6 Tips for Handling Criticism

Gretchen Rubin, Bestselling author; blogger www.happiness-project.com

As an Upholder, I have a tough time being criticized, corrected, or accused – of even
the smallest mistakes – and I react very angrily.

Yikes, how I struggle to keep my sense of humor and light-heartedness! Here are some
of the strategies that I try to use to accept criticism.

1. Listen to what a critic is saying. Really listen, try to understand that point of view,
don’t just nod while I formulate my retorts. Accept just criticism.
2. Don’t be defensive. This is the toughest step for me. With my writing, for example,
I always have to take a deep breath before reading an edit letter or meeting with an
editor, to remind myself, “I welcome criticism. This person is helping me. I’m eager to
hear how to improve my book/article/post.” Along the same lines…
3. Don’t expose myself to criticism from people I don’t respect. I pay a lot of
attention to criticism from people I respect, but I try to shield myself from criticism
from people I don’t know or don’t respect, because I fear that I’ll react to it, even
though it may be unfounded. So when I get trustworthy criticism about my writing, I
act on it, but I try to avoid reading drive-by snarkiness. The means that bad  affects
us more strongly than good, and I fear that I’ll change my writing in response to some
person’s thoughtless comment, in ways that won’t make my work stronger. I need to
stay creative, open-hearted, adventuresome, and honest, and if I feel defensive and
apologetic, I won’t maintain those elements.
4. Delay my reaction. Count to ten, take a deep breath, sleep on it, wait until the next
day to send that email…any kind of delay is good. A friend told me her rule: when she’s
upset about something that happened at her children’s school, she won’t let herself do
anything about it for three days – and usually she decides that no action is better than
action.
5. Admit my mistakes. My father gave me an outstanding piece of advice when I got
my first real job. He said, “If you take the blame when you deserve it, you’ll get the
responsibility.” I’ve found that to be very true. Difficult, but true. In my experience,
until someone in a group (or in a family) accepts blame, everyone stays very anxious and
focused on fingering the person at fault. Once I raise my hand (if appropriate), then
everyone else can relax. And then we can all focus on what needs to be done.
6. Enjoy the fun of failure. Fact is, trying new things and aiming high exposes me to
criticism. I remind myself to Enjoy the fun of failure to try to re-frame failure and
criticism as part of the fun. Otherwise, my dread of criticism can paralyze me. Once,
when I told my husband that I was upset because I’d received a mean comment here on
the blog, he said, “Remember, this is what you want. You want to put your ideas out
there. Not everyone is going to be nice.” That made me feel better.
The discussion of criticism reminds me of a passage from Stephen Spender’s
autobiography,World Within World:
To overhear conversations behind his back is more disconcerting than useful to
the writer; though he can perhaps search for criticism which may really help him
to remedy faults in style. But he should remember that the tendency of reviewers
is to criticize work not for what it is but for what it fails to be, and it is not
necessarily true that he should remedy this by trying to become other than he is.
Thus, in my own experience, I have wasted time by paying heed to criticism that
I had no skill in employing rhyme. This led me to try rhyme, whereas I should
have seen that the moral for me was to avoid it.

This passage is a good reminder that criticism should help us do better what we want
to do, and to be more wholly ourselves, and criticism that doesn’t serve those goals
isn’t helpful.