Managing Criticism

Why criticism is so hard to take? A negative comment affect you badly but never affects a friend of yours? Negative comments won't affect you even if you are emotionally sensitive.

You mistakenly connected the negative comment to a wound: We humans are always biased towards our beliefs even when they are incorrect, as a result, whenever we get criticized we quickly try to connect the negative comment we got with one of our wounds. If three people were rejected in a job interview then the one who doesn't like his looks will believe he wasn't accepted because he is not good looking, the one who doesn't believe that he is smart will believe that he was rejected because of his low IQ while the one who thinks that he is boring will believe that he was rejected for that same reason. In fact all three could have been rejected for completely different reasons than the ones that came to their minds but because we humans are biased towards our beliefs we usually interpret rejection and criticism incorrectly

You never took the human nature into consideration: One of the site's readers contacted me and told me that she feels so bad because a friend told her that she is not pretty. After further investigation we found that her friend was jealous and she just wanted to put her down. In other words, people who say negative things about you aren't always right but they sometimes try to put you down out of jealousy or even hatred.

You gave a different meaning to the words you heard: If someone told you that you are incompetent because you didn't do a certain task well then this doesn't mean that you are incompetent in general but it might mean that he wanted to tell you that you could have done better. Criticism hurts because we give different meanings to the words we hear and the situations we go through. I know a friend who used to believe that a person who moves his eyebrow while talking to him is a one who dislikes him! When we examined that false belief together we discovered that he had been interpreting words and messages incorrectly throughout his life and that's why he always felt rejected.

See the real world

If you want to prevent criticism from hurting you then you must see the real world. If you have been looking at life through your wounds lens then its time to drop that lens and see reality.Learn how to understand the intentions of the people you deal with, know how to interpret their words correctly and criticism won't affect you the same way it used to affect you.