Try Listening to Your Critics

It's a hard thing to be able to listen to those who criticize you.

Criticism itself isn’t a bad word, but no one especially likes it. After all you take pride in your work, or if not pride, perhaps you spent a lot of time doing it. Now someone has come along and decided to point out its faults. It could be your colleague, your manager, a friend, or even a family member. The end result is that they are telling you that what you are doing could be better. How does that make you feel?

Chances are you probably feel a tad bitter towards the person offering the criticism.

This is a natural state of being as your work is being subjected to opinion that you may find unwelcome. Imagine you’ve put time and effort into a project only to have your manager show you all of its faults….and then ask you to do it again. Depending on how much you’ve invested into the project you may feel deflated or perhaps even hurt. It does not need to be that way though.

Criticism could be capricious and destructive, but in a professional setting it could possibly be the best thing that could ever happen to you. The reason is that you can see your faults and correct them. It’s actually hard to be critical of oneself unless you are gifted with that ability…then you’re a perfectionist. The rest of us are usually blind to our own faults; criticism is a tool that can be used to help reveal faults.

Ask yourself: if a friend asked you to review some work they have done and asked for your thoughts…would you tear it apart or would you offer constructive thoughts?

Keep this in mind when receiving criticism: don’t treat it as a personal attack…instead think of it as a friend pointing out how something can be done better. Sometimes the feedback may seem sharper than other times…but in the end it makes your work stronger. Everyone who builds a house still needs a building inspector to ensure that there are no flaws…or at least a reduction in them.

Use this to improve the quality of your work; before you know it everyone will come to you to ask for your feedback and criticism.

Learn to use criticism as fuel and you will never run out of energy

Orrin Woodward