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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about how to deal with critics trolls and haters I've had my fair share of experience being here on YouTube with critics trolls and haters in the last few years so I think there's some some ideas I can share with you here that can help you with this issue I've been called everything from Voldemort to Yuri the guy from command & Conquer and everything in between so I'm pretty familiar with various slanderous criticisms that one can get here's the point the point basically with critics is the following is that life is too short for taking critics seriously and you have a life purpose to accomplish right right you have a life purpose don't you right right right right right right a life purpose you know what that is you have a life purpose you have a a mission you have a sense of meaningful work that you're doing you have some sort of work project a business a career something that you're kicking ass in you have to have that in life if you don't have that in life you don't have a life purpose you're not clear what it is and you're not fully committed to it you're not living your passion life what's going to happen is that critics will run you down they'll get to you because here's the bottom line about critics here's one key and I'm going to give you a couple of key insights here that's going to really change how you view critics but here's the first one a critic is basically a crab in the bucket have you heard of this before crabs in the bucket so supposedly what they say I don't know I've never done this but if you take a bucket and you throw a bunch of crabs in it the crabs will never be able to escape because even as one crab is trying to climb out he can climb out but the other crabs will pull him down every time and so because of this phenomenon you can have a bucket full of crabs and then they all die in the end all together in that bucket when they could have been able to escape now I don't know how true that is but let's just go with it let's just assume that's true so this is how I want you to see a critic whenever someone is criticizing you he is one of those crabs and now the important thing for you to determine is are you going to be one of those crabs that lets himself get pulled down back into the bucket because that's a choice you have a critic is ultimately a distraction a distraction to your life purpose if you know what you need to be doing in life if you have a sense of trajectory and you've got that dream you're working on you've got that dream career that dream business whatever you're trying to do whatever impact you're trying to make in the world that should be at the top of your mind to the point where it eclipses everything else especially critics and let me tell you if you're going to be accomplishing a meaningful life purpose in your life and you're going to be having an impact in the world whether through starting a business or career or some charity organization that you start or whatever you're gonna have plenty of critics because as soon as you start rocking the boat and you start making some splashes in the water critics are everywhere but let me give you the next key insight for how to deal with this so here's something you got to really understand this realization and it takes a little bit of thinking about this to get this realization down but I'll help you here so here's a realization you have to realize that an opinion does not change anything about reality itself so you have reality and then you have an opinion and these two things are totally different this might seem kind of obvious but let me show you how powerful this realization is here with some examples so let's take a common case let's say someone says that they don't like your work or that your work is crap right common area where we get criticism is with the work that we do maybe you're an artist maybe I'm you're a musician maybe you're a business person maybe you're launching sort of product or a service and people don't like it for whatever reasons ok so how do we use this realization well let's say someone tells me that my work is [ __ ] ok at first I have this instant reaction of like oh I got to defend myself and oh now this maybe means that my work actually is [ __ ] and then see then this kind of puts me into this kind of downward spiral of starting to doubt myself and getting into this kind of depressive mode and and all that that's why criticism is painful to us is that we kind of think like well what if there's something true about this criticism and then somehow that now this changes things but see it changes nothing really why is that if someone tells me that my work is [ __ ] we've got two options either my work is [ __ ] or it's not [ __ ] but whatever the case my work did not change the truth did not change reality did not change simply because someone told me that my work is [ __ ] now granted it might be the case that my work actually is [ __ ] maybe all later come to realize like oh man they were right my work is bad but notice that that's an opinion too that's my personal opinion if I start to believe that and that's fine it might be a valid opinion but I have a choice about what I choose to have an opinion on and also notice that even when I make the decision that my work is bad that still did not change the work that was originally there so let's say that I'm feeling great about my work then all the sudden someone comes and says my work is crap then I start to maybe doubt myself in sort of think oh yeah maybe it is crap but look the work itself didn't change that whole time through when I was feeling great the work was the same when someone told me it