How I Handle Criticism

I recently got an email from a fan with a deep desire to play big in her life and career. There’s only one problem, she’s terrified of the type of criticism she might receive if she really puts herself out there. “Kris, how do you navigate the good, bad and ugly?” What a fantastic question!

First and foremost, I’ve cultivated a sacred relationship with myself. I literally have my own back and am an excellent (self) bodyguard. I also believe in KC, and drum roll … I like me. Sure, meanies can sting, but I can’t be torn down easily. Good reviews, bad reviews, why hold onto either? If you believe you’re the next Jesus, then you’d better believe you’re the devil too. That’s the roller coaster ride you buy a ticket for when you choose to get caught up in others’ opinions of you. As long as what you’re putting out in the world resonates with you, feels good in your soul’s tummy, and helps folks, that’s all the validation you need. Here’s another test: Would you be proud of what you’re doing ten years from now? 20 years, etc? If so, charge on!

Over the Crazy Sexy years, I’ve experienced a bloody-wrestling match with criticism. I’m not going to lie, every once in a while I wish my life were simpler and private. But I signed up for more this time around. And more is stunning and complicated. Not everyone is open to my wellness philosophy, irreverent sass, my desire to be a smart businesswoman and my willingness to stand up for animals, people and the planet. So how can we learn to separate constructive criticism from useless finger-waging whining?  On top of that, how do we build a tougher shell to fight against bullies? It’s simple: 99 percent of the time, the stabbing comment is not about you. It’s about them. The haters will hate because they are hurt and sad and mad. Your shine freaks the holy-hell fuck out of them. Capiche?

In these situations, the quicker you shake it off and march forward, the better. Send compassion, love and forgiveness to the person attacking you. Yuck!? Yeah, I know that can be a hard pill to swallow. But boy does it reframe the situation fast. Maybe they’re having a bad day or haven’t quite learned to master the fine art of communication. Whatever the case: Never let their issues bring you down. If you can be honest with yourself, it’s pretty easy to see what information is beneficial and what needs to be tossed. Can’t see things clearly? Ask a trusted friend or colleague. Here’s another way to look at harsh commentary: When you start to get a reaction from the outside world, you know that you’re pushing boundaries and challenging yourself (and others) to grow. So, rock on pioneer!

Safe ways to deal with criticism:

1. Consider the source. Is the commenter a friend or foe? Are they speaking from a place of security and openness or anger and negativity? Even if you don’t know the person, you can usually tell a lot about them from their tone. Often, destructive, snarky criticism is a projection of the insecurity and unresolved issues of the giver. These comments can be the most biting, but also the most unfounded and telling. When you march to your own beat, you’re going to piss people off because it makes them feel uneasy about their place in the world. Thought-provokers are prime targets for being misquoted and manipulated, and you can’t control that – trust me! Take a breath and objectively examine the source before crawling into a hole of self-loathing. Plus, that person is already occupying the hole. Do you really want to hang with them?

2. Practice non-attachment. Whether the response is good or bad, you will benefit from creating distance between yourself and your work. These remarks don’t define you as a person. And remember what I said a hot second ago. You can’t control how folks perceive you. If you really want to dampen your spark, go ahead and try. Seriously, it’s not possible, so just keep your side of the street clean and let go. For example, health is a hot button issue for a whole lotta folks. To keep moving ahead, I have to remind myself that I am not merely the product of my work. I am not an inspirational patient. I am not a trailblazer. I am not a glass of green juice. I am not defined by how the world perceives my work. I am Kris. No more, no less. Sure I have goals. But my work and my life are very different – even though my life is deeply embedded in my work. Make sense? If I allowed myself to be defined by these things, I would’ve stopped years ago. And remember this, just because someone says something about you, it doesn’t mean it’s true. Is one weak voice going to silence you? No way!

