Wednesday 12 July 2017

How to Deal with Criticism


How to Deal with Criticism


Despite all of the perspective you might have gained so far about why criticism can be a good thing and why it always goes hand in hand with taking more risks and being a go-getter in life, it still hurts. There are some strategies which can help you to deal with criticism in a way where it doesn’t cause you to be completely overwhelmed or make you give up on yourself or your projects.

Many people have come within only a few steps of success, so close they could taste it, but they felt like the criticism was too much and gave up on their dreams. If they had pushed forward a little bit longer, weathered the storm a little bit more, they would’ve seen that there was something wonderful on the other side.

If you can learn to deal with criticism effectively, you can use it as a tool to take you to your success instead of allowing it to derail you from getting to where you want to be in life.
Below are some strategies you can use to deal with criticism.

Dont be defensive

Oftentimes, our perspective clouds our judgment and we’re unable to see that the person was not trying to hurt us at all by their criticism. They might have been giving us some information because they wanted us to consider another angle of ourselves or of our projects. You could be missing out on valuable, constructive information which might help you to grow or be better at what you do.

It’s important not to be defensive when criticism comes. Don’t immediately try and find excuses or try and turn it around on the person criticizing you by finding fault with them as well. Retaliation only turns it into a war instead of something constructive, which it might have been intended as.

Sometimes, we hear feedback as sounding too mean or sounding condescending, and we might have an emotional reaction because our ego is hurt. We ignore the words and all we hear is the tone. This is a way of blocking the channels of communication and of missing a potentially valuable message.

What you should do when you receive criticism, or when you just feel criticized, is to try and firstly give the person the benefit of the doubt. Always imagine at first that they are saying it because they genuinely want to help you. This might not always be the case, but often it is, and we simply react emotionally when it’s unwarranted.

Try to hear if there is an honest, valuable message you could be getting from the criticism. Hear it for what it is, and tune out the feelings of embarrassment, inferiority or disappointment which you might be feeling initially. If there’s really something in there, and if kind, sincere criticism is being offered, always remember to say thank you. The person has helped you to be better, and when you’re successful one day, they played a small part in it. Tell the person that you appreciate the fact that they want to help you and you recognize it as a way that they are showing you how much they care about your success.

If there’s really nothing constructive to be gained from the criticism, move on to some of the next steps instead in order to ignore the person or tell them they’re not helping you at all.

Confront the person about how you understood what they said

It might be useful for you to tell the person how their criticism comes across. If it is not helpful to you, and if it feels overly hurtful or mean-spirited, tell them that their words might not have had the effect that they were aiming for. If they’ll listen to you, explain to them why the message was poorly received.

In the case of feedback from your supervisor, you might explain to them that you’ve received the criticism as too harsh for it to be constructive. You might just prompt them to change their approach and look at the types of comments they’re giving you. If the problem is truly with the style of feedback, this might help to improve your relationship with your supervisor, especially if they’re unaware that they can be brutal with their criticism.

Most people who are only out to hurt you won’t want to listen to this, or might laugh it off. That’s a good sign to steer clear of that person in future, because being around them doesn’t benefit you at all and they’re not hanging out with you in order to make your life better. But other people might be genuinely surprised that their words hurt you, and you might be offering them a way to be better communicators as well.

Be your own cheerleader

Having low self-esteem can be a major factor in why criticism hurts some more than others. If you don’t really believe in yourself and know your own worth, it will be easy for other people to tear you down and make you feel worthless.

No one else will believe in you or believe in the things you do if you don’t show them that you already have confidence. It will be a lot harder to convince someone to invest in your new design project if it’s obvious that you don’t really believe in your ability to complete it. It will be tough to get people to support you if you give them the impression that you’re not very good at what you do.
There are some detailed resources for building confidence and gaining motivation at the Academic Coaching website. For now, let’s look at some areas you could work on.

You need to become your own biggest supporter before you can expect the support of others. Be who you are and do what you do with confidence. That way it’s easier for others to be confident in you too.

