We’re our own worst critics (that’s human nature I suppose) and if you don’t critique yourself, even slightly, then there’s no room for growth.

That being said; not too long ago we had an Epiphany!  That might be a slight exaggeration; let’s call it a sudden ‘self-awareness’!

And that is, that Self-Criticism can be interchangeable with Ego. Surely not you say? Surely they’re completely opposing behaviours… Nope.  They can be one and the same. Albeit usually handled very differently… Someone screaming narcissistically “I AM THE BEST. NO ONE WILL EVER MATCH MY BEAUTY, BRILLIANCE AND GENIUS!” is, I think you’ll agree, much uglier to witness than someone quietly cursing themselves for not  doing a better job or being prettier and so on. But at the end of the day why do we constantly and harshly evaluate ourselves? Because we still WANT to be the ‘best’. We all know one of those successful, wealthy, uber intelligent and beautiful-to-boot kinda people, and we all want to be one of them! We want to be known for being ‘amazingly talented’ or ‘incredibly successful’, or whatever adjective we may be striving for… And of course we strive for this ‘perfection’ to feel proud of ourselves. And there you have it; self-criticism is caused by pride and ‘pride’ and ‘ego’ are one and the same right?

So… How did we come to such an ‘epiphany’/’self-awareness’ and what has this got to do with anything?

Up until a few months back we used to follow every ‘shoot’ day with a discussion over breakfast over what we could have done slightly better or what we’d have preferred to do slightly differently. Talk about dumping on our enthusiasm and passion!

Not too long after we’d started this terrible self-deprecating regime we started our company rebrand; aka the best thing we ever did! Thank you Krysta from Big Deal Branding for the numerous ‘therapy’ sessions.

The most eye-opening slap to the face (in a good way) session with Krysta was all about ‘strengths’. Basically we discussed the impact that focusing on the negatives has and how instead it is a lot more constructive to focus on our strengths. In particular applying that to our business but in reality the same thesis applies to our personal lives too (and probably yours if you’re honest). The idea was to zone in on our strengths as individuals and as a team and how these strengths are unique to us and our business and how that makes us ‘different’ to the rest.

Once we’d figured that out we were laughing. We stopped these post shoot-day blues and instead made sure to enjoy the biggest most indulgent breakfasts as a reward to ourselves for doing such an awesome job! We HAD always done an awesome job… we’ll never say ‘perfect’, ‘perfectionism’ is so debatable, ‘perfect’ to one person is ‘preposterous’ to the next. But we’d done a bloody good job! This isn’t ‘Ego’ talking; now we simply motivate ourselves with a ‘pat on the back’ (rather than our previous routine which had been slowly destroying our enthusiasm and subsequently  killing our ‘creative mojo’ in a ‘one swift bullet to the brain’ kind of way).

Do you want to know the best thing about all this and how it effects you as our client rather than just our own self-esteem? Well we’ll tell you in {Part 2} of this blog.