3. Pull out the gems. Once in a while, you’ll receive a big honking piece of fabulous feedback. This type of critique is one of the greatest gifts a person can give you. Cherish these nuggets even if they’re difficult to digest. Constructive criticism may make you feel a little uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t hurt your feelings or cut you down. Instead, it can teach you how to better serve and build your business.

A special note about the Internet: Remember that the Internet gives everyone a voice. That’s what’s so great about it. But it also makes it an emotional land mine. People who are in pain have a really easy time venting from a laptop, especially if they never have to meet you in person or be held accountable. Journalists too. No matter how lovely they may seem, they often have their own agendas that do not include your best interest in mind. If you find yourself at a place in your career where you are being interviewed, check out the writer. Does he or she have a respectful, clean tone? How intelligent is the person? Are their values aligned with yours? If not, you can say … no. Opportunities will come and go, you’ll always have them. I promise.

Bottom line: Don’t let the fear of criticism hold you back. Use the good stuff as rocket fuel, the thoughtful advice to hone your message, and throw the junk in the trash where it belongs.

Peace & encouragement,

KC

Photo credit: TeX HeX

The Key to Manifesting Your Dreams

I’m obsessed with personal growth and have spent my life devouring everything I could get my hands on regarding how to make dreams come true, all the way to becoming a Handel Life Coach and running the life coaching arm of The Handel Group for the last four years. Many teachers of the Law of Attraction would lead you to believe that whatever you can see in your mind’s eye and concentrate on, you can have. But I have found, it is not that simple.

The truth of the metaphysics behind the Law of Attraction is that what you can feel, you can attract; what you resonate consistently with, is who you are, and you attract accordingly. Also, when you become clear about what you want, you become more likely to see signs pointed towards it and can more quickly draw yourself and it together.

But, there is a lot more “fine print” they don’t tell you.

Personal integrity (aligning your heart, your mind and your actions) is actually the foundation of being able to manifest that which you desire. To have that thing/experience you desire, you have to believe you and it belong together. How do you learn to believe? Not easy, right? Think of all that’s in the way of you believing in having:

-A beautiful body that you honor consistently.

-Deep, true lasting love.

-An amazingly successful and easeful career.

-Abiding self-love.

What’s between you and your dream is all your past experiences and choices and how they impact you, not to mention your constant inner dialogue filled with worries, detractions, reminders of your (or another’s) inadequacies, and general brattiness.

So how can you quiet your mistrust of yourself and your noisy mind? There are many ways, but the best is to develop personal integrity, which means living according to your ideals. It means doing what you said you’d do. It means making and keeping promises (this is the exercise that builds the muscle). It means lining up your heart, mind and body.

Whatever your dream is, it is the law of attraction that will determine how quickly you achieve that dream (how much do you resonate with it?). If you want to use the law to your advantage, develop personal integrity. Here are a few steps to get started:

Step 1: Articulate your dream. Dare to feel it and share it even if you don’t believe it yet.

Example: I live in a warrior’s body: strong, proud and free to experience all of life’s pleasures.

Step 2: Write out your internal dialogue about why you can’t or don’t have your dream yet. Then, analyze this for bad logic, excuses, skewed theories, unresolved past experiences, etc.

Example: I’ve never accomplished this in the past, nobody supports me, experts have told me certain things are impossible, etc.

Step 3: Undo the bad logic and skewed theories you uncovered in step 2.

Example: Try to find the flaws in your distorted thinking and replace negative thoughts with more positive ones. Be mindful of negative thoughts as they arise and question their validity.

Step 4: Make a list of promises that take you to your dream and keep them! Action makes you feel different.

Example: I will drink eight glasses of water every day, start the day with green juice, write a letter to my body apologizing for my crimes against it, etc. Tell supportive people about your dream, write up a plan, start asking for help and accountability.

Coaching begins with covering these steps in all the important areas of your life. You can see how this causes an enormous shift in how you think and act. Yes, how you feel impacts how you think and act. But how you think and act utterly impacts how you feel. The easiest access to changing your thoughts and feelings is acting in accordance with your dream. Lucky you, you can dive in and start doing that today.

