Mark McGuinness - Resilience: Facing Down Rejection (17 page)

1. Process (basic)

For process-oriented tasks, where there is a clear right and wrong way to do things, it’s relatively easy to come up with specific examples of successful performance. Health and Safety drills, proofreading guidelines, and driving lessons are designed with this purpose in mind.

Many forms of martial arts include
kata
—literally ‘form’—sets of prescribed movements to be performed in sequence, such as a series of attacks and defenses.
Kata
are tightly choreographed in order to teach correct posture and movement. There’s no room for creativity. Students spend hours practicing the movements, using demonstrations, video, and feedback from instructors to guide them.

At the level of process there should be plenty of instructions available, so make the most of them. But if you’re really on the path to achieving something remarkable, you’re not going to do it by just following instructions.

2. Technique (intermediate)

The next level involves tasks that are performed according to principles rather than rigid rules. Things like public speaking, tennis strokes, baseball pitching, plotting a novel, using perspective in painting, or meter and rhyme in poetry. Sooner or later, you’ll need to develop your own style, and maybe do things in an original way. But familiarizing yourself with tried and tested principles can speed up your journey to mastery.

At this intermediate stage, a skilled teacher can be tremendously helpful, giving you very specific feedback about where you’re going wrong and practical advice on improving. They can show you how to structure your presentation for maximum impact, or eliminate a distracting gesture. They can tweak the angle of your arm so that you hit or throw the ball with greater speed and precision. They can help you smooth out inconsistencies in your plot. They can give you exercises in perspective or versification to establish the principles firmly in your mind.

Criteria are useful here since they help you focus on the specific elements you need to improve. In the examples above, we can identify
structure
,
body language
,
speed
,
precision
, and
formal technique
as the key criteria. Once you know these criteria, it’s relatively straightforward to identify good examples and measure yourself against them.

For example, if you delivered a rambling, incoherent presentation, a teacher could give you an example of a really well-structured talk, explain how it differs from yours, and show you how to use the same principles to structure your own talk. In this scenario you’d spend more time with your laptop than on the podium. But if your structure was good but your body language let you down, then you’d spend more time watching videos or live demonstrations, and practicing your delivery.

No, technique is not enough for artistry. But I’ve noticed that real artists tend to have a healthier respect for technique than the amateurs who dismiss it as ‘not the real thing.’ As Banksy famously said, “All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?”

3. Mastery (advanced)

When you move beyond technique towards mastery, it’s down to you to figure out what to do next. When it comes to jazz improvisation, mazy runs on the football pitch, or leading a team through a crisis, nobody can tell you the ‘right answer,’ because there isn’t one.

At this stage, teachers and critics are there to raise your awareness of your own performance, as a prompt to your own creativity. You will get more from a critic who helps you see a habitual weakness, or a coach who asks you probing questions, than from an instructor who tries to tell you what to do.

The better you get, the more people will be telling you how wonderful you are, which is nice, but dangerous. If you only hear the praise, it’s hard to know how to improve. So find critics with sufficient insight and experience to hold you to higher standards. They could be professional reviewers, academics, a mentor, a friend, or even a rival. And ultimately, you need to learn how to do this for yourself—making the transition from being your own worst critic to your own best critic.

Among the many criteria you or your critics can invoke at this stage, two are particularly important:
your own standards
and those of
exemplars
.

Your own standards

When it comes to your own standards, it’s invaluable to have at least one critic who knows you well enough to spot when you are true to your own talent and aspirations and when you veer aside, into the easy option, the rehearsed formula, or the crowd-pleasing gesture. Maybe everyone else is showering you with praise, awards, and/or flowers—but the critic speaks up, like the voice of your conscience. And it may be hard to hear the criticism. When everyone else is inflating your ego, it’s painful to have someone apply a pin!

But if you look honestly into your heart, you should see whether or not they have a point. And hopefully you will get better at doing this for yourself, without the need for someone else to point it out to you.

Exemplars

Exemplars—people who are shining examples of stellar achievement—become more and more important the better you get. Because there are fewer people in your immediate circle who can match your performance, it’s vital to keep your exemplars in mind.

For example, having achieved considerable success in the first part of his career, the poet Seamus Heaney wrote a perceptive article about W.B. Yeats, where he said Yeats was the kind of poet who “bothers you with the suggestion” that once you have mastered one type of poetry, you should try writing a different kind. If Heaney had used poetry prizes or reviews in the
Times Literary Supplement
as his criteria for success, he might have been tempted to rest on his laurels. But when he looked at the achievement of Yeats, he found he had plenty to learn.

Choose your exemplars with care. Make sure you pick someone whose example genuinely resonates with you. Steve Jobs achieved amazing things in his lifetime, and if you want to build a company as big as Apple, you can learn a lot from his example. But maybe you’re not interested in building an empire on that scale. Maybe you’d rather keep your business small, manageable, and meaningful in your own terms. In which case you might be better off taking a leaf out of Derek Sivers’ book
Anything You Want
, in which he tells the inspiring story of ‘accidentally’ growing a $22 million business, while trying to keep it as small as possible.

