How to Be Resilient in the Face of Harsh Criticism

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Most of us have been “feedsmacked” at some point in our life. In the midst of a meeting, an innocent walk down the hallway, or a performance review, someone delivers a verbal wallop that rocks our psychological footing. We looked at 445 such incidents when we conducted an online survey asking people about the hardest feedback they ever received.
Some of the comments were downright harsh (“Think about leaving — I need warriors not wimps” and “You only want to be right. You are manipulative. You don’t care about others”) and others were less intense while still direct (“When you lose your temper, it can make others feel less respected” and “You need to improve your emails by only stating facts and not making them so flowery or soft”).
Many respondents to our study were still haunted by a harsh comment they received decades ago. I know this feeling from personal experience. I still feel a tightness in my chest and a sense of profound dread when I recall an episode where a colleague who didn’t like the way I handled an email called me a “f—ing idiot” and threatened to destroy me.
My hunch was that those who received such high-octane criticisms were likely to feel worse than those who received gentler comments. But, surprisingly, people who received less severe comments reported being just as overwhelmed and upset.
I was also surprised that few in our study became combative in the face of criticism, regardless of its severity. In fact, close to 90% described their immediate emotional response with words like dumbfounded, flabbergasted, shocked, stunned, or numb and 40% described a “shame”-related emotion like: embarrassment, worthlessness, hurt, sadness, and self-doubt. A scant 15% reacted with feelings that focused on the other person: anger, betrayal, or violence.
Why would anodyne observations create just as much agony as scathing assaults? The answer is this: we all crave approval and fear truth. And critical feedback feels traumatic because it threatens two of our most fundamental psychological needs: safety (perceived physical, social, or material security) and worth (a sense of self-respect, self-regard, or self-confidence).

Let’s address safety first. There are times when feedback does include financial threats (“I’m going to fire you”), relational threats (“I’m going to leave you”), or even physical threats (“I’m going to hit you”). In these instances, fear is the right response. But our analysis of the 445 episodes people reported in our study showed that immediate threats are a rare exception. In most cases, it is our defensive, combative, or resentful response to feedback that puts us at risk more than the feedback itself.

Now let’s talk about worth. If learning truth is beneficial, why would its reception provoke shame, fear, and anger? Because we live with an undercurrent of terror that we aren’t worthy and feedback risks pointing this out.
Many in our study argued that feedback hurts worse when the messenger has malicious motives. In truth, motive is irrelevant. The reality is that most of us crave the approval of powerful people. Our secret hope is that their positive endorsement might finally quiet feelings of nagging inadequacy. But it doesn’t.
I’ve spent much of my life believing that the best way to help people receive and act on negative feedback is to help those who are delivering it to improve their message. But I’m now convinced I was wrong. Rather than focusing on saying things the “right” way, we need to all get better a finding truth in negative feedback, no matter how it’s delivered.
I’ve witnessed first-hand how people can do this by taking responsibility for their own safety and worth. For the past three years, I have studied and worked with a nonprofit called The Other Side Academy (TOSA) in Salt Lake City, Utah. Approximately one hundred adult men and women with long histories of crime, addiction, and homelessness live at TOSA in a self-reliant community that thrives on feedback. Their fundamental belief is that relentless exposure to truth is the best path to growth and happiness.

Twice a week, students engage in a process called “Games,” which is two hours of nonstop feedback. It can be loud. Vocabulary is sometimes raw and colorful. And a single student can be the focus of relentless attention for 20-25 minutes from as many as two dozen colleagues. Peers present you with evidence that you are dishonest, manipulative, lazy, selfish, or mean. There is little emphasis placed on diplomatic delivery of the message. Instead, they focus on helping the individual learn to “take their game.”
A few students react to their game defensively. They’ll withdraw, deny, or lash-out against those who are telling them things they don’t want to hear. But most don’t. They quickly learn that they are the primary source of their own safety. Reassuring themselves of their own efficacy is the fastest path to peace, and the best way to increase their self-efficacy is to scour the feedback for truth. The feedback is either true, false, or more often, a mix of the two. And if the truth is going to hurt you, it is more likely to do greater damage when you don’t know it than when you do. So, learning it is always beneficial.
What I’ve learned from the TOSA students is that we need to build our resilience in the face of criticism. Here are four steps you can try the next time harsh feedback catches you off-guard. I’ve organized them into an easy-to-remember acronym — CURE — to help you put these lessons in practice even when you’re under stress.

