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.
(Photo: randolfscott07,
Flickr)
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