was crap their works to remain the same and when I started to believe it was crap it still remained the same so reality didn't change this is a very powerful thing you got to start to see how powerful this is because what you should be doing as your self actualizing and you should be learning to align yourself with reality and with truth truth and reality are your saviors most of the neurotic problems and emotional issues that we have all the dissatisfaction with life that we have is not because there's something fundamentally wrong with reality it's because of how we look at reality that we have problems so we're we're facing that right here let me give you another example so let's say someone says that you're ugly or they criticize your looks in some way maybe your hair your dress whatever right a lot of people are very sensitive to personal appearance criticisms so same thing think about this when someone says that they hate your hair and it's crappy at first as I call me and you hate my hair my hair must be bad and I need to go get a new haircut or something like this okay maybe even your hair is bad but look your hair didn't actually change by them telling you that nor did it change by you starting to believe it either so you have to separate what's real the hair is what it is and then what people believe about and what you believe about it two totally different things now of course if you start to believe that it's bad you can go get a haircut and change it if you want alright but that's like an option that you have later on the key here to not be reactive to criticism is to understand that oh nothing changed I mean it feels like when someone tells me something negative or bad it feels like something changed about reality the trick is to understand that nothing really did change another example let's say someone says that you're stupid or that you hold some sort of wrong belief or if you're an argument then you're espousing a wrong argument so again did your intelligence change because they told you that no did not your IQ level change notes stay the same if you hold a wrong point of view in an argument if you hold a false belief let's say you hold the belief that's factually false okay maybe you do if someone tells you hey your belief is false maybe it is but that doesn't change the fact that you held that belief so right now you might feel bad because someone tells you that hey there's something factually wrong in your model of the world but if it's true that there's something factually wrong in your model of the world then it's true and it's always been true now you could change that in the future but just because someone else believes it or you will start to believe it doesn't change it you see you have to open yourself up to what what's fascial occur echt what's factually true reality if you're wrong just be honest that you're wrong that's fine there's nothing wrong with being wrong per se let's give another example let's say someone accuses you doing some sort of immoral or evil act let's say someone calls you a liar or a cheat or a thief or something like that and you're and you're innocent and it's like well no I'm innocent I want to protect my innocence and so you get all you know your panties get in a twist because someone wrongly accused you of lying or cheating or stealing okay and that you know that's usually emotionally disturbing for us but again you'd have to realize wait a minute did reality change because someone called me a cheat or a thief or a liar no didn't change even if I did cheat or steal or lie well then that's what's true someone pointing it out to me doesn't change it it's already been true it was already true before it was pointed out to me so if someone points it out to me nothing changes you see let's say another example your parents hate your lifestyle choices let's say you pick a career or you pick a a major at school and your parents really disagree with you and so they criticize you for it maybe your dad or your mom criticized you for it and then that makes you upset because now you're kind of agitated you're doubtful okay realize that you chose this career or you chose this major because you enjoyed her because you had a passion for it or whatever you had some reason for it because your mom criticizes you for it doesn't change your passions doesn't change the decision you made to go into this career into this major right so just kind of separate that stuff out very powerful in a nutshell what's so powerful about this is that you start to realize when you make this separation between opinions and truth is that opinions only have power over you when you agree with them let me repeat that again because this is very important opinions only have power over you when you agree with them that's a big thing to realize if you can truly realize that and be conscious of that throughout your life you're going to make yourself immune to criticism very powerful the only way that you can really lose something when you're being criticized is to take that criticism seriously enough to slow yourself down in the hard work that you need to be doing towards your life purpose so let's say you're like a train and you're on track to go somewhere far some are good you're pursuing your life purpose you like a train on train tracks right and you're going you've built up some momentum and then someone comes by and stands on the road on the on the tracks basically and tells you to stop hold on stop the whole train now if you want you could stop the train it's gonna slow you down a lot though if every time there's someone by the tracks trying to get you to slow down or to stop but that's totally your choice because you're a freight train if you want you could