Criticism

Criticism is a judgment. A judgment that you yourself interpret also: acceptable or wrong. With some variations in between, depending on who is the person that criticizes. When your little neighbor boy criticizes your marketing plan, it is likely that you do not take that as serious as when your boss does the same. But either way, the source of judgment always is a personality.

Whatever it is that you do, you do it in a way that your personality expects it to get the label "good". Now you give "good", and someone interprets that in a different way. Criticism automatically questions the source of your information and experiences, because they do not bring you the expected positive results.

Criticism hurts because you more or less identify with the subject of the criticism. It may be "your" plan, house, choice of cloths, and when that is criticized, you experience that as criticism on your being. And then it does not make a difference when someone tries to soften that with terms like "positive criticism", you will learn from this, nobody is perfect, it is only my opinion, etcetera. That is merely a justification to be able to criticize without you attacking him or her in rage.

Because criticism contains a form of rejection, and you are only too aware of that. Rejection is interpreted by your personality as an attack that weakens you, and for which you should defend yourself.

Dealing with criticism start with yourself: become aware of the situations in which your own personality criticizes, through saying it out loud or only thinking it. In the workplace or any other situation in which you judge what someone else does or does not do. And ask yourself a question: does this bring me anything I want? Do I want to keep on strengthening this? Because you will find yourself rejecting other people to get a better picture of yourself. This will bring you some form of "feeling better", and this is highly appreciated by your personality. By choosing a different approach yourself, you are now able to weaken the principle of criticism for yourself and you break through the automatism of perception > judgment.

Now when you get the hang of it for your own judgments, you can extend this idea to situations in which other people criticize you. You recognize their judgments, but no longer give that a status in itself, because now you know that that too does not bring you anything you want. You now have a choice on how to deal with this: by not looking through the eyes of your personality, you can see it as a neutral thing, that may or may not contain inspiration for you. Your original contribution of letting go was essential to come to this point: a neutral basis for yourself and others to go from here, whatever label the criticism contained: good, average, wrong, etc.

Your new point of view now offers your input as a neutral action in itself, or as a new or fresh thought, rather than as an ultimate truth and something that should re-establish your personality. There are of course nice aspects when you become aware of these principles: when you change your attitude in "letting go", you allow other people to react from a different place than where you normally expect them to. It is not the other way around: this order is essential: you first!