How Self-Criticism Undermines Your Performance

A poor mental state can lead to low-quality performance, even though you have already proven to be able to deliver very high performance in your profession. When we criticize ourselves, our body experiences it as an attack and can even have an effect on a hormonal level, which causes problems.

In NLP and psychology, there are anchoring techniques that can help you build more self-confidence. This phenomenon will also increase your charisma. People like to be attracted to charismatic personalities. Charisma can be trained.

The brain (the unconscious) experiences self-criticism as an attack from outside. That is how we are programmed. Your body starts producing adrenaline and cortisol, which causes it to focus all available energy on survival. This happens at the expense of the resources needed to show professionalism and expertise. Because you are in survival mode, your intelligence blocks itself.

When you are in survival mode, your body blocks your critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving skills. This condition causes you to fail in performing your tasks and others may see you as weak, your non-verbal communication contributes to this.

If you doubt yourself, you radiate that. Your conversation partner will pick up on this and quickly label you as weak and incompetent. This article therefore also explains why some people are not successful in business; this is one of the causes.

The solution: train yourself from within in positive thinking.

There are anchoring techniques in NLP and psychology that help with this. The writer of this article, myself, has this knowledge.

"You are not good enough" is an unconscious program that ensures that you always deliver mediocre performances.

Imposter syndrome often occurs in highly gifted and intellectually broadly developed people. At least 70% of people experience this feeling of insecurity. "I'm not good enough. It may take a while for someone to discover this. But stress and anxiety cause stagnation. To come across as charismatic, one must overcome these obstacles.

Three steps to break through this:

Reveal and understand that most people experience this. Think of a situation in which someone you admire also had to deal with this. Visualize this person telling you about his or her own discomforts and how they were overcome.

Neutralize negative thinking. Understand how subjective your arguments often are and that you often confirm something selectively. If you experience negative thoughts, try:

Depersonalize your feelings: not "I am ashamed", but "There is shame in failure".

Remember that there have been similar situations in your life and that you are still there.

Visually see yourself from a distance, smaller and smaller until you are a dot on the earth; there are many techniques.

Rewrite your reality. Suppressing or ignoring rising anger because of an incident can cause you to pay a high price pays by not achieving your goals. The moment you decide to rewrite your belief about an event, you literally change your emotion, which allows you to achieve your goals because you come across as charismatic.

Example: Come up with an explanation that calms your brain. Suppose a reckless driver just made you angry, maybe he drives arrogantly because he just heard that his mother is dying. It doesn’t matter what you come up with, but if your brain experiences the explanation as reassuring, you will calm down and get back the charisma you need for that presentation that starts in 30 minutes.

If you can’t do all this yourself, find an NLP specialist.

Author of the article: Inna Boukreeva (art historian, marketer, hypnotherapist with NLP knowledge). This article is based on works by Olivia Fox Cabane and Robert B. Cialdini, among others).