by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
On Dealing With the Haters and Doubters in Your Life So You Can Grow REAL
One of the biggest obstacles standing between you and the REAL life you actually could be living isn’t a lack of talent, skill, or intelligence – nor is it just good ol’ fashioned bad luck:
A lot of the time, it’s the voices of the people around you and the choices that you’re making to listen to them instead of listening to yourself.
Sometimes, the only thing holding us back from taking REAL ACTION and moving towards our true vision and life goals is that we’re surrounded by haters and doubters who keep trying to pull us off the path we’re supposed to be walking.
Sometimes they’ll do it openly and at other times they’ll do it in ways that are so passive-aggressive you almost question whether it’s happening at all – either way, the effect is the same.
- They’ll try to make you feel ashamed of who you really are.
- They’ll try to make you feel guilty about what you know you should be really doing.
- They’ll try to convince you that you’re getting ideas above your station.
- They’ll simply tell you that what you’re trying to achieve is impossible (according to who, though?).
This article is about the psychology behind these kinds of people and why, in most cases, haters and doubters hate and doubt themselves first.
Once you understand this, you’ll see that – instead of taking their opinions personally – you can simply smile, nod politely, and then do whatever the hell you need to do anyway (just as long as it’s REAL, of course).
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Haters and Doubters: What We'll Cover in This Article
- On Dealing With the Haters and Doubters in Your Life So You Can Grow REAL
- My Own Experience with Haters and Doubters
- Two Different Types of Resistance
- Haters Control Through Shame and Guilt
- Doubters Control Through Fear
- The Big Secret
- Haters Are Projecting Their Shadow
- Doubters Are Projecting Their Lack of Trust
- Crabs in a Bucket
- The BBBOBS: The Big Black Bag of BS
- What If They're Right?
- Moving Forward Despite the Haters and Doubters in Your Life
- The Final Word: Dealing With Haters and Doubters
My Own Experience with Haters and Doubters
When I was younger, I always knew that I eventually wanted to grow up (still a work in progress) and do something ‘more’ than wasting my life in a mind-numbing job somewhere.
I guess that’s pretty standard but the thought of spending forty years festering away inside a cubicle (or, even worse, one of those modern open-plan offices where everybody can hear each other mouth breathe) genuinely terrified me.
Really, I just wanted to find a way to be myself and be stay real – it wasn’t really complicated but back then my ambitions felt ridiculously grand:
- I wanted to write books.
- I wanted to start my own business.
- I wanted to make a living using the things that fascinated me and actually help people.
Without meaning to sound like I’m up my own arse, I’ve now done all of those things and can honestly say that I genuinely love my life – that doesn’t mean it’s perfect or that I don’t still have challenges but I’m grateful every day that I chose to follow what felt REAL instead of settling for something that slowly killed my spirit.
The point of sharing all this is that it’s allowed me to learn something that I now know with absolute certainty:
If I’d listened to the haters and doubters, none of it would have happened – not one book, not one coaching client, not one business. Literally nothing.
I know this is a really common phenomenon because I see the same pattern appears with my present-day coaching clients:
Many of them have goals that are completely REAL, achievable, and aligned with their real values and who they really are – the only ingredients missing are discipline, consistency, commitment and time.
Unfortunately, they also have people around them trying to convince them not to bother and – to make matters worse – more often than not these people aren’t strangers but the people closest to them:
- Parents.
- Partners.
- Friends.
- Brothers.
- Sisters.
- Sometimes even their own children.
This can make the journey into realness so much harder than it needs to be because we naturally care what these people think.
The problem is, though, that caring what somebody thinks doesn’t automatically mean they’re ‘right’.
Two Different Types of Resistance
I’ve noticed that these people usually fall into two broad categories which is what we’re going to talk about in the rest of this article:
The Haters and The Doubters.
Sometimes they’re the same person, sometimes they aren’t, but understanding the difference helps you recognise what’s actually happening overall.
Haters Control Through Shame and Guilt
You can recognise the Haters because they generally don’t attack your goals – instead, they go right for the jugular and attack your character.
Here are some of the things they might throw your way:
- “You’re showing off”.
- “You think you’re better than everybody else”.
- “Who do you think you are?”
- “You’re fooling yourself”.
- “You’ve changed”.
- “You’ve become selfish”.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The interesting thing about the Hater is that none of the things they really say has very much to do with what you’re actually doing – it’s all about making you feel ashamed of expressing who you are in your REALNESS (usually, because they’re unreal – which we’ll get onto)..
Shame is the core belief that “I’m not good enough as I am” and it holds you back with Gremlins in your mind that tell you thinks like:
“Don’t be seen”.
