Teflon and Velcro: 5 tips for when you’re being too self-critical

Last week, I was feeling a bit down on myself. I’d set some goals around a key business strategy a few months ago and hadn’t made much progress. All I could see was where I’d fallen short. What started as a quiet, critical conversation with myself about my lack of progress developed into a strident and shouty full-scale assault on my performance in just about every area of my life.

Yes, I can get carried away and no, it was not much fun.

It wasn’t until I sat down with my coach, Nick, that I was able to put the brakes on this mean monkey mind. When he got me to reflect on what progress I had made, and to celebrate that progress, I was able to take a step back. I could now see more objectively that, although I hadn’t got to where I wanted to go, I had achieved far more than I’d thought I had.

Teflon and Velcro

It’s not only me who can focus on the negative. I’ve seen many leaders (and even teams) fall prey to this pesky habit:

• The manager who focuses on the fact that they’re still interrupting others when they want to get better at listening - but fail to notice they’re interrupting way less often than when they started that development journey.
• The leadership team who missed their budget but did not take into consideration context, nor the headwinds the company was facing, while missing the many successes they and the organisation had achieved.

This concept is called “Teflon & Velcro”. It refers to our brains’ negativity bias - an evolutionary throwback which means our brains are hardwired to remember (like sticky Velcro) negative experiences and quickly forget positive experiences (like Teflon, we let those positives slide off us). It’s especially prevalent when it comes to our self-talk. We therefore need a conscious, active process of taking in the positive in order to make up for our brain’s negative wiring.

• What can we do to take a more balanced approach to appraising our progress?
• How can we stop the negative and critical self-talk that leads to that downward spiral?
• How can we better acknowledge and celebrate the wins, the progress and the things that are going well?

This doesn’t mean not facing reality or kidding ourselves; good leaders face into the truth of a situation. But it does mean we can be more balanced, seek out the positives and shine a light on those – which makes the journey a bit more bearable. Doing so can also lead to better performance; people who cultivate a positive mindset perform better in the face of challenges.

Here are five ways to address the balance and get the Teflon/Velcro mix right:

1. Notice when your attention is pulled way more to the negative than the positive. This might show up like my self-critical internal conversation. Or, in your team, it might present as thinking and talking about what’s wrong way more than you do about what’s working or what’s right. Acknowledging when you see a pattern emerging is the first step.
2. Once you acknowledge the ‘Velcro for the bad’ pattern, don’t do what I initially did and keep it to yourself; you’ve seen where that got me. Share what you’re noticing with someone you trust – a peer, coach or trusted mentor. They may be able to challenge your thinking or ask some powerful questions to help you unpick what’s going on. Nick was that person for me.
3. Speaking of questions, here are some good ones to ask yourself or your team if you’re in the negative Velcro zone:
   1. What is the pattern I am/we are noticing when I/we think or talk about x?
   1. How do I/we know this is true? What is the evidence?
   1. What is working well? Where are we/I feeling proud or positive?
   1. Where have we made progress? What can we learn from that success and how can we apply that more to this situation?
   1. If we aren’t making progress at a rate we want, what’s getting in the way? Get curious.
   1. How realistic are we being in our expectations? (In my case: not very ?).
4. Look at data, not only to provide facts to your feelings but, perhaps more importantly, to give you clues. In my case, when I looked at the data and checked off my achievements against my plan, there were some deadlines I’d missed, but there were also a number of areas where I had made some great progress. Seeing that in black and white gave me a more objective view.
5. Build purposeful acknowledgement of progress, wins and successes into your operating rhythms at a team and personal level. Celebrate these. Really give yourself a pat on the back.

If you don’t consciously focus on the positive – looking for it and listening for it – you risk not seeing or hearing it, and that spiral is not pretty. But you also miss opportunities. Ruminating on the negative is not only unpleasant, but it also keeps you stuck. You can generate more creative solutions, and will certainly act with more energy, if you have the positive in your sights.