keep going and no one could stop you they could park a car in front of you just go right through it because you've got that much momentum and how much power because in the end these are canyons are like ghosts right it's kind of like a ghost was on the train tracks you just kind of like plow right through it and wouldn't even dent the Train that's the case here except if you start to believe that these ghosts are real and they're really solid they can derail your whole train then what's going to happen is every time you meet a ghost you're going to stop you're going to pull over you can start the whole the whole train and then you're going to stay there right you're gonna stay there that ghost could haunt you for four years and guess what you're not going to be working towards your life purpose during this whole time and this is the case of the crab letting himself get dragged back into the bucket this case right here so what's the lesson from this well the lesson is that you need to be very confident and clear with yourself about your own values and goals and dreams in life and your life purpose this is vital this is vital the reason that most people cannot follow this advice that I'm giving here is because there's so unclear they have no sense of purpose they have no clarity about their values they have no real dreams or ambitious they're going for so basically because of this it's like you know there's their train is extremely weak it's not going anywhere it's already kind of standing still so when the train is standing still it's very easy for to get infested with rats and worms and and ghosts haunted by ghosts and all this kind of stuff right because it's just standing there's like a haunted train so the key here is that you're not that person and if you are right now that's okay admit that that's just what's true and you can change that though you can really change that in fact I have a whole course my life purpose course which deals with how to find a life purpose how to find your true values how to set proper goals how to really find your passions in life I created that course because it's I think it's it's one of the most important missing pieces that most people don't have and I spend a lot of time personally in my life figuring that out for myself because I saw how important it was right I saw these dynamics and I told myself it's worth spending a few years really finding my life purpose and it's really paid off now at this point you might have a little Jack you might say something like well okay leo I kind of get weird going with this kind of makes sense you know opinions are just opinions but isn't it also the case that opinions a little bit more than just opinions what about for example when my boss uh has an opinion of me you know he's my boss I depend on him for my salary you know he has a lot of say on my on my life so don't I need to garner good opinions with him isn't that important isn't my boss's opinion more than just an opinion because he holds the purse strings so I need to make sure he likes me so in this case it's kind of like I can't just ignore him it's not just like a ghost it's something more serious yeah that could be the case you could corner yourself in life put yourself in such a precarious situation in life that your whole life will hinge and your fulfillment and your your success in life will hinge on the opinion of one individual person and then what you'll be doing is you'll be playing this game where you have to bend over backwards and jump through hoops for that person and that person will like it because people like having a sense of power over other people or maybe for example it's not your boss but maybe there's some important person like at a networking event you need to go kiss someone's ass at a networking event because that person's promised promising you a prospect of a great job and you want that job so it's likely oh I need to go impress this person and I need to you know get a favorable opinion from him otherwise I'm not going to get my good job and that might very well be true here's what I'll tell you about this stop expecting freebies from people the reason you have this problem is because actually what you've done is you haven't taken full responsibility for your life and for your own success you've been kind of a victim and you've been using other people as crutches and you've been expecting freebies from people like oh yeah that person supposed to set me up with some money and this person here is supposed to set me up with my girlfriend and this person they're supposed to do a favor for me and so you've got hundreds of people around you who all are like occupying these critical positions in your life and this makes you extremely dependent on and so what this means is that you're putting yourself into a really tight spot you're basically making yourself dependent on opinions when you don't need to be and that's probably because you've been lazy because you didn't really want to take responsibility for yourself to go out there and do all this stuff yourself which you could have done you know it's kind of comfortable to lean on somebody here and there so what do you do about this well you have to start to restructure your life a little bit you need to take responsibility for the results and the success you want to get in your life create your own success you don't want to outsource success that's something that you should be doing focus your efforts not on schmoozing with people and making a lot of fancy high-powered connections to get yourself a bunch of freebies um that's a that's a real unfulfilling way to go through life instead focus on self reliance on independence focus on creating massive value for the world through