One more recommendation:

Come play with Elena Brower and me for a daylong experience on the subject of raising your vibration. Yup, we’ll be “om-ing” and “saluting the sun,” but there is so much more.

Raise Your Vibration Urban Retreat

This one-day urban retreat is designed to raise your vibration and to give you practical techniques to live a happier, calmer and more inspired life. Imagine what your daily life would look like infused with (short) practices for self-awareness, self-love and manifesting your dreams. Every moment is an opportunity to raise your vibration and each one counts. Instead of waiting for your dreams to come to be happy, start being happy first and watch your dreams come, as a result.

This special retreat is led by two expert teachers: Elena Brower, founder of Virayoga, and Laurie Gerber, President of Handel Group Life Coaching. They have extensively practiced and taught the methods you will learn and they are prepared to hand over the whole bag of tools at once! Retreat includes: yoga, meditation, breathing, gratitude, heart opening, listening, writing exercises, getting freedom from your mind, how to have hard conversations and Law of Attraction practices.

November 6, 2010  2:00 pm – 9:00 pm at the Benjamin Hotel, 125 East 50^th Street, NYC

Learn more…

Laurie Gerber is the president of the private coaching division of The Handel Group, a corporate consulting and private coaching company that specializes in teaching personal integrity as the key to happiness.

Photo Credit: Dawn Huczek

How Love Leads to Purpose

In an increasingly obscure song by the Small Faces (circa 1968), a man follows his internal hunger and aching in order to fulfill his destiny.

He becomes a baker.

He sees the necessary elements around him: wheat in the field, water in the stream and salt in the mine. No longer able to just stand and wonder, he gives himself to the purpose that beckons him.

It’s obvious from the singer’s intensity and the power in his simple words that it’s not a job he just applied for. It’s an all-consuming purpose that descended upon him in a flash of epiphany. He realizes that he can do nothing else. As he proclaims in the third stanza, “The baker will come, and the baker I’ll be.”

Ronnie Lane once stated that the song, in spite of its poetic life’s purpose and fulfillment, actually stemmed from the idea of how hard you’ll work if you’re hungry.

However, to me, “Song of a Baker” gives a very clear illustration of the concept of “right livelihood,” reflected not only in the means of income but comprehensively in all that one does. It’s a full integration of belief, action, work, daily living and meditation. The singer has chosen to “be,” and through his “being,” others will receive.

Also in the third stanza, he shows us the linchpin: “When thinking of love, love is thinking for me.”

This thinking of love begets a very legitimate offspring: Love will also think for us. It will serve as the powerful motivation behind all that we do. To allow love to determine our actions we must possess clarity, daily awareness and the ability to let go of personal agendas. It requires non-attachment to outcome and encourages being present in the moment.

At times it might seem that it requires relinquishing a goal. But then again, it can encourage the embracing of a different goal: that of always doing what love would do in any situation. I’ve found that this goal supersedes any other that I can pursue.

Okay, so what do the Small Faces have to do with my dinner?

The culinary program I attended in Boulder, Colorado was all about the heart center. For all its culinary weaknesses — the Francophobic director scoffed at all things Escoffier — this one message came through loud and clear: Cook from the heart.

It’s not a new message, nor an obscure one. But it is one that is seldom seen in practice. It requires constant awareness, which is not really that compatible with commercial food production. When it is present, people notice it immediately.

For a short time, I operated my own small café in Denver. The menu was grounded in a soul food ethic, focused on nourishing with lots of room for pleasure. There was one lady who came after work each day and always ordered the same plate: grilled polenta cakes with tomato ragout, Anasazi beans with epazote, and steamed kale.

After a couple of weeks, I went to her table and introduced myself. I thanked her for her business and then politely expressed my curiosity at her consistent order.

