3. Filter the good:
You’re going to also have to filter the good negative criticism. That sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?
I don’t think it is.
After you’ve filtered out the garbage content, you can begin to filter the good criticism.
What I do is the following:
- Create buckets for the good
- Filter the criticism by topic (ie: Content, structure, value, etc)
- Dispose of the criticisms that don’t speak to you
- Layout a framework for improving the areas you learned about from the negativity
This gives you a way to begin looking at the criticisms with new eyes. You now have something you can work with rather than your emotions telling you that you suck.
4. Work on areas that need improvement:
You’ve now got a list of critiques that you could work on. This helps you to focus on areas of improvement you may have missed in your current work.
You are able to take what was negative and make it into a positive experience in the future. You may even reach out to these negative critics and ask them to review future work. This will make a critic into a friend.
There’s few things that hurt more than dealing with negative criticism or words aimed at what you’ve created or done. However, without hearing that there are areas of improvement, you will never improve.
Take the good from the negative critiuqes. Form it into a plan. Then work your butt off to become even better.
You can do this. I believe in you.
This article on dealing with negative criticism originally appeared here, and is used by permission.
