The power of criticism

that he wouldn’t be the one to serve me, the arrow pointed at him. I tried retracing my footsteps but there he was, grinning like a boy who had just been offered some candy.
He had a crooked smile and a chipped tooth which made him look like he was growling and ready to attack.
Why was it that every time I came to shop, he was the one that served me? This unsettled me a lot. Everything about this man was either wrong or not good looking.
I criticised him every time I saw him and would ignore him when he spoke. He never wronged me but for some reason I just disliked him.
How many people criticise you everyday, not because you have offended them but because they just don’t like you? How many of us criticise ourselves everyday that we are not good enough and that we don’t deserve good things in life?
It took one person I had never spoken to to make me realise that criticism was not good.
She didn’t like the way I looked physically and for a moment while she criticised my appearance, I lost confidence.
It was my body, and she made me feel as if something was wrong with it.
There is constructive criticism that can build one for the greater good and one that can destroy a person. Instead of criticising a person all the time, find ways to help them.
No one likes being criticised but sometimes we criticise ourselves and the next time you feel like criticising yourself remember C Joy Bell, who said: “I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticised me, I have already criticised myself.
“But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don’t want to spend my life with someone who is always critical. So I am going to stop being my own critic. It’s high time that I accept all the great things about me.”
Have you noticed the power and the weight our words have when spoken?
They have an impact on our lives even though sometimes we may not notice it.
Muhammad Ali once said: “What you are thinking is what you are becoming.”
The more we speak negatively about ourselves or a situation, the more the things we don’t want to happen start happening.
This is because when we speak negatively we attract negative forces around ourselves and sometimes we even subconsciously cause those negative things to happen to us.
May Engel Breit once said: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.”
The Bible also warns us in Proverbs 18: 21 that: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and they who indulge in it shall eat the fruit of it.”
Thus we should be careful of what we utter because without knowing it, we are prophesying our own life.
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” is a truism from one unknown author.
Opportunities are presented to us each day of our lives but some of us do not see them because we are too busy staring at the opportunity we almost had.
Boris Pasternak said: “When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart and it is very easy to miss it.”
Many people are caught in that web.
They stare at the closed door hoping that one day it will eventually open and let them pass through. Whereas behind them there is an opened door that presents far greater opportunities than the previous door, they don’t want to let go of the closed door.
Was it not Muhammad Ali who said, “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life?”
This is what most of us do, we find it hard to let go of our past wishing and praying that God will turn back the hands of time and put everything back the way it was. But in reality we all know that will never happen.
Accept the change in your life and try out the new opportunities life has presented to you. After all, you will never know the outcome unless you try.
Joseph Sugarman once said: “Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognised a problem and turned it into an opportunity.”
Most people know what confidence is, but they don’t really know what it means or how to be confident. The way you walk, speak, eat, breathe and move your eyes sends out signals and a story about the type of a person you are.
Sometimes people treat us harshly or without even a care in the world because of the way we carry ourselves.
Marianne Williamson counsels people saying: “Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. If we’re frantic, life will be frantic. If we’re peaceful, life will be peaceful. And so our goal in any situation becomes inner peace.”
A person who just slouches in a chair, never looks up to listen to what is presented in meetings, never offers any ideas and when asked to do something, actually hides to avoid more work.
When others get promoted this person is the first to complain and accuse others of getting favours in the work place, and yet when opportunity is presented for him/her to show off what he/she can do, he/she lacks the confidence and instead lets fear take over, thus the opportunity is forgone.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
“Actually who are you not to be? You are a child of the universe. You were born to manifest the glory of the universe that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone,” writes Marianne Williamson
One author says a diamond doesn’t start out polished and shining.
“It once was nothing special, but with enough pressure and time, becomes spectacular,” says Solange Nicole.
Anyone could be that diamond.