Her answer was simple: “It makes me feel good. There’s love in this food.”

That’s something you don’t hear often in a commercial setting, but we were small enough to make it work. It’s the way I trained my staff. It was one facet of right livelihood that I wanted them to have, just as much as I wanted to have it for myself.

But this idea, my thinking of love so that it can think for me, is bigger than food, and it’s bigger than a career. It expresses itself in personal matters, in all relationships, informing one’s life purpose. It’s a form of selflessness, but it is not self-sacrificing. It is malleable, fitting each scenario allowing all participants to be nurtured. If I yield so another may flourish, I know that my strength, patience, presence and love are growing. My own endeavors, as important as they might be to me, are not so important that I must hinder another person as they peacefully seek theirs. And vice-versa.

It’s the recipe for a wonderful world — and yes, it requires over-the-top idealism. But it’s quite simple, too. Our purpose at a very basic level is to nourish ourselves and our species so that we may grow. I maintain that our unique evolutionary position also encourages us to nourish the other species around us, or at a minimum, to do no harm to them. This is what love would do.

Sure, Ronnie Lane deromanticized the song shortly after he sang it, but I’m willing to overlook his mundane interpretation. I much prefer the song’s grand philosophical view of love growing through the tangible seed, water, and salt, coming together in the bread. Through this universal nourishment, love directs us into a life of purpose.

Is my view somewhat optimistic and fantastic? It certainly is. But I’m compelled to live that way.

Photo Credit: surlygirl

The Wonder of You and Your Creative Dreams

When I was 6 years old, I came home and said to my Mom:
“Mom, show and tell should be me every day!”

She gently told me that the other kids needed a chance, and I said:
“They don’t want to- and they’re begging me to do it!”

My first-grade teacher set up a system where I went to a different grade each day to do my show and tell. I loved it, and it was a big part of my creative dream to share what I was finding each day. I didn’t know it was a “creative dream” in first grade, but I knew what I loved doing and what brought me joy.

We all know this.

We become conditioned to make a living instead of making a creative dream life. We can do both, if our creative dream isn’t yet or ever meant to create enough money to live on.

When I was 10 years old, I told my Mother:
“I’m supposed to be a beacon of hope and write books for the world.”

She told me to eat my peanut butter sandwich, and I wrote my first book that summer, and then wasn’t published for 25 more years.

In between, from ages 14 to 26, I had hundreds of jobs after my Grandfather told me: “Do everything you can think of doing so you know what you don’t want to do for the rest of your life.”

I found out a lot about humility and service and what I didn’t want to do through doing all of those jobs. I also found out a lot about what I loved doing and what brought me joy.

When I was 26, I started trying to live as the artist and writer that I knew I was, and couldn’t figure out how to make a living, so I opted out of the money system and lived on barter and trade for 10 years. I also discovered that creative dreams don’t die. They are very resilient and will wait forever.

Even though I attended college for 4 years, I decided that a degree was meaningless and quit before receiving one. I told people that I went to “collage,” because I was collaging my creative dream life together.

When I was 35, I published my first book; A Creative Companion, and started my business; Camp SARK. I created the books and products I had dreamed about all of my life, and a business to support the structure. Many books and hundreds of products later, through all my business successes and mistakes, I find myself at 56, as eager and excited about my creative dreams as I was when I began- perhaps more excited.

One of my many mentors was Maya Angelou, and I appeared on a national TV show with her. The show consisted of talking about how my creative dreams had been supported by Maya Angelou, and audience members whose creative dreams were being supported by SARK. It really showed me the value of talking about our creative dreams, sharing the processes, what worked and didn’t, what wisdom we gather along the way with each other. This energy MOVES MOUNTAINS.

I created a book called Make Your Creative Dreams REAL, and a card game to play about this book. I’ve witnessed countless businesses and great ideas become real from people working with these materials.