This confidence comes with accepting yourself just as you are, with all of your flaws. When you can say, “I’m not the best at singing, but it doesn’t matter because I love doing it anyway,” no one can take that away from you with their criticism.

Confidence can be strengthened with affirmations. You can remind yourself about the good things in your life. You can do this by displaying your awards, diplomas, trophies or certificates on a wall or a display case, or putting pictures up of yourself where you really think you look and feel your best. These reminders will give you visual proof of how awesome you are. If you’ve done great things and been a successful person before, those accomplishments will stay with you forever. You can remember that you are that same person right now as the person who achieved those things in the past, and you can do even more amazing things in your future as you continue to grow and learn in life.

Boosting your confidence could include putting up a positive quote on the wall in your kitchen or bedroom where you’ll see it every day. You could design your own quote that makes you feel good and motivated, and that reminds you that you have limitless potential despite your challenges in life. You could also try and find a quote that helps you to steel yourself against criticism. A good place to start is the excellent quote by Theodore Roosevelt from his speech delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1910. The excerpt is referred to as “The Man in the Arena”. It can remind you that critics will always be around but they shouldn’t stop you from doing great things with your life:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Remind yourself often that you’re worthy of success, and give yourself the praise for being daring and brave enough to go after your dreams. The more you start to believe it yourself, the more you’ll radiate success and other people will believe it too. It’ll be easier to take actions that bring you closer to success when you already believe that you’re good enough to get there. No amount of criticism can bring you down if you know your own worth.

Focus on what you can learn from the moment

If you’ve been criticized, it’s easy sometimes to make excuses for why you made the mistake that you made, or to try and find all sorts of reasons why the person might have offered their criticism. Maybe the weather was bad and it made your friend moody, so they found fault with your singing technique. Maybe you’d just had a late night or had not warmed up your voice enough. There are lots of reasons why the criticism might be misguided or might not be useful to you. These excuses might be valid, but if you rely on them every time you’re being criticized, you’ll definitely be missing some valuable feedback.

If the criticism really is valid, you should be able to look past your feelings and try and learn something from it.

Of course, this is not as easy as it sounds. How do you simply ignore the fact that it feels like someone punched you in the gut?

A good strategy is to take it slowly before you react to the criticism. Give your brain and your body some time to process what is happening. Take a beat and take a deep breath. You might feel strange if there is a sudden silence while you collect your thoughts. You might not want the person who criticized you to know that they hurt you, and the deep breath might be giving it away. But it’s better to react consciously than to just react instinctively. Rather than retaliate, take a second to be in the moment, to be hurt, and then to try and look past it at what the person is actually trying to say to you.
This way, you won’t retaliate when it’s not necessary to do so. You won’t dismiss the advice or information which someone is offering you simply because it hurt to hear it.

The best way to deal with an emotional reaction is to really be conscious and aware of the emotion. Think to yourself, “I’ve been hurt by that criticism. It hurts to hear what this person just said to me, because it makes me feel embarrassed. But is there anything I can gain from their message?”

If you can’t immediately move past your emotional reaction in order to respond to your critic, you can just tell him or her: “I’ll have to think about what you said. I’m not really sure how I can use your feedback just yet to improve myself or improve my work. Once I’ve thought about it a bit more, I’ll tell you what I think.”

Even by saying this, you’re not immediately being defensive or dismissive, but rather giving yourself time to work through your emotions and then respond to the criticism. That way, you can evaluate whether you should really be listening to it at all.

Ignore false criticism

You can usually tell when criticism is false. When you know that the person criticizing you has no real investment in seeing you improve, and might enjoy it if you gave up, you can be pretty sure that the criticism is not meant to help you. If they say something that doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation at all, it’s not worth listening to them. If they’re criticizing you only to put you down or to make themselves feel better, they’re not contributing to your life in a positive way.

The best thing to do in the face of such criticism is to ignore it completely. Just remind yourself: “listening to this person right now will not improve my life at all, and will only bring me down.” Then do your best to dust it off and move as far away from that person as possible.

You do need to remember, again, that you shouldn’t use your emotions to measure whether or not to listen to criticism. Sometimes the truth hurts much more than a lie. Try and see whether the criticism is really false, and if so, ignore it.

