Don’t Count Your Critics, Weigh Them

Whenever I get asked how to handle critics, I always remember this phrase:

Don’t count your critics, weigh them.

If you do anything, especially in today’s culture, you’re going to get criticized. There are a million different reasons people criticize.

1. 1. 1. There’s a lot of people who are going to criticize you out of envy—they are too afraid to make a mistake, so they are going to criticize to make you feel bad to somehow feel better about their passivity and their fears.
      2. There’s a lot of people who are going to criticize you because they have a need to be better than you, or they feel a need to know more than you. So, they’re going to criticize and try to make themselves look better.
      3. Another reason people criticize is ideology, philosophy, or theology—they might have different worldviews than you do.

Jesus said this, and I’m going to paraphrase: “Whoa to you when you’re not getting criticized.”

What he actually said is, “Whoa to you when all men speak well of you.” That’s the flip side way of saying criticize.

Make sure you’re getting criticized by the right people.

If you’re making everybody happy, then you’ve got some serious problems. What if you’re making the control freaks happy? What if you’re making the irresponsible happy? What if you’re making entitled people, narcissists, gas lighters, and toxic people happy by appeasing all toxic stuff they do? You don’t want that.

Once you start to do anything that is loving, responsible, honest, forward moving, accountable, and results oriented—which also means you are going to have to have hard conversations and say no to people who aren’t performing—you will get criticized.

Make sure you’re getting criticized by the right people.

Make sure you’re making the right people angry. That’s a good way to know you’re doing a good job. Then make sure you’re not getting criticized by the good people—the people that you would want to please for good reasons.

Now, you will get criticized because you’re not perfect. But here’s the thing, when you get criticism from people that you respect and are for you and not against you, run towards it. Say to them, give me a gift. David said in the Psalms, when a righteous man strikes him, he will consider it a gift when he gets rebuked. That’s the attitude we must have toward the right people.