Your work is not who you are.

Your work is not who you are.

Your work is not who you are.

Really internalizing that is step one.

You are smart enough.

This one is a lot more subtle but worth a ton if you can internalize the implications of it. The fact is others are smarter than you, some aren't as smart as you, and the truth is you really shouldn't care.

What you do need to realize is that for all of us it boils down to the amount of work we need to do in order to accomplish something. And everyone varies widely in this.

Here is a thought experiment for you: say you take a person of below average intelligence, but they are raised among Geniuses basically. And these geniuses, being the chairing smart people that they are, never really let on that the person of below average intelligence is below average.

Now take that same scenario only this time the person is around not so good people they're not so smart they're not so caring.

Secret to getting your ego out of all of this is to compare and contrast those two scenarios and what they're going to mean mental health confidence of the person in question.

In the former scenario, that below average person is going to learn a ton of smart ways to do things. And they'll be confident in the doing them. Others may not even know how smart or lack of smart they are.

In the latter scenario the person is acutely aware of their deficiencies, and there's a whole bunch of negativity that comes with that, along with a lot of work because they didn't get to learn a lot of smart ways to do things and so they struggle. And they're not confident.

Rather than value your work as some reflection of your identity and how smart you are or some other attribute that you value it could be anything. Rather than do that, value outcomes and other people.

A very large part of who we are depends on who we hang with, and how we handle that.

I used to play it much differently, like some kind of competition, and criticism of my work had a high impact.

Today I seek people that are better than me in areas that I need to improve, and I share what I'm good at with others who want to improve.

And the outcome is we're getting shit done, it's done right, and we feel good about that which is done.

Let's take something simple like a presentation, or a chunk of code that has to perform a task.

What is more important?

Is it that your contributions are the very best?

Or, is the most important thing that that presentation or volume code nailed the task at hand?

Answering in the latter case allows you to take criticism of your work because it's all intended to achieve more important goal. The more we achieve those important goals more successful we are as people, teams, companies.

Here's one last thing comma and it's simple it's a phrase comma but it really helped me:

"Nice catch"

I was working with someone once was on a standard body and they have to do lots of detailed work and it gets revised many times and it has to be right it's right as people can get.

They used that phrase all the time when inconsistencies errors improvements were found.

And it took me a while, but I realized what that phrase meant. And it's about being one of a body of Skeptics being skeptical together to make it better whatever it is.

So give to get benefit of the doubt, give yourself a personal out so you don't have to take it personally and worry over every little thing or criticism that you may see.

Instead, think or say nice catch!

That really helped me make a big mental shift and a ton of things are so much easier today with you worries. Good luck and take care.

Meta: I use the Google voice input on this one, and hope to catch it in my edit window, until then please forgive typos and cats.