Can you speak up? I can’t hear you over my inner critic…
Our older son, Zachary, wasn’t the only Williams’ family member to graduate this month. Last week, our dog, Bailey, graduated from obedience school, and what a triumph it was. You see Bailey was the underdog. I’ll tell more of her story a little later…
Have you ever felt like the underdog? No matter how hard you tried you just couldn’t seem to get ahead of either your internal or external critics? Perhaps you were assigned the project that no one else wanted and were overcome with self-doubt or you had a leader who determined from your initial meeting that you were not the right person for your role and there was nothing you could do to change their opinion of you.
What do you do when that happens? In my mind you have three choices:
Today, I offer a toast to our sweet girl, Bailey, the underdog!
Bailey from the beginning fought an uphill battle to graduate from basic puppy obedience school.
Defeat: In this scenario you define yourself by the critics’ opinion of you. You let their opinions become your truth. You resign yourself to the fate they have defined for you.
Triumph: In this scenario you hear what the critics say, survey the landscape and then you get creative, designing solutions that change the landscape. In fact, you architect a path forward that no one would have expected. This becomes a springboard to a whole new level. You refuse to let the critics define your path forward.
Stagnation: All too often, we end up somewhere in between. In the liminal space of neither defeat nor triumph where we go through the motions day-after-day neither defeated nor triumphant but instead stagnant living a life of mediocrity neither living down to pre-conceived notions proclaimed by these critics nor triumphantly exceeding their expectations.
I would argue which of the three you do is a matter of choice. Brené Brown spent three books unpacking Theodore Roosevelt’s speech “The Man in the Arena.” I’d have to agree with her, and Theodore Roosevelt, for that matter. In the end, its not the person who is sitting their critiquing you that matters, it’s the person who is in the arena with you that counts. It reminds me of the two grumpy old men on the Muppets, Statler and Walford. Perhaps I’m dating myself, but Kermit, Scooter, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, and the rest of the crew worked so hard to put a great show together and all Statler and Walford could do was criticize everything they did. I never saw them out there offering to help so, frankly, their opinion never should have mattered.
Muppets Grumpy Old Men,
Statler and Walford
Always critiquing but never in the arena.
I’d say the same for our lives. It should only be the people in the arena with us that we should be listening to. The ones who are on the projects, running the marathons, in the trenches that we should be listening to, not the ones sitting on the sidelines critiquing, even when it is our internal critic who is wreaking havoc upon us.
I close with a final tribute to my sweet, somewhat-anxious, newly graduated golden doodle, Bailey, who somehow became a metaphor for my own internal critic in her obedience school adventures over the past 8 weeks. Because she was always with us during the pandemic, we had no chance to observe that she was nervous around other people and other dogs. She seemed a happy-go-lucky dog to us. Little did we know she had a vicious inner critic who drives great anxiety when she is out in public until we took her to obedience school where she cowered in fear, tail between her legs, shaking throughout every class, growling whenever any human or canine dared to come near.
I get it. I really do, because I too was struggling with my own inner critics at the same time. Perhaps some of her anxiety was reflecting my own mood. After all, dogs pick up on their person’s mood. By week 7 when she couldn’t complete even the most basic commands, both the teacher and I assumed she was destined to repeat the class-we even discussed it. But that sweet dog, dug deep, refused to accept defeat and somewhere in the deepest corner of her canine soul, she found the strength to persevere and stop listening to her inner dog critic (whatever that sounds like), including the Australian Shepherd’s parents who reminded us weekly that their puppy was “gifted” (which, I’d argue, he actually was). I served as her coach, and we trained twice daily, relentlessly focused on perfecting the techniques. When I forgot to train with her, she’d come over to my desk and stare at me without blinking, telepathically willing me to drop what I was doing and do her bidding. She’d remain unflinching until I’d finally give in, stop working, and review each of the exercises with her.
Bailey chose triumph, and, in the last class, she ended up the dark horse, making a major come from behind for the final exam which consisted of a number of skills-based competitions. In the end, my precious, shy, good-natured, Bailey Lynn Williams, was awarded the silver medal for her class. She even made a best friend along the way, Ella, the equally-good-natured, Lhasa Apso with two-inch eye lashes, who barely edged Bailey out for the gold medal. Ella was in the arena with Bailey-always there to offer encouragement and never criticism (cue “The Final Countdown”).
Bailey Lynn Williams, Underdog
Basic Obedience School Silver Medalist
