The Opposite of Criticism

Aaah, criticism! Sweet, old, bitter criticism! The one we all grew up with, and the one that was never left out. The criticism that we thought was the only trigger to make us move mountains…and ourselves. We grew up with the idea that criticism improves, it is needed and it is the only thing making us go forward.

When I say “criticism” I talk about labeling, judging, comparing, blaming, shaming, guilting someone with the “high purpose” of improving them, or getting them to feel a need to improve themselves.

First of all, let’s take it logically. When everything around is chaos, or emotional blackmail, logic is the last resort. So, going on with logic, when I say someone should improve something, like their attitude, skills or actions, I am judging their current level based on my own views. If I criticize them now, is because according to my standards, they are not good enough. I judge, label and condemn at the same time; because my standards are mine, they are not universal, my views are also personal, and nobody should just adjust and submit to them by default. And of course, it also goes the other way around, meaning that when someone criticizes me, they do it based on their view, information, standards and expectations, which has nothing to do with me, in the end. This way, the first step when criticizing someone would be to evaluate them, according to MY perspective, and then draw the conclusion that I have no use of them like this, so they should change. Here we get to the second step: they are of no use to me like this! But why should someone be of use to me? Why just that specific someone? And why in a specific way? And most of all, who am I so that I expect them to serve me and be useful to my needs? As for the third step, this where the real action kicks in: I tell them, in any possible way, making use of any argument, emotional blackmail, bringing up tradition, culture, rules, laws, etc., maybe even throwing in there a bit of threatening, anything it takes, to make them change. And this is the third problem-step: I want to force someone to change. Force brings only counterreaction, which then evolves into a power struggle, and even if in the end I win, it will leave both of us, so me included, depleted.

One thing that I learned through my 28-38 channel (The Struggle Channel) is that if a battle that doesn’t fulfill you, regardless of the outcome, is not a battle worth fighting for. What use do I have of winning something, with the price of my own energy, that I can’t enjoy afterwards, because I am too drained, exhausted, depleted to enjoy it at all? And this is just a parenthesis about getting into power fights with another mind: they will always leave you drained, they will always cost you a lot of energy, so in my opinion, these battles are not worth fighting.

Coming back to criticism, I started studying it long time ago, when something didn’t feel right. Somehow, criticism never landed well with me. Maybe this comes from my 40th gate, my Design Sun, or from the 26th gate, my Design and Personality Uranus, or maybe I just don’t find it useful to be told what I am doing wrong. Being told what I could do better feels way more useful and saves more time!

How can any of the blaming/shaming/comparing methods give fuel to someone to take on a new task, or to improve something about themselves? I never felt motivated by these techniques, so I always avoided applying them on others. As a 5/1 profile myself, if a method that I tried doesn’t work, I just go looking for another one, there is no time to waste on feeling sorry that it didn’t work. So, why do people expect that with a negative input you could ever get back a positive outcome? In what world does this logic work? I am not connecting any of this methods to fear, I am going only by logic. Because, of course, if you add in fear… things change. But fear, especially the fear of other people, is a subject for some other time, so in here I will keep it only at criticism level.

Each time I told someone that was criticizing me that it’s not going to work, I won’t do it better if they continue telling me what I am doing wrong, I could see how their face froze in shock and they got lost. How come I didn’t react “well” in that scenario? Why? And, the most common question was “Then how can I make you do it?” And here we get to the main point, here is where the whole critical interaction between two people sits, in “How can I make you do this?”

Nobody can make anybody else do something. Nobody can make someone else change, decide, take action, learn, etc. We can’t force other people into something, we can’t make them do what we want them to do. This is not how life works. Of course we can force them, threaten them, use lots of tools, for our own fear that if they don’t do what we want, we will lose something, but as I said before, this is another story.

So, then, what can we do? What can we do if we really need the cooperation of someone else, and we can’t obligate them to do it? What would be the solution?

Encouraging someone could work, although encouraging someone is not the opposite of criticism. It is 100 times better, but it’s still not the Solution. Encouraging works mainly where people already have self awareness, some self esteem, and some courage. It works where people were already thinking about the same idea that you presented, and by being encouraged it can help them to finally make a decision or take the first step.

But what do you do with someone frozen in front of a situation? I tested it already, both on myself and other people, that encouraging a frozen person doesn’t help. The conclusion that I got to was that Empowering the other one is what works. And then, also from a Human Design perspective, I read a lot and tried a lot with this “empowerment” idea. How to do it? What is it? And, most importantly, how does it work?

I already found my way of empowering others, I noticed I do it intuitively, and for all those years that I have been trying to understand what it means, I had been doing it already!

I will come back in another post with what Empowering the other means to me, and how I noticed it happens, but until then, I would like to know if you are familiar with it, what it means to you, if you have ever felt empowered by someone else and how that fueled you.