In One Ear and Out the Other

You shouldn’t take that job. Your Tory Burch flats are last season.  Don’t chew with your mouth open. You shouldn’t wear red lipstick. Why are you taking notes in pink pen?  Your tongue is blue from the ringpop you ate. Your presentation is dull. There’s not enough color. You should use a line graph instead of a bar graph. Don’t you know how to format? You sound like a robot when you speak in public. You’re swaying back and forth. Stop touching your hair. Look straightforward, stare into my eyes, and don’t let your gaze shift until you finish your closing remarks.

No matter where you are in the world or what you are doing at this very moment, people will criticize you.  They can’t help it. As human beings, it is in our animal nature to measure ourselves up against the competition and to bring down our opponents just enough to make them feel inferior.  But when we criticize people, whether we know it or not, we are doing it for a wide array of different reasons; thus when we receive criticism, we also have to assume that while some criticism is intended to help us grow, other criticism is intended to make us feel inferior or to make us appear weak in the eyes of an opponent. When we have so many comments and critiques flying at us every single day, how is it that we can differentiate between the ones that we should take to heart and the ones that we can allow to go in one ear and out the other?

If you are anywhere near as stubborn in your ways and grounded in your beliefs as I am, it probably takes a lot to get your attention.  Rarely do I take criticism to heart; people can say whatever they want about my work, my outfits, my appearance, my etiquette.  And while I may acknowledge the criticism coming out of someone’s mouth for an all of three seconds, rarely do I allow the critiques or comments to stick in my head beyond that. Because while I know that I’m not perfect and that I have many things to improve upon in my life, I take a data driven approach to almost everything I do.  So for every 100 criticisms I have received, I have received almost double the accolades - so in my head, they kind of cancel each other out.  And rarely does someone manage to stop me in my tracks and make me think twice about my actions.

With that said, it has happened – just this past week actually.  For days on end, I had spent countless hours working on this project that I had to put together, which was extremely out of my comfort zone. I hadn’t done a lot of work of this nature before, so while I gave the project a gallant effort, I knew deep down that even if I put my best foot forward, it probably wasn’t going to be my best work.  After slaving away over my computer for days on end, I finally had a final product that I was marginally proud of – sure, it wasn’t perfect, but I stepped out of my comfort zone and did my best to assume the challenge and construct a noteworthy product.

I rarely share my finished work with a significant amount of other people before I throw it in the ringer for the big dogs to assess. But given this project was out of my normal realm of work, I figured that I would run it by one of the closest people that I have in my life to get a second opinion.  Almost every time that I had sent my work to this person before, he often followed-up with extremely positive feedback, giving me some type of confirmation that my work really was as good as I thought it was.  So in hopes of receiving a similar set of feedback on this project, I made some final edits on the file and sent it over.  While I knew it wasn’t my best work, I never expected this type of reaction – not only did he think that it was bad, but he made it impeccably clear that there was no other option aside from redoing the entire project from scratch.  Well, there went one week of my life – hours of slaving over my computer and working my butt off only to have to wipe the slate clean and go back to phase one.

While it was my initial instinct to want to get yet another opinion of my work in hopes that someone else might feel differently, my gut told me that for one primary reason, his feedback held some truth to it.  After telling me how excruciatingly painful it was for him to even get through my entire project, he did not just tell me how crucial it was that I needed to start over and throw this version in the trash; but instead, he said that he was going to help me redo the entire project, and that he would be there this time to help me along the way.  After trusting what he had said and working through the entire project with him a second time, I pinned the two final versions up against each other, and they were like night and day.  He was right, my initial project was not representative of my best work; yet had he simply criticized me and then retreated like others often do, his words wouldn’t have pulled as much weight.

Though doing my entire project two times was marginally painstaking, the experience really helped me to learn an important lesson about interpreting criticism.  In the midst of so much feedback (both positive and negative) being thrown our way, it is often challenging to know what to make out of everything.  While it is often detrimental to take all criticism to heart when the person criticizing you or your work might not have the purest of intentions, it can also hold you back from reaching certain levels of self-improvement if you put up the blinders and are resistant to feedback in all of its forms.  So how can you determine when to take negative criticism seriously and when to simply nod your head and keep on walking?

For me, there are three main indicators that I have come to take into consideration when making this decision:

Test their reliability: How much do you trust this person? What role do they play in your life? How has their feedback measured up to your outcomes in the past?

Examine whether they are an active or passive criticizer: Is the person who is criticizing you offering to help you improve, or are they throwing words at you and retreating from the situation?

Measure their intentions: Putting the scenario in perspective, does this person have pure intentions? Do they have your best interests in mind? Are they on your side or are they a competitor who may simply be trying to weaken your moral?

Through creating a set of personal criteria to assess whether or not you should internalize criticism, this will give you significantly more control over your self-confidence and you will find it easier to maintain a stronger sense of self.  Just as it is important to assess criticism on the receiving end, it is also important to take these points into account when providing criticism or feedback to others.  If we are evaluating the work of a close friend or colleague, it is crucial that we commit to helping them improve in the area in which we are critiquing in order to have our feedback taken seriously.  Not only will this help others continue to improve, but it will also help us to improve ourselves personally through learning how to turn our words into actions and impact the lives of those around us instead of wasting our breath.