In this week’s series, we’re going to examine the habits that define successful and unsuccessful people, and look at choices that increase energy in our lives. Today I’ll share why the choice of criticism or complimenting is a major deciding factor in our success. Criticizing ourselves and others is a surefire way to deplete our energy and perpetuate negativity in our lives. Making the conscious switch to compliment and provide constructive feedback is a simple hack that will get you vibrating at a higher level in record time!  

Read transcript below:

Steve Napolitan: In this week’s series, we’re going to examine the habits that define successful and unsuccessful people, and look at choices that increase energy in our lives. Today I’ll share why the choice of criticism or complimenting is a major deciding factor in our success. Criticizing ourselves and others is a surefire way to deplete our energy and perpetuate negativity in our lives. Making the conscious switch to compliment and provide constructive feedback is a simple hack that will get you vibrating at a higher level in record time!  

And there are times of feedback. So that’s not what I’m getting at. But when you overly criticized, when you’re criticizing others more than you compliment them, then you’re taking your own energy away. Because we’re actually giving our energy away when we overly criticized. And a lot of times this goes to our own personal self worth. I know I’m going really deep, really fast, but when we can point out that someone else is wrong, then it puts us as right. Or there’s an innocence and guilt a thing that happens with that. And so the more that we find ourselves criticizing others, the more we drain our energy. And this is not useful when we’re running our businesses, we’re managing our business and we’re running our life. And so this is why I want to bring this up in a big way right now.

So if you really feel the energy around that when you compliment someone, so go try this out today. Go compliment someone, or a few people, and then notice the energy inside yourself after doing that. It’s kind of like those moments that we always talk about when we give a gift. When you give a gift to someone and you’re doing that, that energy is amazing. Think of the times when you’ve been able to give someone something that really meant a lot and you were able to have an opportunity of that exchange, then it lifted you up as well. Even though you’re giving the gift and we don’t think about that. But notice your energy when you’re doing that. And compliments are a gift. And it’s also celebrating life. I think we under celebrate our life. Especially we put so much expectations on ourselves and then we don’t reach them because we put such high expectations.

Most people I meet, especially entrepreneurs and executives, we put these huge goals. That’s why I’m such a fan of stretch goals, and a goal. Make a goal that you can achieve and then have a stretch goal that’s out of reach. So then when you hit that there, there’s success, but when you hit your goal, there’s success. And so when we’re complementing one another, we are celebrating and that lifts ourselves up, our vibration goes higher, your energy goes higher. And it’s really good.

And again, there’s going to be times when you have to give feedback. And so those times that you’re doing that, do it in a way where you’re giving some compliments as well as what feedback you want. One thing that I learned from Carl Buchheit and his whole team at NLP Marin was, what I saw that worked well was dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

What I’d like to see more of is dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And so, then you just put it in those two chunks and it works really well for feedback, versus just continually criticizing others. So just notice where you’re criticizing and then, now this is going to pop up. So building a little self awareness. When you do criticize another person, notice your energy level around that and your feelings around it. Are you truly giving feedback so that you can help someone? Or are you doing it where it’s disempowering, or you’re trying to lift yourself up into a righteous position? And then that actually just noticed that even though that might some, in your subconscious mind or conscious mind, feel good, because you’re putting yourself into a higher position. The energy of yourself is going to go down. Because we’re putting energy away from ourselves by criticizing others. And just notice your energy level when again, compliment or criticize and notice how it changes the energy inside your body.

And you might be saying, “Steve, this is crazy. What the hell are you talking about?” But give it a try. What do you have to lose? Just try noticing in these moments how it feels inside of yourself and notice your energy level. And I would say that most successful people…

Sorry about that. The camera froze real quick, but I was closing this out, and saying that I believe successful people compliment more than they criticize. And just check yourself awareness around this. And tomorrow we’re going to talk about another piece of success versus… Successful people versus unsuccessful people. Look forward to seeing you on tomorrow’s episode. And as always, remember, choose gratitude and create freedom. We’ll talk to you soon.