HANDLING CRITICISM IS AN ART!

….. & you must be an artist

It is a very common trait among people to get offended by other’s comments. But, I often wonder why people allow someone else to dictate their emotions?

Over the years, I have had received some of the most wonderful comments and some pretty nasty ones about me. While during my teens and early adulthood, the good comments did give me a high while the bad ones made me sulk, but I have pretty much shifted my thought process to a state where I admired someone’s wonderful praises and learned to ignore the nasty comments. Over the years, it has become a second nature where people’s opinions /comments /criticisms about me have stopped to stimulate me.

So, how did I reach this state where criticisms do not affect me? Well, it took a lot of thinking and dissection of human behavior. People criticize for THREE REASONS:

1. They are your haters. Period.

2. They are immature or ignorant about the facts, yet impulsive enough to comment /criticize.

3. They are genuinely criticizing for logical reason(s).

Other than these, there is hardly any fourth reason why someone will criticize you.

So, how do you categorize under which category, your critics belong to?

Well, there is a simple solution. When someone criticizes behind your back then that person is a coward, so out-rightly ignore him.

However, if a person is candid about criticizing, then you try to find out whether the person plainly hates you, or is just immature/ignorant, or is a genuine critic. For that you’d have to look for subtle signs.

A hater never finds anything good in your work. An immature/ignorant person cannot find a way to avoid the mistakes himself that he is criticizing about you. It is only a genuine critic who can point out your mistakes along with the good things about you and your work; but most importantly, how to avoid the mistakes in the future. Listening to such critic(s) give(s) an opportunity to learn a lot and improve yourself.

Handling criticisms is an art, and you must be an artist.