your life purpose make yourself independent that way then you're not going to be really reliant on all these opinions of other people I mean if you want to really create a disastrous situation for yourself then put yourself in a position that a lot of like women will put themselves in for example uh like a stay-at-home mom who's had a couple of kids and then she stays at home and she doesn't really go get a new job she doesn't reinter the workforce because she's kind of just hoping that the husband will provide for her now and she's kind of got comfortable that position but now the husband is the only one who brings in the money and maybe the husbands are like a little bit abusive like verbally abusive emotionally abusive and she just has to put up with it she has to put up with it and you know he holds the purse strings because he gets the paycheck the money's all in his name in his bank account and it's like the wife has nothing and he has everything and so now she's really in this position of like master/slave she's a slave he's the master right he has the power in this position and what happened here is that she gave her power away she didn't have to do that and now she's really painted herself into a corner because now she needs to curry favor with him all the time if he now has a negative opinion of her when he comes home from work she's going to really be upset about it it's going to really bother her and now this opinion is more than just a ghost now it's a lot more serious because now it very might be the case that you know if you piss if she pisses off this some this guy then he won't give her the money if she was hoping for or he won't you know give her something else that she was hoping for or he might exist exert some kind of other external pressure on her to get her to comply so yeah you got to be careful about not setting up those kind of situations this means restructuring your life strategically where necessary thinking down the road and eliminating these kind of dependencies doesn't mean you have to be neurotic and completely independent of everybody with this you can have dependencies in your life just you know make sure the core dependencies are handled by you especially stuff like your paycheck your money right don't be relying on the people to be your sugar daddies and don't be relying on other people to make sure that you have work for example if your boss if the opinion of your boss is the sole thing that keeps you employed and if your boss ever stops loving you then all of a sudden your job is going to be cut if that's how you're earning a living in your in that situation you got to sort of change that situation that's a very dangerous situation to be in you're basically sticking your head under a gun and you're hoping the other person doesn't pull a trigger and eventually those triggers usually get pulled if they don't get triggered just by accident so I have a little exercise for you here get a piece paper get a pen and write down the following statement if I took more responsibility for creating what I want I would restructure my life as follows so write down this statement I'm going to repeat it again I took more responsibility for creating what I want I would restructure my life as follows and then create a list of five maybe 10 maybe 20 restructures to your life that you could make so that you are more in control and you're let less reliant on opinions of other people so for example if you know if if your boss has you in a bind and you really feel like you can't hold down your job unless he loves you then maybe what you got to do is you say you know what screw this I don't need this you know I don't need to be someone's little [ __ ] let me go find a job where I have a boss that respects me let me go find a job where um even if my boss disagrees with me or doesn't like me for a certain while you know I don't get fired just because of that that might be one restructure that you come up with but think deeper think about not just your career but think about friendships think about social connections think about your relationships and all that stuff all right so that's your exercise there but let me continue because I have a few more important signs for you here's the next key insight people are critical because they procrastinate and because they fear their own greatness and because they fear hardwork key insight the reason that there are trolls in the world it's it's subtle it's not obvious at first why there are trolls it looks on the surface like wow people are just criticizing legitimate grievances that's not what's really happening what's really happening when I see a troll is I see someone who has no life purpose or if they do then they're totally off track with that life purpose and really what they're doing is they're doing the easy thing they're criticizing someone else it's easy to criticize but see when they criticize what they're actually doing is they're feeding it to their lower self and they're using that as a form of procrastination it's very subtle and very sneaky self-deceptive procrastination because when we procrastinate in our usual way our mind says all your procrastinating time to stop but when you become a troll you become a procrastinator without knowing that you're a procrastinator and that's what all criticism basically boils down to is that these people who are criticizing you whether it's your parents or your boss or your wife or your husband or whoever if they're expending more than just a few seconds telling you something is wrong if they're actually putting in motion is that criticism the way a hater or troll would they're just they're robbing themselves basically of their own greatness they don't know what