Managing Your Internal Critic

Manage your internal critic. Why? (See previous blog) How? By reversing your thinking. Typically, the critic looks at life with the perspective of discovering what’s wrong. To manage this internal critic, you have to 1) Recognize this in yourself and accept it. It’s a gift to be able to see what’s wrong. But don’t stop there. 2) Recognize that it is NOT usually the best approach when dealing with people because it shuts down RESULTS. 3) Keep your critic voice silent. So, that means, don’t blurt out your thoughts/ criticism. (Yes, I know you didn’t mean it as a criticism. You were only trying to help.) 4) SWITCH the question in your mind to “What’s right with this approach? What’s working? What could possibly be good, different or positive about the situation or person?” Now, you at least have some balance. With practice, you’ll be able to train yourself to balance this critic voice by consciously choosing to reverse your thinking.

Critical Thinking

I love engineers. I love their critical thinking and problem solving skills. I find their raw intelligence to be exciting and interesting. I've noticed a trend though... Here's what I wrote for one of the engineers who took our Index for Emotional Intelligence 360 Assessment of Emotional Intelligence:

"Critical Thinking – You have very high standards and great critical thinking skills that are a true asset to your problem solving ability. Don’t change these strengths. Recognize that these skills work extremely well when dealing with objects and technical problems, but not so well when dealing with people."

Good engineers has been set up and conditioned to be critical. Thinking and responding like "Skippy the Skeptic" (Skippy was coined by Marilyn Reeder - an engineer!) is just a part of what they have been taught. Don't we want engineers to apply critical thinking to make sure the bridge holds or the plane stays up? Don't we want them to "test" rather than take this on faith? Of course we do. I'm sure that applying skepticism rather than blind faith has saved many lives. Critical thinking is how they get their "A's" and their stars. When an engineer solves a problem, that's what kicks in. It's why they are good engineers. So, it's no mystery that they apply the same set of skills when dealing with people. But then, we criticize and label them as having poor people skills.

Is it possible for an engineer to have great people skills? Absolutely. The first step is helping them recognize and separate the people issues and the technical issues and then giving them tools to use for the people issues. And let me warn you... their raw intelligence will make them quick learners.

Stay tuned for more on this topic.