“Don’t stand out”.
“Stay small”.
“Play it ‘safe'”.
If your own unresolved shame gets triggered or activated when the Hater starts throwing this kind of thing at you then you’re most likely to retreat and give up on your real goals:
- You’ll stop posting online.
- You’ll stop creating.
- You’ll stop speaking honestly.
- You’ll stop chasing your vision.
- You’ll stop SHOWING UP.
This doesn’t mean your vision isn’t REAL – it just means that you allowed the Hater to press your shame button.
Doubters Control Through Fear
Doubters are slightly different in the sense that they don’t usually shame you at the core of your character but, instead, will try to infect you with their own fear.
You’ll hear them say some of the classic lines for giving up and rolling over:
“There’s no point”.
“That’ll never work”.
“Nobody makes money doing that”.
“You’re wasting your time”.
“You’ll never manage it”.
“It’s impossible”.
On the surface, it sounds as though they’re commenting on reality or that they’re concerned about you but actually that’s not the case at all:
They’re actually commenting on themselves and what they imagine they’d be capable of doing if they were in your shoes (which they’re not).
That’s an important distinction.
The Big Secret
Here’s the insight that changed everything for me and helped me to just focus on staying real and doing what I needed to do:
Haters and doubters hate and doubt themselves first and foremost.
Read that again (then write it down and stick it on the fridge)!
What this means is that before somebody can project hatred onto you, they first have to experience hatred within themselves.
It also means that before somebody convinces themselves that your dream is impossible, they’ve already convinced themselves that their own dreams are impossible.
The ‘hate’ and ‘doubt’ you see coming your way from these people is the end result of an internal conversation they’ve been having for years and they’re simply inviting you into it to convince themselves the conclusions they reached are true (when they almost never are).
The good news is that you don’t have to accept the invitation.
In fact, you can ignore it completely.
Haters Are Projecting Their Shadow
From a psychological perspective, haters are often projecting parts of themselves they’ve rejected (i.e. they’re projecting the Shadow Self on to you in order to keep their own Ego in place).
They’re usually deeply shame-driven because – at some point in childhood – they learned that expressing themselves wasn’t safe or ‘acceptable’ and so they went into hiding.
The reasons for this could be a million different things:
- Perhaps they were mocked.
- Perhaps they were criticised.
- Perhaps success made other people uncomfortable.
- Perhaps confidence was mistaken for arrogance.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Whatever happened, they buried the ‘parts’ of themselves that weren’t received by the world in the Shadow Territory and continued to wear a mask and act as though that very real part of themselves no longer existed (mask = ego).
Understanding this helps us to understand the hating and the doubting – for example@
When they accuse you of “showing off”, what they’re often revealing is that they secretly hate the part of themselves that wants to stand up, create something meaningful and express something REAL.
Or when they have a problem with your confidence, well, the problem isn’t your confidence – the problem is that your confidence reminds them of the confidence they buried.
In short, rather than recovering that lost part of themselves, they try to bury it inside you too.
Doubters Are Projecting Their Lack of Trust
Doubters operate slightly differently:
They’re also driven by shame but it tends to express itself as a lack of trust in the sense that they don’t trust themselves to be able to do what they need to do and they don’t trust life to do what they can’t do.
For whatever reason, they don’t believe that things can work out and so they never really commit to anything or take any real action – instead, they become experts at rationalising and never run out of reasons why they can’t begin.
Again, like the Hater, the Doubter lapses into projection and so when they tell you “That’s impossible”, what they’re usually actually saying is: “I believe that would be impossible for me“.
Thankfully, you’re not them – you’re ‘You’.
Some more ‘good’ news is that their beliefs aren’t objective reality – they’re just subjective conclusions based upon their own fears, conditioning and emotional wounds that belong to THEM, not ‘YOU’.
If they watched you succeed, they’d most likely experience cognitive dissonance because they’d have to confront the possibility that many of their excuses were never actually true.
That’s painful and so it’s much easier to convince you not to try than it is to question the story they’ve built their whole identity around.
Let them doubt themselves and go do your thing anyway.
Crabs in a Bucket
There’s an old saying or story (whatever you wanna call it) about crabs in a bucket (in a restaurant or something waiting to be cooked) which is that, apparently, if one crab starts climbing out to escape, then the others will pull it back down.
Whether or not crabs literally do this isn’t really the point because it’s a good metaphor for what human beings definitely do which is that whenever somebody starts growing beyond the limitations of the group, people who aren’t growing often become uncomfortable and try to stop them.
Like we’ve alluded to above with the Doubters, this is because your growth into REALNESS silently asks a question:
“If they’re doing it…why aren’t I?”
