes to building a research program or leading a research program, leading people.

5:27 And so if we are going to continue to move forward, then we cannot erode our self-esteem because when we feel unworthy, when we feel inadequate, we are not able to move forward with the kind of strength and confidence that we need. And so instead of criticizing ourselves, one thing that we can do is to practice radical self-compassion. Yes, radical self-compassion. Because hey, if you're not going to have compassion on yourself, who is? If you're not going to nurse the emotional wounds that you sustain every time you're rejected, every time you're criticized by others, who's going to do that for you?

6:12 And so I would say that the term that comes to mind is physician, you got to heal yourself first. You are a healer. This is what you do. You heal people. But your healing means nothing if you, the healer, is broken. And so radical self-compassion allows you to say, how can I nurture myself? How can I heal the wounds that I have and not inflict any more on myself? So the antidote to self-criticism is radical self-compassion. One of the strategies that has helped me and comes to me from Positive Intelligence, a book by Shirzad Shamin, is looking at a picture of yourself when you were younger.

6:57 So find a picture of yourself when you may be two years old or even up to six to eight years old, where it really shows the essence of who you are as a child, who you were as a child. You still are that person. But you know, it's probably a picture in which you're smiling, laughing, carefree. I don't know. But there's a picture that exists of you as the quintessential child that you are, where your inner you radiates from that picture. Find it. And maybe you're like, well, I didn't have a happy childhood. And most of my pictures from childhood, you know, I just look sad in them and it's okay. That's the picture that you need. So every time you look at that child, you remember that that child is you.

7:39 And that child deserves compassion. And if you tell me, you're like, well, my mother didn't take pictures of me when I was young because I was kid number six. I would say, come on, you can be creative. Find a picture of you in the earliest, the earliest picture you can find, whether that is you at 15, whether that is you at 12, just find the earliest picture. Find a picture that shows your essence, where your essence shines through. It's got to be a picture that's younger than who you are right now and practice radical self-compassion by showing compassion to that person who is you. Okay. The second thing self-criticism does is it hinders your personal growth.

8:23 Self-criticism hinders your personal growth. So I want to take a step back again and remind you that clinical training is not research training. I just want to take a step back again. I know I'm stepping back a lot, right? And I want to remind you that clinical training is not research training. If you're going to grow in your research capacity, if you're going to grow in your capacity to write grants, you're going to grow in your capacity to lead a research program, if you're going to grow in your capacity to mentor others, if you're going to grow in your capacity to be fiscally responsible as part of your research program, you've got to grow. And it's okay because you are used to growing. You're used to expanding, you're used to being challenged and it's okay.

9:05 But if you insert criticism, then you hinder that growth. You stop yourself from advancing. Now this is one of the things I hear from people where they're like, oh no, every time I criticize myself, then I just, you know, I put my nose to the grindstone and I go, go, go. And the self-criticism is a thing that helps me really do well. If I stop criticizing myself, I'm not going to succeed like I was. And I would just say, let's challenge that assumption. Let's challenge the assumption that criticizing yourself, which amounts sometimes to yelling at yourself or noticing everything that's wrong, let's challenge that notion that that's the best strategy under which you can thrive.

9:50 It's like saying by withholding what's needed, then yeah, I'm motivated to go forward. And I'm not discounting the motivation that can be caused by anxiety and the motivation that can be caused by fear. But I need you to understand that motivation driven by fear and anxiety cannot, cannot accomplish to any great extent what motivation born out of love can accomplish. Again, fear and anxiety are a way of motivation and sometimes self-criticism makes people feel like, okay, well, I'm motivating myself through the self-criticism. And it's working for me. I'm just letting you know that it works to a certain extent, but it doesn't bring out the best in you.

10:34 And if you think about, if you turn around, if for whatever reason you have a child in your life and you have the opportunity to observe that child after they've been criticized, you realize that what you get, even when you get more work, is work that's happening under a cloud of shame, under a cloud of constriction. Not much creativity can happen there. And so even if you've been operating under a strategy of self-criticism and you feel like you've accomplished so much because you've been so self-critical, I want you to consider a different strategy and do the experiment. How does my productivity change when I stop self-criticism?

11:20 Then you're like, well, okay, so if it hinders my personal growth, then what do I do instead? Well, what you should do instead is self-reflection. Why is that important? Sometimes self-criticism is a way that we're trying to say, you're bad, therefore you should improve. And instead what we need to do is just reflect without judgment. Okay, well, I submitted that manuscript. I was so sure it would be an instant acceptance. And instead I got a radical reject. Like, totally this is the worst paper that's ever been written. And instead of saying, well, if you only were a better writer, just pause and say, okay, well, what did the reviewers say?

12:05 What specific comments did they give? Okay, reviewer number one said, I absolutely have no desire to comment on this nasty paper. And they said nothing else. It's okay. Reviewer number one didn't give you much. But reviewer number two did. Reviewer number two said, okay, this is how you might be able to improve the paper, even if it's not suitable for this journal. And so reflect, reflect on their comments and say, well, okay, how can I grow? How can I grow? And do you see, can you feel that different energy of instead of just look at what you did? It's like, okay, this is what they said. How can I grow from this? How can I grow?

