How to Handle Workplace Criticism Without Losing Confidence

Dealing with a difficult boss can sometimes feel like swimming with sharks. The relationship can bring up giant waves of frustration, insecurity, and discomfort within my own being.

One of the things I can do to deal with a difficult boss is to get out of the water and stand back on the shore, away from the situation and away from the scenarios. Let me just rest in peaceful reflection for a few moments and really ask myself: What is the gift? What is the message that this difficult person is bringing?

Many times, a difficult boss will challenge the way I see myself. The difficulty is that I allow myself to feel diminished or threatened, and to become protective of my dignity. But what they are revealing to me are the fragile aspects of my own ego. They are revealing the places where I take false support to feel good about myself.

So, I imagine that in this moment, I go beyond taking my sense of value from the roles I play, from labels like intelligent or competent. I go beyond overidentifying with what I do and how I do things, and I enter into the vast, unlimited peace of my being.

I am so much more than what I do for a living. I am eternal. I am peaceful. I am full of qualities like love and joy. I am divine. And when I take time to enter into this pure awareness, I reawaken love for myself and begin to feel a renewed sense of confidence and value.

This practice of spiritual awareness transforms my relationship so that instead of feeling like I am swimming with a shark, I begin to feel the freedom that comes when I am able to keep my dignity, even amidst situations of criticism or rejection.

This is true liberation.