In April 2010, I launched my first comprehensive online and on the phone course called Dream Boogie: Dancing from Dreaming to DOing.

We gather in Dream Boogie for 8 fun and focused weeks, to discover and accelerate our creative dreams, and gain support from our creative community.

Some people launch businesses, others create systems for self-love and care, all experience growth of more money, love, time or revelations. We all do our transformational work. I offer “intuitive flashes” which are my quick intuitive answers to any creative dream questions. I’ve long been an intuitive, I just haven’t named it as such. The questions and answers are profound. There’s a live weekly class, and a reframe of homework, called “ownwork.” Each week, there’s a “Boogie Book” to work from, and everyone receives copies of everything at the end of the course. There are also videos by me, and audio interviews with other “Dream DOers.” There’s a colorful website to interact with everyone on, and a voluntary program of “Boogie Buddies.” People can participate as much, or as little as they wish. Both styles will create growth and results.

I am thrilled to offer our third Dream Boogie session and witness all of the transformations, revelations and incandescent learning that takes place. Our creative dreams FLOURISH with this kind of attention and care, and the world will turn eagerly towards every creative dream in process, and help it to grow and GLOW for all to see. I invite you to experience it and the successes that will result.

Love List: Crazy Sexy Biz

Love Listers,

Over the past decade, I’ve experienced the power of health, spiritual wealth and happiness. This journey sparked my entrepreneurial fireworks and led me to create my own wellness company. I’ve learned that it’s not easy being a business maven, but if you’ve got a passion and you want to share it with the world, you need to stock your entrepreneurial toolbox with knowledge and courage (and be prepared to make a lot of mistakes!). This year, I’ve discovered some of the most powerful ladies in biz today and they are rocking my world, which is why I’d like to dedicate my love list to them this week. Enjoy!

1. Marie Forleo’s B-School

Marie Forleo is my new BFF–the soul sista from a past life who I finally reunited with! She blows my doors off every time we get together, Skype, or brainstorm about business-savvy web magic! If you have a business that is making money, but not fully leveraged through online marketing and you want to monetize the heck out of what you do, then this program was made for you. Rich, Happy & Hot Marie Forleo has created an eight week online program for women (and men!) business owners (online or offline) looking to take off on the web and make their companies soar. This is an intense program made for entrepreneurs who already know what they want for their biz, but need help harnessing the power of the internet! Sound like you? Learn more (registration ends August 16th)!

2. Danielle LaPorte’s Fire Starter Sessions

Danielle’s no nonsense, spirit-packed approach to business resonated with me from the first time I heard her voice! Her Fire Starter Sessions virtual experience lit my entrepreneurial fire. I found myself saying, “Yes!” out loud as I read through FSS and watched her inspiring videos. If you’re looking to pinpoint your passion or launch the idea that’s been brewing for years (maybe decades!), Danielle is here to help you see the journey through. Want more one-on-one attention? Danielle offers phone consultations, but I have to warn you, buckle your seat belt and be prepared to take notes like the wind before you get on the horn with her!

3. Amanda Steinberg & Gabrielle Bernstein’s Know~ing Your Worth Teleclass

Want to get your wallet in order while fine-tuning your personal connection to cash?  Amanda Steinberg of DailyWorth has teamed up with Gabrielle Bernstein to create the Know~ing Your Worth teleclass. These four teleseminars will help you make the connection between your well being and your financial health. Amanda and Gabrielle will get you on the road toward healing your inner and outer relationship with money while you learn how to move toward financial success! Check out their website and learn more during their free introductory call on August 11th.

4. CrazySexylife.com Nominated for a Veggie Award!

And speaking of business…why don’t I give my own company a little love? CrazySexyLife.com was nominated for “Best Website” in VegNews’ 2010 Veggie Awards. Cast your vote today!

Peace & moo-lah,
Kris Carr

Photo Credit (cash register): plain_jane53177

Photo Credit (Danielle LaPorte): Anastasia Photography