Praise and Encouragement vs Criticism

1. Praise and Encouragement vs Criticism Understanding how our interaction with others ranges from inviting them to give away their personal power to empowering them to use it.

2. Objective: • To identify actions that invite others not to use their personal power. • To identify actions that invite others to use their personal power. • To practice distinguishing between praise and encouragement and increase understanding of empowering others.

3. “Empowering other people means to invite them to use their own personal power rather than trying to use your personalpower to get them to do something.”

4. Types of Interactions • When you send invitations to someone you can usually categorize your interactions as one of three types: • Criticizing • Appreciating • Empowering.” • There are some interactions that don’t fit into one of the three categories.

5. Criticizing • This is the least helpful of the three. • One type of criticism is when someone points out errors or mistakes that you’ve made. Another type is when someone gives you a put-down. When you say something to someone or when someone says something to you about how a task was done, what type of things are usually pointed out? • Negative Points.

6. Criticizing (continued) • People usually point out what was wrong, what was done incorrectly, left out, etc. The reason people do this is to help the other person do it better next time, so they can grow and develop and get better at doing whatever it was they were doing. However, focusing on the negative is not very effective. • Research shows that pointing out what someone did wrong does not help them grow. When you point out what someone did wrong, what usually happens is they do one or more of the following five things.

7. Pointing out what’s wrong, could cause: • PEOPLE TO STOP LISTENING. People don’t like to hear negative things about themselves or their work so they tune you out. • PEOPLE TO REACT DEFENSIVELY. They feel they are being attacked so they begin to make excuses to justify what they did. They focus on defending what they did instead of concentrating on improving. • A DECREASE IN EFFORT ON THE TASK. Their motivation to do the task is lessened. They feel they are being criticized, and they don’t want to do anything that’s going to bring them more negative input, so they either do less of it or stop doing it at all. • PEOPLE TO SEE THEIR WORK AS FUTILE. They perceive that they have worked hard, so then when someone points out mistakes they feel their efforts were for nothing. They begin to see themselves as powerless, so they give up. • PEOPLE TO WANT TO GET BACK AT YOU. They feel they’ve been hurt and they want to hurt back.

8. So the drawback of pointing out what someone did wrong is that it actually invites them to feel powerless, to give up, and to lose. Does pointing out errors or giving put-downs invite others to focus on the positive? (no) • There is another aspect of how giving criticism or put-downs to others is not being responsible to them. When you criticize someone, who picked out the behavior to action to evaluate? (you) • Does that invite the other person to use their personal power? (no, it takes it away, you are in control, not them) • If you judge their accomplishment and put a negative value on it with your criticism, who is doing the evaluating? (you are) • Does that invite the other person to use their power to evaluate their accomplishment? (no)

9. Under both the errors and put-downs on your chart, write: YOU pick out behavior and YOU evaluate it. Both of these put you in control and invite the other person not to use their personal power. Is criticizing someone an effective way to exercise responsibility to someone? (no) • What are the two reasons why not?” • It invites them to focus on the negative. • It takes their personal power away. • We all get criticism from those who haven’t yet learned how to be effective in exercising their responsibility TO others. • Tomorrow we will discuss Appreciating and Empowering others.