1. Collect yourself. Breathing deeply and slowly reminds you that you are safe. It signals that you don’t need to be aroused for physical defense. Noticing your feelings helps, too. Are you hurt, scared, embarrassed, ashamed? The more connected you are to these primary feelings the less you become consumed with secondary effects like anger, defensiveness, or exaggerated fear. Some students collect themselves by consciously connecting with soothing truths, for example by repeating a phrase like, “This can’t hurt me. I’m safe.” or “If I made a mistake, it doesn’t mean I am a mistake.”
2. Understand. Be curious. Ask questions and ask for examples. And then just listen. Detach yourself from what is being said as though it is being said about a third person. That will help you bypass the need to evaluate what you’re hearing. Simply act like a good reporter trying to understand the story.
3. Recover. It’s often best at this point to simply exit the conversation. Explain that you want some time to reflect and you’ll respond when you have a chance to do so. Give yourself permission to feel and recover from the experience before doing any evaluation of what you heard. At TOSA, students sometimes simply say, “I will take a look at that.” They don’t agree. They don’t disagree. They simply promise to look sincerely at what they were told on their own timeline. You can end a challenging episode by simply saying, “It’s important to me that I get this right. I need some time. And I’ll get back to you to let you know where I come out.”
4. Engage. Examine what you were told. If you’ve done a good job reassuring yourself of your safety and worth, rather than poking holes in the feedback, you’ll look for truth. If it’s 90% fluff and 10% substance, look for the substance. There is almost always at least a kernel of truth in what people are telling you. Scour the message until you find it. Then, if appropriate, re-engage with the person who shared the feedback and acknowledge what you heard, what you accept, and what you commit to do. At times, this may mean sharing your view of things. If you’re doing so with no covert need for their approval, you won’t need to be defensive.

It turns out that the misery we feel when “feedsmacked” is a symptom of a much deeper problem. Those who acknowledge and address this deeper issue don’t just get better at these rare startling moments of emotional trauma, they are better equipped for all of life’s vicissitudes.

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What is REST

REST is acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. It is architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems and was first presented by Roy Fielding in 2000 in his famous dissertation.
Like any other architectural style, REST also does have it’s own 6 guiding constraints which must be satisfied if an interface needs to be referred as RESTful. These principles are listed below.

Guiding Principles of REST

1. Client–server – By separating the user interface concerns from the data storage concerns, we improve the portability of the user interface across multiple platforms and improve scalability by simplifying the server components.
2. Stateless – Each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client.
3. Cacheable – Cache constraints require that the data within a response to a request be implicitly or explicitly labeled as cacheable or non-cacheable. If a response is cacheable, then a client cache is given the right to reuse that response data for later, equivalent requests.
4. Uniform interface – By applying the software engineering principle of generality to the component interface, the overall system architecture is simplified and the visibility of interactions is improved. In order to obtain a uniform interface, multiple architectural constraints are needed to guide the behavior of components. REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state.
5. Layered system – The layered system style allows an architecture to be composed of hierarchical layers by constraining component behavior such that each component cannot “see” beyond the immediate layer with which they are interacting.
6. Code on demand (optional) – REST allows client functionality to be extended by downloading and executing code in the form of applets or scripts. This simplifies clients by reducing the number of features required to be pre-implemented.

lego sorter project

https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/how-i-built-an-ai-to-sort-2-tons-of-lego-pieces

Swap caps on systems without x11 or xwindows

swap caps on systems without x11 or xwindows

ESRGAN

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https://kingdomakrillic.tumblr.com/post/178254875891/i-figured-out-how-to-get-esrgan-and-sftgan

Inclusive Leaders

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Companies increasingly rely on diverse, multidisciplinary teams that combine the collective capabilities of women and men, people of different cultural heritage, and younger and older workers. But simply throwing a mix of people together doesn’t guarantee high performance; it requires inclusive leadership — leadership that assures that all team members feel they are treated respectfully and fairly, are valued and sense that they belong, and are confident and inspired.
Inclusiveness isn’t just nice to have on teams. Our research shows that it directly enhances performance. Teams with inclusive leaders are 17% more likely to report that they are high performing, 20% more likely to say they make high-quality decisions, and 29% more likely to report behaving collaboratively. What’s more, we found that a 10% improvement in perceptions of inclusion increases work attendance by almost 1 day a year per employee, reducing the cost of absenteeism.
What specific actions can leaders take to be more inclusive? To answer this question, we surveyed more than 4,100 employees about inclusion, interviewed those identified by followers as highly inclusive, and reviewed the academic literature on leadership. From this research, we identified 17 discrete sets of behaviors, which we grouped into six categories (or “traits”), all of which are equally important and mutually reinforcing. We then built a 360-degree assessment tool for use by followers to rate the presence of these traits among leaders. The tool has now been used by over 3,500 raters to evaluate over 450 leaders. The results are illuminating.