This is a difficult question to have to think about answering and so many people would rather drag you back down than answer it honestly.
That’s why the “crabs in a bucket” phenomenon exists – it isn’t really about you but about protecting the comfort of unreality.
Keep climbing anyway.
The BBBOBS: The Big Black Bag of BS
One way I like thinking about all of this is imagining that haters and doubters are carrying around a huge black bag that contains all kinds of emotional garbage in the form of every unresolved issue they’ve never dealt with.
- Shame.
- Fear.
- Envy.
- Resentment.
- Regret.
- Self-doubt.
- Insecurity.
- [You name it].
I like to call this the BBBOBS (Big Black Bag of Bullshit) (mainly because it’s fun to say aloud).
When somebody with a BBBOBS encounters somebody who’s genuinely trying to move forward, they desperately want to hand them the bag so they don’t have to deal with whatever is being triggered within them.
The mistake that you’re probably making if the Haters and Doubters are holding you back is in thinking you have to accept it.
You don’t.
The only thing that makes you pick up somebody else’s BBBOBS is your own unresolved shame and so – if you’ve done your inner work – you can simply smile and leave the bag exactly where it belongs.
With them.
What If They’re Right?
Of course, there needs to be some balance here because sometimes we do have blind spots, sometimes we actually are arrogant (or have some other personality defect), and sometimes our plans genuinely aren’t thought through so criticism can actually be really helpful.
What we need to remember is that REALNESS is never about ignoring reality but about moving closer to it and so if somebody offers constructive criticism based on evidence and genuine care then we can take it on board and use it to grow real.
What we don’t wanna do is confuse constructive feedback with emotional projection because where one is trying to help you become more REAL, the other is trying to make you become more unreal so the other person can avoid facing themselves.
Learn to tell the difference and you can free yourself from all kinds of unnecessary nonsense.
If you want to go deeper into growing real and building flow in your life then check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Moving Forward Despite the Haters and Doubters in Your Life
So what should you actually do if you’re getting psyched up to start growing real in your life but you’re surrounded by Haters and/or Doubters.
Here are some practical steps to help you start moving:
1. Recognise Projection
Whenever somebody tries to shame you or convince you that your vision is impossible, then pause and ask yourself one of the most basic but powerful questions of them all:
“Is what they’re saying actually true?”
If you wan to go deeper then ask:
“Am I just listening to an extension of somebody else’s relationship with themselves?”
Just going through these questions alone can stop you internalising years of somebody else’s unresolved emotional baggage.
2. Set Boundaries
Not everybody deserves unlimited access to your dreams, goals, and vision – especially when they’ve repeatedly demonstrated that they can’t (or are unwilling to) support your growth.
Love them if you want, forgive them if you can, but set some healthy boundaries and stop giving them a front-row seat to your future.
Setting boundaries like this isn’t ‘dramatic‘ – it’s simply about deciding that certain conversations are no longer available to certain people.
3. Keep Taking REAL ACTION
Nothing silences doubt like actual EVIDENCE:
Give up the arguments, the debates, and justifying, explaining, or defending yourself and commit to real action instead:
- Keep writing.
- Keep building.
- Keep creating.
- Keep serving.
- Keep showing up.
- Keep doing whatever it is that you need to do.
REAL ACTION gradually turns yesterday’s impossible dream into today’s actual reality and it saves you from all kinds of debates and discussions because it SPEAKS FOR ITSELF.
4. Build Your Trust Muscle
The opposite of doubt isn’t certainty but trust which means learning to do your best and let go of the rest:
What this looks like is that you learn to trust yourself enough to take the next step and you trust reality eventually fill in any blanks when you have to move through periods of uncertainty.
You can also trust that consistent action compounds over time and so your results will keep building on themselves (for example, if you write 100 words a day that’s a whole book by the end of the year).
You don’t need to know exactly how everything will unfold – you simply need enough trust to keep moving.
The Final Word: Dealing With Haters and Doubters
If your vision is REAL (i.e. it’s aligned with your journey into deeper wholeness and genuinely allows you to serve others) then don’t let somebody else’s shame become your prison.
Remember what we said:
Haters hate themselves first. Doubters doubt themselves first.
Neither of those things has to become your problem if you can see their projections for what they are, refuse to carry their BBBOBS, set healthy boundaries, and keep strengthening your trust.
Commit to walking your own real path because the world doesn’t need another person who’s been bullied into living an unreal life they don’t deserve.
Smile, nod, wish them well if you can, and then carry on doing what you came here to do.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start walking your own real path and to level up your confidence then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to start trusting and believing in yourself.
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