Saturday, July 28, 2012

How to handle criticism?

We all like to hear good things about ourselves. We all like to get praise from our colleagues, our family members, and our friends. Praise or good words from others make us feel happy, increase our confidence, make us feel that we are doing something important, and in many ways motivate us to do the things that can generate more praise. But not all the time we get praise, many times we have to face criticism, directly or indirectly and there comes the problem. Many people can not handle criticism properly, they take it as an attack on their personality or behavior. It is also true that for many of us, it's easy to criticize others but very difficult to praise them or digest criticism directed at us. If we ask any person to list some shortcomings of people they know they can list many but they might struggle to list a few good qualities of them. We tend to find fault with others very easily. It's very easy to criticize, I think it comes naturally to many of us but at the same time, it's not that easy to accept the criticism. Why are we so unprepared when facing criticism?

I think that there are two ways to motivate people. First is a positive way where you motivate a person by praising them, and saying good things about them which makes them feel confident and instigates positive feelings in them. The second way can be called a negative way, where you criticize them, show them their drawbacks, and try to encourage them to overcome them or challenge them to prove you wrong. Both ways have their own pros and cons and it depends on the situation or person which one will work best. It's easy to offer criticism but often very difficult to accept it and not all the criticism is intended to motivate. Is dealing with criticism that difficult? I don't think so, it's not that easy but definitely we can use criticism directed towards us in a positive way. It's a free service offered to us by people around us to show our shortcomings and chance to know what we lack to become a successful person. It's also an indication that people around us are noticing us and also thinking about us which is very good.

Criticism can be used like an antivirus program where others scan our system and let us know some bad traits of our personality, then it's up to us to clean our system by removing them or if we want to have them with us, it's our choice. We also should be very careful and sensible while criticizing others, our criticism should be able to help another person to improve his/her behavior. Criticism out of jealousy or anger doesn't serve any purpose other than spoiling our relationship with the person we criticize. Most of the time our first reaction after receiving criticism is to get upset or angry or both. These things inhibit our rational thinking process. Instead of thinking about why we got this negative feedback, we put all our efforts into giving a fitting reply to that person. And it starts the next round of criticism from our side, and the game begins with no player getting benefit out of it.

The process of criticism can be compared with boxing training or practice. You want to give a punch so that the other person realizes his weakness and works to improve it but don't want to knock him/her out. So, it's not like a real boxing match but like training. But the truth is that rarely people can control their emotions once they get angry and start criticizing others and very often people turn this into a real boxing match and try to knock out each other. We are not here to make scores even with each other but to help each other and make ourselves a better person. It's very necessary to maintain this balance while criticizing others so that our boxing practice doesn't turn into a real boxing match. Criticism is a double-headed sword so we should use it very carefully. Once we realize the importance of this very effective tool we should use it to make things better for us as well as for people around us. Remember that everyone has to face criticism in their life at some point. Great political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, or many other great personalities like Jesus or Buddha faced criticism in their lives at some point, but it didn't make them weak or killed their confidence rather it made them strong and more determined in their efforts to achieve their goal. We should learn to take criticism positively and also offer constructive criticism to others, by this we can help each other to develop into better people.

Thanks for reading and please share your opinion.

(Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing)  

No comments:

Post a Comment