their own greatness is they don't know how to pursue their own greatness they don't want to go do hard work towards a life purpose they don't want to go focus the way that you're trying to focus so they just engage in it's kind of guilty pleasure of the lower self it's almost like binge eating on ice cream or on potato chips it's good that kind of thing you know they're stuck in that and then that's why a troll becomes a troll because you know first he starts as a critic and then you know it gets worse and worse and worse and worse and the more he procrastinates with that then the more series of a troll becomes until you see these kind of people like on the internet you know or on YouTube these kind of chronic trolls which just all they do is they just watch videos and they just leave nasty mean comments about how everything is wrong the world is screwed up society is screwed up and everything is wrong everyone is wrong except them it's not a coincidence that their ego is doing that right there's something really deep going on there so how can you use this well you can actually use this as a reminder of how to improve yourself and keep yourself on the narrow road so every time you see a troll out there somewhere just remind yourself like oh yeah that could be me in fact where am i acting like a troll Who am I criticizing in some other aspect of my life how am i procrastinating on my life purpose by being a troll maybe not in the same way that this guy is maybe I'm not so critical at my job but maybe I'm critical with my with my girlfriend or my boyfriend or maybe I'm I'm a troll to my children and I nag them all the time why do I nag my children oh it's because I'm too big of a [ __ ] to actually go and work on my own greatness so that's a very good reminder because you're gonna forget this is something that's very unconscious these dynamics are very unconscious because the fact is that pursuing your life purpose is very challenging it's scary it demands everything of you to be able to do it successfully and it's so much harder to do something constructively than to do something destructive just like criticism especially criticism not only is it destructive but it's it's it's it's so lazy it's like you get to just sit back and get a talk [ __ ] talk [ __ ] you don't you have to be responsible for creating results you don't to get off your ass you have to do anything all you have to do is you just have to do that that monkey chatter that- monkey chatter and your mind you just have to say yes to it that's the easiest thing in the world and the hardest thing in the world is to control that monkey chatter and to turn it from negative to positive and then to apply it towards some sort of useful purposes in life and then to shape and improve the entire world with that drive that's the hardest thing the easiest thing is to sit back and criticize so that's it in a nutshell now before I let you go I need to give you a couple of important warnings here so warning number one is this is not to be used as an excuse to reject feedback so I'm not telling you here that now you don't have to think about feedback feedback is important you need to distinguish being feedback and between criticism constructive criticism is otherwise known as feedback feedback is very important and you're going to fail without it so for example if let's say you have a business and you launch a product and then some client of yours sends you an email saying something like your product is [ __ ] now what is that is that criticism is that feedback well the way it which it was said your product is [ __ ] that tells you that that part of it is criticism but that same exact email that same exact sentence also might have some valid feedback maybe it is the case that this customer is legitimately disappointed by some aspect of the product that you launched maybe there could be something improved about your product in the future now this customer might have said it in a very crass way because he doesn't know any better but you still need to be able to distinguish between feedback and criticism likewise for example if your parents are telling you the hey you're doing something wrong you know you made some bad lifestyle choices you chose a bad major bad career it's very easy to say well they're just being trolls and critics I'll just ignore them and I'll just do exactly what I want to do no that's not what I told you what I told you is ignore the troll part but it might be the case that they actually have some legitimate advice or feedback that they're offering you maybe it's some feedback that you don't want to hear maybe you did choose the wrong career choice maybe they have your best interest at heart maybe they just don't know how to communicate it you need to be able to take that kind of feedback right and of course of course if you're sitting there at work and your boss comes to you and you guys are working on some pilot project you're collaborating and he tells you hey you know this change you made yesterday it's not going to work for our clients you know they need these kinds of changes made so go ahead and change what you did before now you might listen to what I said you might say well oh so that my bosses opinions you know it's all [ __ ] it doesn't matter I'll just keep doing what I wanted to know that's not what I told you your boss in this case is probably offering you some valid feedback so you need to take that into account right there is a difference there is a difference opening up yourself to feedback that requires you to actually summon courage that's part of your mission of becoming great in life is taking in valuable feedback and there's no real paradox or contradiction here it's just a distinction you