You also shouldn’t listen to criticism about things you can’t control. If someone criticizes something about your body, your mannerisms or your race, sexuality or gender, their words have nothing to do with you and rather with their own prejudices or insecurities. Even though these words might hurt a lot, you need to find ways to love these parts of yourself and not allow the issues of someone else to make you feel like less of a person. Try and find positive role models who are similar to you. If you have big ears that you’re embarrassed of, find a great person who is living their dreams who also has big ears. Notice that they didn’t let their ears hold them back from being who they are and doing what they love. This is a silly example, but you should try and apply the principle to anything that you might not be fully comfortable with about yourself.

None of these factors ultimately determine who you are. If it’s something you can’t control, you should ignore any criticism of it or comments about it. If the situation calls for it and it feels appropriate, call the person out on their meanness or prejudices. Tell them that you love that particular part of yourself and that it is a valuable and important part of who you are. If it’s not the right time to do that, simply walk away and remember what you’re really worth.

Only listen to respectful criticism

It’s just not worth it listening to or engaging with someone who is deliberately trying to hurt you or bring you down. You deserve to get the same respect that you show to others, so when someone disrespects you, demand their respect before you engage with them any further, or just walk away. You don’t have to waste your time on negative people.

The people that you surround yourself with will greatly impact on the person you will become. If you constantly allow people to tear you down, you are very unlikely to succeed. If you keep these people around and let them disrespect you constantly, you’ll be showing yourself disrespect as well. Your self-worth will plummet and you won’t have any confidence that you can do great things with your life. Disrespectful people are simply not worth keeping around.

A good measure of this is how you feel in someone’s company. If you feel uncomfortable, unhappy, judged, small and pathetic around them all the time, they’re probably not showing you the respect you deserve. If you feel like it’s impossible to please someone, it usually is – they’ll never be satisfied with anything you do, so why even try?

However, if you have someone in your life who really respects you and who values you, and criticizes you because they want to see good things in your life, this is the kind of person you need to be listening to and keeping around. These people will help you to really know where you’re making mistakes, but will still celebrate your victories with you as well. These people bring positivity into your life, and they’re willing to criticize you out of a genuine desire to see you grow. If you don’t already have people like this in your life, go out and meet some. You could try any kinds of hobby groups – these people are usually trying to constantly improve themselves, so they’ll be attracted to places where they can do this. Hiking, art, writing, personal growth and leadership groups would be good places to start looking.

Whenever you feel disrespected by some criticism you receive, you could tell that person that what they said felt very disrespectful, give them the reasons why, and tell them that you’re much more likely to listen to them if they treat you with respect. Often, this will show these people that you’re not willing to be treated like garbage, and either they’ll start treating you better or find a new target to disrespect.

Journal about it

If you’ve really been hurt by a piece of criticism, it might be a good starting point to question yourself about why it hurt you so much. The best way I’ve found of doing this is to journal about the experience.

Journaling can be very cathartic, allowing you to put all of the emotions onto a piece of paper and get the negative energy moving instead of simply keeping it inside. Lots of people immediately feel a sense of relief after writing about an experience. Even though it still stings, you can start to really process those emotions when you write them down.

Some people even find value in writing a letter to the person who has hurt them, explaining exactly why the experience was hurtful. Whether you deliver this letter or not, the process of writing will give you a sense of clarity and some emotional relief.

Journaling can also give you the chance to gain some perspective – when you actually take the time to write something down, you can see that maybe it was not quite as deliberately hurtful as you imagined it to be. You might be able to see that the person was actually offering you valuable criticism.

Journaling is a good habit to maintain if you need more clarity on your emotions. It can help you to reflect on your life and get to know yourself better. When you feel criticized, journaling might be a good way to diffuse your own anger or frustration.