These are the six traits or behaviors that we found distinguish inclusive leaders from others:
Visible commitment: They articulate authentic commitment to diversity, challenge the status quo, hold others accountable and make diversity and inclusion a personal priority.
Humility: They are modest about capabilities, admit mistakes, and create the space for others to contribute.
Awareness of bias: They show awareness of personal blind spots as well as flaws in the system and work hard to ensure meritocracy.
Curiosity about others: They demonstrate an open mindset and deep curiosity about others, listen without judgment, and seek with empathy to understand those around them.
Cultural intelligence: They are attentive to others’ cultures and adapt as required.
Effective collaboration: They empower others, pay attention to diversity of thinking and psychological safety, and focus on team cohesion.

These traits may seem like the obvious ones, similar to those that are broadly important for good leadership. But the difference between assessing and developing good leadership generally versus inclusive leadership in particular lies in three specific insights.
First, most leaders in the study were unsure about whether others experienced them as inclusive or not. More particularly, only a third (36%) saw their inclusive leadership capabilities as others did, another third (32%) overrated their capabilities and the final third (33%) underrated their capabilities. Even more importantly, rarely were leaders certain about the specific behaviors that actually have an impact on being rated as more or less inclusive.

Second, being rated as an inclusive leader is not determined by averaging all members’ scores but rather by the distribution of raters’ scores. For example, it’s not enough that, on average, raters agree that a leader “approaches diversity and inclusiveness wholeheartedly.” Using a five-point scale (ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”), an average rating could mean that some team members disagree while others agree. To be an inclusive leader, one must ensure that everyone agrees or strongly agrees that they are being treated fairly and respectfully, are valued, and have a sense of belonging and are psychologically safe.
Third, inclusive leadership is not about occasional grand gestures, but regular, smaller-scale comments and actions. By comparing the qualitative feedback regarding the most inclusive (top 25%) and the least inclusive (bottom 25%) of leaders in our sample, we discovered that inclusive leadership is tangible and practiced every day.
These verbatim responses from our assessments illustrate some of the tangible behaviors of the most inclusive leaders in the study.

• Shares personal weaknesses: “[This leader] will openly ask about information that she is not aware of. She demonstrates a humble unpretentious work manner. This puts others at ease, enabling them to speak out and voice their opinions, which she values.”
• Learns about cultural differences: “[This leader] has taken the time to learn the ropes (common words, idioms, customs, likes/dislikes) and the cultural pillars.”
• Acknowledges team members as individuals: “[This leader] leads a team of over 100 people and yet addresses every team member by name, knows the work stream that they support and the work that they do.”

The following verbatims illustrate some of the behaviors of the least inclusive leaders:

• Overpowers others: “He can be very direct and overpowering which limits the ability of those around him to contribute to meetings or participate in conversations.”
• Displays favoritism: “Work is assigned to the same top performers, creating unsustainable workloads. [There is a] need to give newer team members opportunities to prove themselves.”
• Discounts alternative views: “[This leader] can have very set ideas on specific topics. Sometimes it is difficult to get an alternative view across. There is a risk that his team may hold back from bringing forward challenging and alternative points of view.”

What leaders say and do has an outsized impact on others, but our research indicates that this effect is even more pronounced when they are leading diverse teams. Subtle words and acts of exclusion by leaders, or overlooking the exclusive behaviors of others, easily reinforces the status quo. It takes energy and deliberate effort to create an inclusive culture, and that starts with leaders paying much more attention to what they say and do on a daily basis and making adjustments as necessary. Here are four ways for leaders to get started:
Know your inclusive-leadership shadow: Seek feedback on whether you are perceived as inclusive, especially from people who are different from you. This will help you to see your blind spots, strengths, and development areas. It will also signal that diversity and inclusion are important to you. Scheduling regular check-ins with members of your team to ask how you can make them feel more included also sends the message.
Be visible and vocal: Tell a compelling and explicit narrative about why being inclusive is important to you personally and the business more broadly. For example, share your personal stories at public forums and conferences.
Deliberately seek out difference: Give people on the periphery of your network the chance to speak up, invite different people to the table, and catch up with a broader network. For example, seek out opportunities to work with cross-functional or multi-disciplinary teams to leverage diverse strengths.
Check your impact: Look for signals that you are having a positive impact. Are people copying your role modeling? Is a more diverse group of people sharing ideas with you? Are people working together more collaboratively? Ask a trusted advisor to give you candid feedback on the areas you have been working on.