As well as choosing exemplars from your own field, feel free to take a few from other fields, as this can open up some really creative avenues for you. David Ogilvy modeled his advertising agency on the kitchen of Monsieur Pitard, head chef of the Hotel Majestic in Paris. Supposing you started a company with the aim of doing for business what David Bowie did for rock ‘n’ roll, you’ll probably come up with something more original than the person who wants to be the next Bill Gates.

Once you’ve chosen your exemplars, don’t try to ape their personality, their quirks, or even their methods. Focus on the particular qualities they embody that make your spine tingle —because those are the ones that teach you something about your own nature and potential.

Your next steps:

How to raise your game depends on whether you’re working at the level of process, technique, or mastery:

1. Process

Identify exactly where you went wrong, and what the correct procedure is to get it right. Use reference materials—instruction manuals, textbooks, videos—or get an instructor to tell you what to do, and practice until you can do it standing on your head. Memorize essential information.

2. Technique

Get as much detailed information as you can about your performance measured according to the key criteria.

If you can, ask the critic these questions:

• What exactly will success look like?
  
• What specifically am I doing wrong?
  
• What specifically should I be doing instead?
  

If you’re not able to ask the critic, ask yourself these questions and see what you can come up with. You may want to enlist a teacher to help you with this.

Next, practice and get high-quality feedback—video yourself, get feedback from a coach, take a test—whatever it takes to verify that you are improving.

3. Mastery

At this level, you can improve by listening to critics, self-evaluation, and/or emulating your exemplars.

Critics

• Who are the key critics for you to listen to?
  
• What are their criteria?
  
• When you read/listen to their criticism, what new options spring to mind?
  

Self-evaluation

• How do you know when you have fallen short of your own standards?
  
• What is most likely to cause this?
  
• How can you avoid it?
  

Exemplars

• Who are your exemplars? In your own field? In other fields?
  
• What qualities do you admire in them?
  
• How can you use their example to spur you on to achieve more?
  

Note:

Seamus Heaney, “Yeats as an Example?” in
Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978
(Faber and Faber, 1980)

35. Your heart, your ego, and your reputation

We often hear that we shouldn’t take misguided or malicious criticism seriously. We should ‘let it go’ or ‘rise above it.’

But what if it’s having a negative effect on your public image? What if an untrue allegation or rumor is affecting your career or business? Shouldn’t you do something about it?

And if you do answer back to the critics, how do you do this without looking petty or getting sucked into a nasty argument?

In short: how do you decide whether to respond to negative criticism—and how to do it?

Let’s start by asking exactly
who
is being criticized. This may seem obvious, but you are a more complex creature than meets the eye. I invite you to consider three different aspects of yourself: your
heart
, your
ego,
and your
reputation
.

Your heart

You know the truth about yourself in your heart.
No one can change this, and ultimately it’s what you have to live with.

It’s possible to fool the whole world by projecting a false image of yourself. But if you lie or cheat or otherwise let yourself down, the knowledge is there in your heart, eating away at you. Conversely, whatever lies other people may tell about you, they can never touch your heart. Even if your reputation is damaged, however painful that may be, you will know in your heart that the lies are not true, and you have nothing with which to reproach yourself.

Being true to yourself is essential if you want to be happy, but it isn’t always sufficient. Very few of us have the equanimity of the Zen master who was falsely accused of fathering the illegitimate child of a teenage girl. When she accused him, and the angry villagers brought him the baby, all he did was exclaim, “Ah so?” He then took the child into his care. With his reputation in tatters, he quietly got on with raising the child for several years. Eventually the truth came out and the real father owned up. The villagers went back to the master, apologized for doubting him, and took the child back to his parents. “Ah so?” said the old man, and quietly resumed teaching Zen.

N.B. Looking into your heart is
not
the same as listening to your Inner Critic! The Inner Critic lives in your head, and gives you the worst possible interpretation of your actions. What you know in your heart is the simple truth, without judgment. The more you practice mindfulness, the easier you will find it to tell the difference between your heart and your Inner Critic.

Your ego

Your ego is your self-image.
Or rather your self-important-image! It’s how you like to see yourself and how you would like the world to see you. It is fragile—easily broken or bruised. And it’s high-maintenance—to preserve your ego, you need to spend a lot of time thinking about yourself and worrying about what other people think of you.

Every time you are pained by incompetent, invalid, or malicious criticism, it’s your ego that feels the sting. Deep in your heart, you know the criticism is not justified, so there’s no need to get agitated. But your ego goes into overdrive because it feels threatened anytime anyone says anything remotely negative about it.

If you want to succeed, you can’t afford to cling onto your ego. Part of the price of success is that some people WILL misunderstand you or fail to give you the benefit of the doubt. And some people will tell lies about you, or criticize you unjustly. And some other people will listen to them and form a negative image of you. They will see you as selfish, greedy, lazy, an egomaniac, or whatever. And whatever you do or say, some people will
never
be persuaded to let go of their negative image of you.

(Remember this next time you hear a juicy piece of gossip and feel tempted to pass it on.)

You have to make your peace with this. You will never persuade everyone that you’re wonderful. Trying to do this is a distraction from your real work, and will only make you miserable. Even if you succeeded, you would only be pumping up your ego to monstrous proportions. The most important thing is that you can live with what
you
know about yourself in your heart.

Distinguishing between your heart and your ego is another compelling reason to keep up your mindfulness practice. Learn to recognize the tell-tale signs that your ego is on the prowl!