How to eloquently accept criticism without loosing your cool?

Criticism is a fact of life, there are several ways you can go about handling both constructive and negative criticism. This e-how focuses on dealing with negative criticism, however you can apply this to most situations of critical review.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Patience,lots of patience.

1. Remain cool and collected. This is very difficult at times but the key to the situation is to rise above the child-like barbs and assaults. By responding with a calm and optimistic demeanor, you will be the superior person. By remaining calm and not reacting to taunts from others you will see two advantages as a result your reactions.
   
   A. People will admire the way you handled the situation in rising above the insults. If you remain positive while taking the criticism well, you will see a notable changed in people’s behaviors towards you.
   
   B. Your self confidence will increase because you are not participating in a useless exchange. By not stooping to the other person’s level you will feel good about yourself by not getting involved.

2. Take a superior stance. All too often we see criticism as an attack on who we are. It is seen more as an insult, however in most cases it is not. What you want to focus on is not taking these attacks personally; you have the ability to redirect the abuse. This may be difficult, but if you can separate yourself emotionally from the criticism and look at what needs to be done to deflect the attack. Typically, the way we deal with critical attacks is to attack back. That simply does not work. We all have the mindset to respond by saying “I will not let anyone talk to me that way,” mainly if the attack is done in a public setting. There is no need to immediately go on the defensive and lash out at the attacker. In doing so you are sinking to his or her level. Even though this person may be obnoxious and insensitive, you do not have to do the same equally annoying things, rise above the situation and become a better person.

3. Change the way you would initially react. Take a moment in the situation and do not react to whatever is going through your mind at that moment. Mentally count to ten and try to figure out another way to react. Take an example of a very critical email, by not responding right away, waiting about an hour or so, will give you a cooling off time to respond appropriately. If you are involved in a conversation in which someone is consistently berating you, simply say in a calm voice “I am ending this conversation with you, now; we can discuss this matter further at another time.” Negative emotions will most definitely lead to increasing anger and resentment; try to avoid them at all possible costs. You will develop this habit it just takes some time. This is by far the best piece of advice I have ever heard in regards to dealing with a negatively critical situation: Take a moment and do not react on the first thought that goes through your mind.

4. Try to put a positive spin on the situation. When you strive to find a positive aspect of a negative situation you are well on your road to success. Obviously there are situations that are utterly wrong and one would be hard pressed to find anything positive about a situation of a serious illness or financial failure. However, you can look at a situation and realize its difficulties and rise above rudeness and discontent. For example, if you had a home robbery in which many valuable possessions were stolen one way to look at the situation is to say “no one was home at the time and it could have been much worse if I or my family was hurt or worse.”

5. Look for opportunities to improve. Striving for and improving is the best possible thing you can do. If you make improvements in your life surrounding your health, personal life, professional life and extra curricular improvements you will find it easier to shrug off negative criticisms. For example, if you are the director of several facilities and you have established a weekly company-wide meeting/newsletter to convey the message on company goals, information etc., you may find that after one year people are going to complain about how dull these weekly meetings are. You can do one of several things to rectify the situation, you could fire everyone for being insubordinate or you could improve the variety of the readings and figure out new ways to make old things look exciting.

6. Here are a few practical examples of how to accept criticism appropriately:
   
   A. Maintain eye contact with the person and do not use negative facial expressions.
   
   B. Remain calm, cool and collected while the other person is speaking or in some cases ranting and raving.
   
   C. Use comments that convey your how you understand what they are saying, such as “I hear you” “Okay” or “I can see what you mean.”
   
   D. Recognize if you need to correct the problem and do it in a timely manner. By stopping or correcting the actions that are causing the criticism you are one step closer to avoiding any type of attacks or taunts. Pay attention to the type of responses that you give when asked to stop or change certain behaviors. Keep the responses simple such as, “Thanks” “I understand” or “Alright.”

7. Realizing the value of criticism. View criticism as music to your ears. Always keep your cool and work on developing a thick-skin. The only way to improve in life is through knowledge, criticism is feedback and feedback improves our knowledge. If you understand where the criticism is coming from you will gain much more knowledge than ever possible.

8. Take criticism as a learning experience. When you receive criticism and you see the positive aspects of it, do not go back to the same type of actions. Work to improve what was pointed out. It may be difficult for most to do this but striving to do better will help you in so many ways possible. If you did indeed do something wrong, recognize it, correct it and try not to do it again.

9. At times there will be clashes. Work towards rising above these petty differences. If you remove yourself emotionally from the criticism your actions and demeanor will reflect your attitude. Thank the critic for his or her input and respond in a positive manner. Here is a short example of a very negative situation:
   Suppose you put together a proposal which involves doing a particular task ‘X’ while ‘Y’ is going on. Your colleague than criticizes you by saying “that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard, Y has nothing to do with X.” The best thing to do in that situation is to ignore the first part of the sentence. You would respond by saying “thank you for letting me clarify the situation because I may have not explained it fully. X is correlated to Y due to… (effluvium) etc. and than some.” You would calmly explain the situation and thank your colleague for letting you clarify a ‘great question.’ Obviously you have remained the better person in the situation so continue on that path and you will have many successes.

10. All too often we have a mindset of “how dare he speak to me that way?” Especially in situations in which we are in a leadership position and those critiques are coming from our subordinates. In reality the question should be “how dare he not speak to me that way?” Criticism that is based on fact in vital to any successful person, especially in your professional career. Honest feedback is essential in any successful operation. You need to create a culture of accepting criticism in a healthy manner whether in your personal or professional life.

Tips & Warnings

• If you are in a situation where the criticism persists despite your best efforts you may want to consider some additional measures. Using non-violent tactics such as the ones found at http://www.cnvc.org, could be very beneficial to your overall well being and success. Hopefully you will never be involved in an argument that turns into a verbal or physical abuse situation. If it does, do not be afraid to take the necessary legal actions.

[harvard]

on 5/28/2009 Don't react, respond. Excellent article that advocates the use of empathy rather than being vindictive. People should lead by example rather than criticize, constructive or otherwise. Thank you for this exceptional in-depth article on dealing with people who insist on judging others and how to deal with them.

[jerryb1]

on 5/5/2009 How to eloquently accept criticism without loosing your cool is a critical skill that every employee should learn to memorize and respond with the phrase and attitude, "Thank you for the advice." Also, every finishing school of business should instill the art of CONSTRUCTIVE criticism technique with the obvious tone of mutual benefit as the obvious theme.

[ampersand]

on 4/14/2009 Good advice on rising above negative comments!

[MarlaineMarie]

on 3/27/2009 I like the word advice better than criticism - and I learned early that advice is not the actual decision. Some people give advice where it is neither wanted or warranted. But be open for those little gems of advice that seem only mean-spirited at first!

[xtraordinary]

on 3/24/2009 This is a very thorough and well-written article! I am having a situation at work where there is a new boss who is criticizing me quite often, and I'm having trouble dealing with it...the old boss never talked to me that way! Thank you so much for these tips! 5 stars.