DON’T YOU LIKE TO BE CRITICIZED?! The true power of criticism and how to use it

Criticisms come from other people and when we face them, we actually face some kind of failure that is visible to others. It is natural that we want to be successful in what we do and expect positive results from our actions. We do the best we know and based on conclusions about how something should be approached, what should be done and how to position ourselves, in order to get the desired results.

Criticism from others indicates to us that somewhere we have made a mistake in judgment or steps, that we have not managed to bring things to the desired state, and hence it is a sign of some minor or major failure that we need to face.

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Sadness, because things don’t go the way we wanted and because we face some kind of loss of what we wanted to have, or we had for a short time and then lost. Anger is a consequence of frustration for the same reason. We don’t have something we want, whether it’s good positive feedback, trust, affection from other people, a positive atmosphere in the relationship, recognition, promotion or anything else we wanted.

Facing criticism calls us to redefine our perception of the situation, to think once more about what went wrong and why.

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What we usually reflexively do first, under the influence of sadness and anger, is either to withdraw into our unhappiness, or to fight for our truth by denying the justification of criticism and finding various convenient explanations why things are not as our critics see them.

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The anger that we mobilize in this situation, we turn either towards ourselves or towards others, depending on how we have learned to handle our aggression. If we turn it towards ourselves, we accuse ourselves of not being smart enough, charming, skilled, perceptive, expert, sensitive, responsible or something else that we think we needed and didn’t have or didn’t show.

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If we turn it towards others, we find in them reasons that diminish the justification of criticism and we believe that they are wrong, misjudge, have no idea, that they are malicious, that they have some interests and that is why we do not believe what we heard from them.

Sometimes we can turn our anger towards the situation itself so that we get angry at it and find some justification in it for ourselves and for our critics. Then let’s believe that it’s just a bad moment, a complicated astrological aspect, an unfavorable set of life circumstances that led to things looking bad for us in the eyes of others.

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In order to use criticism as important information that can take us one step forward in development and maturation, it is important to be aware of the fact that it is very possible that, under the influence of anger and the desire to preserve a good image of ourselves, we initially saw criticism as less nutritious way, rejecting it, discrediting the source of criticism, criticism itself or oneself.

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Then, to become aware that it would be good if, when the first wave of reaction passes, we look at it once again, looking for what could be significant and stimulating for introducing some novelties into our behavior and thinking. It’s okay to be both angry and disappointed, we did the best we knew and could, maybe we did our best, we tried to look at everything we thought was important, we couldn’t have done better. Now it is important to accept that we are neither the smartest nor the all-powerful, that everyone makes mistakes, including us, and that we try to extract from everything that there was some useful stimulus for further growth.

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Kritka, even if it is not fully justified, gives us the opportunity to face our imperfection, the illusions we have about ourselves and others, and to see how we stand with a reality that is not the way we imagined it to be.

The first step in overcoming anger and resistance is actually accepting this personal imperfection that gives us the opportunity to see things realistically.

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If we are able to conclude “I’m not perfect/and that’s completely normal and okay”, we put ourselves in a state that gives the potential for positive change. The next step is to look at the elements of criticism with a calm head. Even if we don’t see the situation in the same way that someone presented it to us, we can ask ourselves how it is that we are perceived exactly that way. What is it in our behavior that can create such an image in the eyes of other people and in what way could we change things in the desired direction?

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The questions we can ask ourselves are the following:

– What was expected of me?

– Which of these did I not do or did I do in a way that was not obvious and clear to others?

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– How am I with those expectations that were addressed to me? Do I or do I not want to fill them in and why?

If we come to the point that we want to fulfill these expectations for the sake of some of our personal well-being and the well-being of our relationships with other people, it remains for us to look at how we could meet them better, easier, more efficiently and simply, and what changes that would require to make in our thinking or behavior.

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And then we define an action plan and take the first steps, aware that we are taking them for the sake of our personal goals and not because someone demands and asks us to do so.

If we conclude that we do not want to respond to these expectations, we can try to make clearer agreements with others based on what is realistically possible and in the interest of all, which will free us from future criticism based on irrational expectations of others.