Q&A-DHD: "How Do I Cope With Being Corrected?"
- dougkatz8
- Jun 2
- 5 min read
Wrong question. Here's the right one — and a framework that actually holds up.
I am headed out to the Blade Show in Atlanta, so I am recording this early.
I pulled this question off Reddit this week.
“How to cope with intolerance to being corrected or being wrong? I absolutely hate being corrected. It used to make me feel devastated and depressed but nowadays it makes my blood boil — especially if it’s something I’m supposed to be knowledgeable in.”
Before I answer it I want to stop at three things in the question itself. Because the question tells you almost everything you need to know about the problem.
First — “being corrected.” That’s a passive construction. Something the environment is doing to you. But that’s not what happened. Someone corrected you. A person. Making a deliberate choice in a specific moment. And in that same moment you have a choice about how to respond. You can’t engage with an environment. You can engage with a moment.
Second — “something I’m supposed to be knowledgeable in.” That’s an assumption. A significant one. You’ve decided that the other person should already know your expertise — and that their correction is therefore an offense against something they owed you. They didn’t owe you that. Nobody does.
Third — the question ends with an apology. “No one knows everything or is always right, I know that, but…” That’s someone who has been mentally shaped over a long time to pre-apologize for their own reactions before anyone else can call them out on it.
None of that is an ADHD problem. That’s a framework problem. And framework problems have framework solutions.
This is a common response pattern for many of us. When someone corrects you now — even legitimately, even helpfully — it doesn’t land as feedback. It lands as another entry in a very long ledger. The anger makes complete sense when you understand that. It’s a scar response. Not a character flaw.
Understanding it doesn’t mean you get to stay there.
I practice martial arts. And the way I think about managing this wiring — managing any recurring pattern that isn’t going away — is through the same lens. You need a framework. Not a coping mechanism. A framework. The difference matters. Coping implies things are being done to you that you have no control over. A framework means you are an active participant with a structure for engaging what comes at you. Think of it as self-defense. The framework is the shield.
Mine runs in two layers — and I’ve written about both in depth on this Substack. The short version is here.
The first layer is Zen. Not Zen as a lifestyle or an aesthetic. Zen as a functional tool. When you meditate — when you practice real awareness — you learn not to react to every thought that arises and not to be angry at yourself for having it. You acknowledge it. You make a conscious decision about whether to engage or let it pass. That’s the kill switch. You feel the correction land. You feel the anger rise. And instead of following it automatically, you catch it. You acknowledge it. And you pause.
That pause is the entire game.
The second layer is Stoicism. Once you have that window — once the pause exists — Stoicism gives you the decision structure for what to do inside it. Two questions. What’s actually in my control here? And what response would I choose if I weren’t reacting?
You cannot change what they said. You cannot make them know you’re knowledgeable in a topic they may not believe you’re knowledgeable in. You have no ability to reach across the moment and rewrite their perception. What you can change is your approach to it. That is the only place your agency ever lived — and it’s enough.
Here’s the part most frameworks skip.
At some point you have to ask whether the correction actually matters.
I’m built around authenticity. It’s not a value I perform — it’s the orientation I actually operate from. And when I run a correction through that lens, most of the time the honest answer is: this doesn’t matter to anyone except me. The moment passed. The room moved on. The conversation continued. The only person still carrying the weight of that correction is the one who got corrected.
Not giving a shit is not avoidance. It is an accurate assessment of what actually has weight and what doesn’t. Make that assessment honestly. Most of the time you’ll find you’ve been spending real energy on something that evaporated for everyone else the moment it was said.
The strategic truth underneath all of this — and this is where I want to land — is that there is no destination.
I recently published a piece called The Blade That Is Never Finished about a concept from Japanese martial arts called shugyo. The idea is that a blade is never finished. You grind it, you polish it, you work the edge — and then you do it again. Not because the last time didn’t count, but because that is what a blade requires. Permanently. There is no point at which you put the whetstone away for good.
Managing this response works exactly the same way. You will never fully arrive at a place where correction doesn’t sting. Stop looking for that. What you’re building instead is a practice — the accumulated framework you keep deploying, every time, in every moment that requires it. Tactics at the moment of contact. Strategy across the arc of a life.
That’s how you cope with this. Except cope is the wrong word. Coping implies you’re absorbing damage. What you’re actually doing — when the framework is working — is engaging. Actively. With a structure. On your terms.
That’s different.
Two pieces that go deeper on the foundation behind all of this — The Blade That Is Never Finished and Zen, Stoicism, and ADHD — are both available on this Substack. This video and this article are the application. Those two are the foundation.
This is the practice. Not the destination.
I am not a clinician — I write from lived experience as a West Point graduate, Army veteran, entrepreneur, and late ADHD diagnosis navigating this wiring without medication. If this framing resonates, The Children of Chaos framework is built around exactly this kind of thinking. Subscribe for a new Q&A-DHD every week — and send me your questions.
This channel stays free because of NULU, my adaptive knife company. If this content is useful to you, that’s how you support it: NULU
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