12:46 And so instead of self-criticism, instead reflect and observe without judgment. Okay. Another thing that self-criticism does, it increases your stress and anxiety. We touched a little bit on this in the last point, but I think it deserves its own platform. And so in medicine, oh my goodness, so much stress and anxiety. And even as someone who consults and supports other physicians and their care of people with hematologic disorders, I realized that a lot of the support I'm doing is managing their anxiety and stress. There was a lot of stress and anxiety in the clinical space so much, and it doesn't have to be yours.

13:32 Now I'm not here to diagnose your stress or anxiety or even tell you how to manage it. I'm not your psychiatrist. I'm not here to give you medical advice. But I do want you to know that when you add to your stress and anxiety by criticizing yourself, it does not do you much good. Now you may or may not have crippling anxiety. You may or may not have crippling stress, but I am pointing out the word crippling for a reason. I'm saying that anxiety and stress can cripple you. If you are doing something that's hard, such as building a research program or building a program of scholarship, it's something you've not done before.

14:12 You don't want to be crippled. You want to be fully able-bodied. You want to be able to be fully functional. And so anything that adds to stress and anxiety, such as being critical of yourself, it will not help you move forward. It will cripple you, and that doesn't help you to build the research program that you're building. And so instead of criticizing yourself to a point of crippling stress and anxiety, instead practice being present. Practice mindfulness. Yes, pause and think about what's happening inside you.

14:53 Think about that tightness in your chest and think about, okay, why is that there? Take deep breaths. Relieve the tension that you feel. Think about the tightness around your forehead and the headache that it's creating. How do you release that tension? Pay attention to your body signals. Reflect on how you're responding to the situation and let the self-criticism go and release the tension in your body as well. It is so important that you are fully able emotionally to invest in this space. There's so much rejection here. There's so much criticism from others.

15:34 There's so much judgment. Do not add to it yourself. Again, you're the physician. You're the healer. Others might try to hurt you, but don't. Don't be one of those that's hurting you. All right, number four is that it creates a negative cycle. Criticism begets criticism begets criticism. Have you ever been in a room, maybe you're reviewing a grant, and one person stands up and says, this is the worst grant I ever read. And you, as reviewer number three, you're like, actually, I thought it was pretty good. And by the time reviewer number one finishes dismantling the grant and telling you how terrible the grant was and how much it sucked, then you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, I guess it was.

16:17 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought there were positive things, but now I don't have anything positive to say. And all of a sudden, that person's negative review has totally canceled your positive review. Well, that's what self-criticism can do, too. What it can do is actually just take everything down a notch. What it does, it overshadows the things that you actually have succeeded in. Okay, so the manuscript was rejected outright, and the reviewers didn't like it. But if you go to reviewer number three, reviewer number three said, this is really well-written. That is important for you to pay attention to. They like your writing, even if they don't necessarily care for the content of your work. And so when you are focused on criticizing yourself, or like, I told you that was a bad idea.

17:01 You should never have submitted this. Why are you even doing any research? How dare you think you can submit publications? Instead of going down that spiral, pause and take stock of the things that are working. Stop and encourage yourself. Because hey, if you don't encourage yourself, your mentor might not. And it can't depend on your mentor because you probably meet that person just once a week, hopefully not more than once a week, maybe more often, I don't know. But you meet yourself every day. You're literally constantly with yourself all the time. And so if there's any positive self-talk, if there's any elevating of the things that you have done well, it's going to be up to you. And that's something that you should do so that you don't create a negative cycle that comes from self-criticism.

17:46 The fifth thing about self-criticism is that it keeps you from taking risks. Book science and the pursuit of creating knowledge is about taking risks. I don't know if this hypothesis is going to be proven to be true or not. If I knew, it wouldn't be science. I am taking a step of faith. I don't know. I think that all the evidence points to this answer, but I could be wrong. But if I criticize myself, if you practice self-criticism, then potentially you're not going to take the risk to test the hypothesis fully because maybe you're afraid that you're going to disprove your hypothesis.

18:26 And then where do you go? And you know what? Sometimes you are going to disprove the hypothesis, and that's OK because you're after, you're pursuing truth to the best of your ability. And sometimes what we thought was true turns out to be true in a different way. But if you are not confident enough to take risks because now you're afraid to fall because you're so critical of yourself, like your body is literally in fight or flight mode and already getting ready to protect itself from the onslaught of criticism that you may be bringing, then you're not taking risks.

19:07 You're not being creative, and that limits your ability to produce high-quality work. And your work is all about the quality that you produce, and it's so important that you are able to produce that work. And so instead of criticizing yourself, embrace a growth mindset. You can grow, you can learn, and whatever it is that you're not doing well right now, you can do it well tomorrow because you're going to put in the effort and the energy that it takes to grow to the space that you need to. You've done it before, you're a person who can grow, you're a person who demonstrates continuous growth, you can do this. Have a growth mindset. The sixth thing I want to talk about is that it harms your relationships.

