Practical Tools for Managing Criticism

Learning from painful feedback.

Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash

We’ve all been told we’re not good enough. When that happens, and our self-confidence is shattered, we question our abilities.

We ask ourselves: “Am I an imposter whose past successes are the result of luck?”

Thanks to social media, our whole lives are open to feedback. Whether your critic is a keyboard warrior or someone you thought was a friend, managing criticism is an essential life skill.

Even history's greatest thinkers had their critics. To get by, you need to evaluate whether the criticism has merit, pull any constructive feedback from it and discard the rest.

Destructive at its Core

Some types of criticism can be insightful, either because they tell us about how our actions are perceived, or because they tell us about the psychology of the critique.

But some forms cause nothing but harm. These are destructive to our mental health and the relationships we form. They forms tend to:

• be about our personality and character, rather than behaviors we can change;
• emphasize the negative without providing constructive tools for improvement;
• and be absolute in nature, based on one…