have to make it means that you have to up the black-and-white thinking and do a little more grayscale thinking and that's fine that's what's necessary second warning is this is not an excuse to be a callous [ __ ] so you might think some like well okay leo you know so I verbally abused my wife and every time she you know I come home and I verbally abused her and then now she's critical of me for verbally abusing her all the time I mean she's just a troll right I don't need to listen to [ __ ] criticisms no that's not what I'm telling you if you're verbally abusive to your wife you're being callous [ __ ] and so she might be giving you some valid feedback there about how your behavior needs to change and how you could grow and how you could be a better husband that sort of thing so this is not an excuse to be a callous [ __ ] this is not an excuse to step on people and to do it you get istic 'el and selfish things without concerning how you're impacting your environment it's important that you have some awareness about that and then the third warning is that this is not an excuse to be dogmatic so you might say something like well okay so leo you're telling me to ignore all the other perspectives in life so you know I have my I have my faith I have my religion I have my beliefs I have my convictions and I my political party and I believe in all this stuff and I'm just gonna like cling to it even more now and entrench myself you gave me permission to entrench myself in my beliefs now too you know [ __ ] everybody else and [ __ ] all the other perspectives in life no that's not what I'm telling you I'm kind of telling actually the exact opposite you need to be going around and looking at the other perspectives taking in all the other feedback studying and learning stuff that you otherwise would be resistant to learn because of your close-minded ego not taking criticism does not mean that you entrench yourself in your dogmas so be careful about that as well all right so that's basically it remember focus on what's real focus on the truth and also focus on your creative mission in life focus on your life purpose speaking of which if you're not sure what your life purpose is and you've been scratching your head this whole time as I was talking about it then I think it would really benefit you to go check out my ultimate life purpose course I worked really hard on it it will really set you on the right direction in life you'll find out your values you'll find out your top passions you'll find out a lot of practical concepts that you need to know to start to go and actually carry that out in your life and as you put that piece of the puzzle into place and you combine it with a lot of the insights I gave you here about criticism you will make yourself immune to criticism and that will be a huge relief for you a lot of people you know we we waste most of our day worrying about what other people think of us and how they're criticizing us and just like it's such an unfulfilling way to go through life think about the opposite think about being impervious to criticism open to feedback open-minded exploring life exploring different points of view and going forward on your mission making an impact in the world that's the kind of life you want that's a self actualized life all right so I hope you check that out anyways I'm signing off go ahead post your comments down below please click the like button share this video with a friend and lastly come check out actualized org right here you'll find the life purpose course there also you can find the newsletter I have a free newsletter I release new videos on self actualization topics very similar to this every single week my mission is to help you to get a self actualized life going this is not an easy thing I'm not here giving you get rich quick schemes and magic pill solutions for all your emotional problems it's actually just the opposite I want to convince you that there's something really worth working for here with self actualization there's a lot of advanced concepts that you need to understand very practical concepts about how your psychology works and how the psychology of life works other people work when you understand these things and you can see what's possible for you in life that's when your life takes on a charge and an excitement that probably missing otherwise when you find your life purpose and then you you get an involve with self helping start reading books and you start taking some seminars and you watch more of my videos or other people's videos that's when you're like it's exciting that's when you're growing one of the greatest most rewarding experiences life is just growth and most people lack this because once they get out of high school or college all the growth stops they stop growing they stop learning and most importantly they're not learning the practical things they really need to know to master life and that's what I'm here to help you to do so if you stay onboard with my newsletter you're going to be getting weekly updates and that's what I found is the best way that's how you're going to really grow yourself here is just stay onboard with me every single week watch the videos do some little exercise that I give you a few years from now your life is gonna start to transform in amazing ways and then 10 or 20 years from now you could you could really be a a mover and shaker in the world a real leader you could really make a big difference in the world and that's going to be reflected also it's going to be mirrored back on you and you're going to have that sense of fulfillment that otherwise you would never have been able to get so I hope you like that idea if you do sign up stay tuned and I'll see you soon you