19:50 Gosh, your self-critical talk may seem to you like you're just making small talk and trying to make people laugh, but you know what? It actually is a downer. People don't really enjoy being around people who are down on themselves all the time. And so you may be thinking you're just being funny. The other people are not really, it just doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good to be around the person who's down on themselves all the time, the person who cannot see the good side of themselves. You're always trying to lift them up and they're like, no, no, I suck. And you're like, no, you don't suck. You're like, oh, no, no. And it's just, wow, what a lot of energy going into convince somebody that they have positive qualities who wants to only focus on what's negative.

20:34 It's draining. It's draining to be around someone who's so self-critical. They cannot see how well they do in different spheres. And they cannot even see that this thing that they're criticizing themselves about is actually an opportunity for growth. And so every time that you criticize yourself and you look down on yourself, it harms the way you show up. It harms your relationships because people tend to not want to be around someone who is down on themselves all the time. The way you treat yourself poorly in criticizing yourself and the resulting kind of energy that comes from that, the, you know, oh, I'm not so great.

21:15 It comes across to other people. And so they know you're great. But now what they're getting from you is that you're not so great. And the more you give them that feedback, the more they're like, well, maybe you're not so great. And so I would say that self-criticism is not your friend. And if you think it's only harming you, I would say, think again, it harms your relationships. Because as you withdraw, as you're angry at yourself, it affects your ability to interact with others as well. So instead, foster healthy communication. Find a friend that you can trust and say, this is how I'm feeling about myself. Remind me of the ways in which I am, I am, I have, I'm skilled.

22:00 Remind me of how this is helping me grow. Like go to ask people to reflect back to you who you are. Now you got to find people that you trust, people who actually care about you. I hope it's your mentor or your cadre of mentors. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's your community outside of work. Maybe it's your church family. Maybe it's your community of friends from med school. Find a place where people appreciate value and celebrate you and tell them, hey, this is how I'm feeling and have them reflect back to you who you are, the greatness of you and where you're going. And you know what? You can't get enough of that.

22:41 And so every week you should just lean into that. And if you have the opportunity to be in a community that meets every week, and this is where I say, hey, we're meeting every week, Mondays at 6 PM, you should join our community. If you have that opportunity to be in a community of people who reflect back to you the strengths that they see, that will be so helpful to you. Finally, if you are full of self-criticism, you reduce your overall happiness. And I want to say that in this space, there is no room for reduced happiness. Again, there's a lot of challenge. There's a lot of rejection. There's a lot of judgment. And there are a lot of things that want to pull on your joy and your happiness.

23:26 And don't add to it, because if every time you're with yourself, you're criticizing yourself, you're bringing down your joy quotient, where are you going to get the joy? Where are you going to get it? And the reason we do this work is because we love the work we do. And so we want to create an atmosphere where love grows, the love of the work, the love of what we produce, the love of the product that we end up with. It's like, oh, I wrote this manuscript. It is beautiful. And so you want to not bring in poison to that atmosphere by criticizing yourself, which diminishes your overall sense of well-being.

24:08 So instead of self-criticism, what do you do? Focus on gratitude. What are you thankful for? What are the things you've done that you're grateful for? I was courageous. I submitted the manuscript. I wasn't even sure that I should put this out there in the world, but I took a step of faith and I did it. And yes, it came back rejected and reviewer number one totally hated it, but look at what I did. And I'm not afraid. I'm going to put, I'm going to revise it. I'm going to put it out there again. Practice gratitude for the things you have done, for the courage you have shown, for the fact that you keep showing up even when it's hard. Practice gratitude for the fact that you get to do what you want to do.

24:50 Practice gratitude. All right, so I said seven reasons why you should not criticize yourself. Number one, it erodes your self-esteem. And instead of criticizing yourself, instead practice radical self-compassion. Number two, it hinders your personal growth. And so instead of self-criticism, shift your mindset to self-reflection. Number three, it increases stress and anxiety. And so instead of criticizing yourself, cultivate mindfulness. Number four, it creates a negative cycle. And so instead of criticizing yourself, develop positive self-talk. Number five, it prevents you from taking risks. And so instead of criticizing yourself, embrace a growth mindset. Number six, it harms relationships. So instead of criticizing yourself, foster healthy communication, getting communities that support you.

25:36 Number seven, it reduces your overall happiness. So instead of criticizing yourself, instead practice gratitude. It has been such a pleasure talking with you today. I want to thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. And this is an episode you need to share with someone who is critical of themselves. You got to share this because it's going to help somebody. So I invite you to share with just one person today, one person changed somebody's life with this podcast episode. And I will celebrate the fact that you did. Thank you so much for tuning in. I look forward to talking with you again the next time on the Clinician Researcher podcast. Have a great day. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.

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