HAVE A HARD TIME ACCEPTING CRITICISM?

TRY MINDFULNESS.

“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible,” the physicist
Richard Feynman once wrote. “Because only in that way can we find progress.”
Feynman was referring to the nature of scientific inquiry—the debunking of
hypotheses through which we attain knowledge of the world around us. But his
willingness to learn from his mistakes is as useful in the office as it is in the
laboratory.

As a corporate psychologist and consultant, I often meet high-potential employees

who either feel that they aren’t receiving the workplace criticism they need, or that
they are unsure of how to meet criticism when they are exposed to it. They aren’t
alone: it’s rare that we encounter a model of constructive criticism that feels
productive, healthy, and satisfying.

In The Harvard Business Review, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman describe
research they conducted in which 72% of participants felt that their performance at
work would improve if they received constructive criticism. In fact, 57% said they
preferred corrective feedback to praise.
But in my experience, even people who say they want constructive criticism often
have a love-hate relationship with it: sure, most of us would appreciate specific
insights to know how we’re doing—and yet negative interactions with a boss can
lead to rationalizations, beating ourselves up, or even dismissing the advice entirely.
(It’s worth noting that in Zenger and Folkman’s research, almost half of respondents
reported that constructive criticism wasn’t their preference, even as a majority
recognized that it would improve their performance.)

Overcoming such obstacles to self-improvement can be one of the corporate world’s

great challenges. So how can you empower yourself to reduce these negative
reactions? Is this sort of suffering the inevitable cost of growth in a high-pressure
work environment?

I don’t think so. Even as studies affirm the difficulty of embracing challenging
feedback, cultivating greater mindfulness can help you address the emotional and
even physiological consequences of criticism, while also shaping a mindset of self-
growth.

Intuitively, we all know that focusing on shortcomings is the key to true mastery of a
subject or task. This sort of logic explains why, for example, my childhood piano
teacher instructed me to spend most of my time practicing music that I found “hard.”
(I certainly don’t claim to be a virtuoso, but I did win a lot of competitions as a kid.)

A similar idea is encapsulated in the work of the psychologist Anders Ericsson, who
helped inspire the “10,000-hour rule” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell; it’s not just
10,000 hours of practice that makes a person improve, Ericsson has observed, but
10,000 hours of deliberate practice. To practice deliberately, you need well-defined
goals, and ideally a teacher—or boss, or mentor of some kind—to help you with the
fine-tuning by providing criticism.
It can also be helpful to understand why we can often have negative reactions to
critical feedback. In the paper “Bad Is Stronger Than Good ,” Roy Baumeister and his
co-authors cite numerous articles that show how people process “bad” information
more thoroughly than “good” information—an ability that, from an evolutionary
perspective, serves the adaptive purpose of enabling us to quickly identify threats in
our environment. To miss dangerous information historically meant you might not live
very long; if you missed something positive, you might have regretted it, but you’d
still pass on your DNA. Baumeister also cites research that suggests people can be
more motivated by minimizing the bad feedback they receive than by maximizing the
amount of good feedback. This sort of phenomenon helps explain why negative
interactions with a boss, research shows, can affect employees’ moods five times
more than positive interactions.
One way to avoid this sort of downward spiral is to identify and address the
immediate physiological consequences of such an interaction — a shift that can be
achieved through greater mindfulness. Many people experience visceral, physical
discomfort in response to negative feedback: an increased heart rate, say, or a
tensing of the muscles. Breathing deeply and focusing on your body can relax you,
putting you in a better position to take in difficult feedback calmly and productively (in
part by activating the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is associated with problem-
solving, rather the threat-oriented amygdala).

When you receive criticism, mindfulness can also be the key to cultivating healthier,
growth-oriented thought patterns. In addition to helping you manage your
emotions in the moment, taking a step back to observe your mental processes can
help you avoid needless self-doubt and negativity. Are you falling prey to cognitive
distortions? Try to frame the interaction with your boss differently — as I did with my
piano teacher, knowing that the feedback was designed to help me grow, even if it
could sometimes be hard to hear.
Research attests to the importance of this sort of shift. Keith Renshaw and co-
authors, for instance, have differentiated between hostile and non-hostile criticism; if
you tend to see criticism as hostile, it can be helpful to focus on the benefits you can
derive from it. Once you’ve been able to settle down any emotional reaction you had
in response to how it was delivered, strive to examine it for any useful content.
“True intuitive expertise,” the Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahneman once
wrote, “is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.” Even
if you want feedback, the real learning comes from being able to mindfully listen to it
and apply it — from seeing it not as negative but as good.