Gain some perspective

When you’re hurt, it’s often hard to see the moment in perspective. It was just one person’s opinion. It doesn’t mean that you’re really a bad person, or that what you’re doing is terrible or not worthwhile. You need to try and see the incident in perspective in order to realize that it really doesn’t matter all that much in the grander scheme of things. This isn’t meant to diminish your feelings – your feelings are valid and you should be allowed to have them and process them. But gaining perspective will help you to stick to what you need to be doing despite the momentary pain you might be experiencing.

You are bigger than a particular emotional reaction, and the work you are here to do is bigger than what one person thinks of it. If you let someone make you feel so bad over one comment, you’ll have many more struggles when you take on even more in your life and the criticism comes more frequently and more aggressively.

Of course, this doesn’t count when someone routinely and persistently criticizes you and brings you down. This is a big deal, and you need to take some actions to stop this person from making you feel the way they make you feel.

But for the everyday criticism you encounter, remember that it won’t really matter when all’s said and done. You’re doing what you love, you’re going after your goals, and if other people have a problem with that, there’s nothing you can do to change that. See it as just another small bump on your road to success. Chances are, in a few weeks, you’ll hardly even remember the moment of criticism, and the pain will disappear. Your life is much bigger than the nasty words of one person.

If you keep getting the same message over and over, its a sign to do something different

You might find yourself saying, “People just don’t understand what I’m trying to do, and that’s why they’re criticizing me”. Well, if almost everyone doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do, maybe you should change the way you’re doing it so that people can sign on. Maybe you should make your message or your work a bit more accessible so that others can really invest in it and believe in it the way you do.

It doesn’t make you a sellout to listen to some feedback once in a while. Remember that the work you’re doing also affects other people, and in order to make it really have a positive impact on their lives, you need to listen to what they’re saying.

If the criticism is about something you can control, and it’s about a project that you’d like to see other people get excited about as well, then listen to how you can make it work for them. This is one of the best ways to have a greater reach with any project you undertake. Being open to feedback and realizing you’ve made a mistake will allow you to not only build stronger bonds with people by showing that you’re really listening to them, but also allow you to improve on yourself and the work you do.

This is not to say that you should give up your integrity. Sometimes the greatest accomplishments were very strange to the world at first. Some of the greatest thinkers were persecuted for their ideas, not because the ideas were bad or wrong, but just because they made people uncomfortable. Galileo was sentence to life in prison for claiming that the Earth was not the center of the Universe and instead revolved around the Sun. If he had balked and given up on his work, where would science be today?

Maintain your integrity, but also listen to the messages that are repeatedly coming from other people. Experiment and don’t be too sacred or precious about keeping things exactly the way they are. Sometimes a small adjustment is enough to really take you to the next level.

Have a good shouting and crying session

No matter how much we rationalize the criticism and understand what it means, it still sucks.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is to give in to the feelings you’re feeling. You might be sad that someone said something mean or judgmental to you. You might be disappointed that things did not work out the way you wanted. You might be embarrassed that your project had flaws and someone pointed it out to you. Or you might be even more insecure and feel like you were silly to even try to do something in the first place.

All of these feelings are valid, and you should allow yourself to feel them. But don’t let them distract you from doing what you want to do and being who you are.

You could have a good, cathartic crying session, and just feel miserable for a while. You could buy yourself a tub of ice-cream after you read a one-star review of your book. You could push your face into a pillow and just shout for a while. Do whatever you need to do to acknowledge your feelings in the moment.

This could help you to feel a lot better a lot sooner. If you really allow yourself to feel everything that you’re feeling, you could process the feelings much better and then be ready to get back on the horse. If you simply tried to ignore the feelings, they might still be lingering beneath the surface and catch up with you eventually if you’re ever criticized again. Not acknowledging your feelings of pain or disappointment could lead you to never gain real confidence in your abilities or stand up for yourself if someone is bullying you. Be honest with yourself about how you’re feeling, and allow yourself to feel it for a while.


Then, when you’re ready, get back on the horse. Go back to square one and continue doing what you do and being who you are. Sometimes, success comes after only a few months of struggle and failure, but for most of us, it will take years of perseverance in the face of a lot of criticism. Feel bad about the criticism for a short while, but then keep on going. You’ll be grateful that you did in the long run.