These are excerpts from the author’s book “Deep,” which contains eight of his small books published in the form of Wisdom Literature covering different aspects of life: Facing troublemakers, dealing with pain, personal financial issues, gastronomy, reading, criticizing, inspiring, and feeling always good to go.

Series 6: Criticizing.

Criticizing Yourself

• Your conscience is your honest self-critic that constantly does its duty. You may be able to ignore it from time to time, but it is unwise to try to deceive yourself and make excuses to legitimize your violation of your conscience. It is important to pay attention to your mistakes, even the small ones, and admit them when you find yourself giving excuses for making them. This will help you to avoid those same mistakes in the future.

• It is good to correct your mistakes as soon as possible, but you undoubtedly will be better able to confront your mistakes, no matter how big or complicated they are, and evaluate them as time passes. Then you will pass the stage of admitting the mistake to where the experience becomes continuously inspiring to you.

• Self-criticism does not mean only closely observing your mistakes but also tracking your significant achievements to improve and develop them, without forgetting to reward yourself every time with whatever you see fit.

• Let your honest self-criticism inspire you to deal better with people. You must understand the motives of others to make the same mistakes that you have made. This does not mean that you overlook these mistakes; it’s more of helping others to understand and overcome these mistakes in a better way, in the light of your personal experience at the same level.

• Your children should be the biggest beneficiaries of your childhood mistakes. Do not ignore your experiences or make excuses for yourself when you were young due to different circumstances. Your credibility about your childhood mistakes allows you to deal with your children’s mistakes and treat them as best as possible. Accordingly, this will benefit both of you.

• Relax and be honest with yourself. Your self-criticism is like a mirror that shows you your image; it’s not to argue with it about the details of the image you see.

• Those who confront you with your mistakes, and put you in sharp confrontation in front of your flaws, exhaust you and cause you great distress; but you owe them a favour, regardless of their intentions toward you.

• Do not allow others to shake your confidence in yourself, no matter how many opinions agree on a negative aspect of a particular behavior from you. The credibility and accuracy of opinions are not measured by the number of those who support them. Try hard to benefit from the criticism of others as much as possible, no matter how harsh, but always remember to subject the criticism to your personal evaluation as objectively as possible.

• Constant self-monitoring is incredibly important and helpful, but it shouldn’t become an obsession. Strive for balance and objectivity, and do not get close to the stage of self-flagellation.

• Admitting your mistakes in front of others is a virtue, but you don’t have to do it every time. You owe others the right to admit your mistake in front of them and to apologize if you made the mistake against them; other than that, you do not need to admit your mistake in front of people unless you want to share with them your lessons learned and enrich their experiences in general.