There’s more to be learned about how to become an inclusive leader and harness the power of diverse teams, but one thing is clear: leaders who consciously practice inclusive leadership and actively develop their capability will see the results in the superior performance of their diverse teams.

Stress + Rest = Growth

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As an athlete, if you want to improve something—your 100-meter time, say, or your deadlift PR—you’ve got to apply a challenge, some sort of “stressor,” and then follow it with a period of rest and recovery. Too much stress without enough rest and you get injury, illness, and burnout. Not enough stress plus too much rest and you get complacency, boredom, and stagnation.

Stress + Rest = Growth. It’s as simple and as hard as that.

Since Peak Performance was published a little over a year ago, no theme from the book has garnered as much attention as that equation. And for good reason. The American College of Sports Medicine, the country’s premier body on the application of fitness science, has officially endorsed training in this manner to increase size and strength. Meanwhile, a 2015 study published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology found that best endurance athletes in the world all have one thing in common: they oscillate between periods of stress and rest.

And yet the more feedback I get from readers, the more I see how that equation can be beneficially applied not just to fitness but to all areas of life. Below are a few of the most common examples, along with some practical advice on how to make what I’ve come to call the “Growth Equation” work for you.

Grow Your Career

When I’m coaching non-athlete clients who are striving to excel professionally, I start by asking them where they want to be in their careers and what they are doing to get there. In my experience, people in the workplace—myself included—tend to fall into one of two traps: either getting stuck in a rut where they are just going through the motions or taking on so much hard work at once that they become completely overwhelmed. Neither is conducive to long-term progression.

I encourage my clients to systematically challenge—to stress—themselves in the direction they want to grow. And then I ask them to follow those challenges with rest and reflection. What went well? What didn’t go well? What could I do differently next time?

Career progression is generally more complex than going from a 6-minute mile to a 5:45 mile; or from squatting 200 pounds to 210 pounds. It’s harder to dial in the right amount of “stress.” On a scale of one to ten—with one being "I could do this in my sleep" and ten being "this is giving me panic attacks"—I ask my clients to take on projects that they’d rate a seven; assignments that they think they’d get right seven or eight out of 10 times, but not every time. These are just-manageable challenges.

Another way to think about stress in the context of career growth is something I got from my co-author on Peak Performance, Steve Magness. He says: “Ask yourself, ‘What’s the next logical step?’ And then do that.” For example, if you’re used to presenting to middle managers, try to create a situation where you’re in front of a vice-president. If you manage a team of five, talk with your boss about trying to expand that to seven or eight.

Just make sure you don’t go from challenge to challenge without giving yourself some time to catch your breath. Much like a muscle grows in between challenging workouts, career growth is more sustainable if you respect the need to rest, recover, and reflect in between challenging projects.

Grow Your Team and Organization

What do Kodak, Blockbuster Video, Borders Books, and the Cleveland Browns have in common? They were all busy doing things the same old way over and over again when the world around them was changing; they neglected to “stress” themselves in the direction of growth. The first three are out of business and the Browns are perennially at the bottom of the NFL.

What do Google and the San Antonio Spurs have in common? They all continue to evolve their strategies to stay ahead of the competition. Google does this by extending into new markets—think: from an internet search-engine to self-driving cars. The Spurs do it by constantly evaluating and adjusting their style of play, including overseas recruiting of little-known players who become hard-to-guard stars. An area of business research called Organizational Ecology says that organizations that are forward-looking, reflective, and challenge themselves to grow tend to survive and sustain their performance over time.

Grow Your Relationships

I am by no means an expert on relationships, but something that comes up repeatedly in the Q and A part of my workshops is how the growth equation tends to apply here, too. Be it friendships or romantic relationships, people in audiences always call this out. Bonds strengthen after two people experience a challenge together and then openly reflect on it. A handful of experts think the same. But just like in the other contexts, too much “stress” without enough rest and the relationship can flame out.

Make the Growth Equation Work for You

• Pick an area of your life.
• Reflect on where you currently are and where you want to be.
• Think about whether you ought to be in a state of stress—taking on just-manageable challenges—or in a state of rest, recovery, and reflection.
• Align your behavior accordingly.
• Check in every few weeks, just like you would for any other training program, and evaluate your progress.