Handling active criticism

You may be wondering, when you look at the last few posts of mine, that, Am I cribbing a lot??. I also removed one of the posts, thinking that, I was criticizing a lot. Hopefully I will write more about more myself and some of my experiences, acquaintances.

In one of my all time favorite books, there is a line saying, there is a solution to the aging problem. It is learning. Yes its true. Mark my words, its a brilliant line infact.

You can learn a whole lot of things.

> Work related.
> Professional life related
> Personal life related. etc etc.

You can also learn from a variety of sources
> Books.
> From people who are kind enough to share their thoughts and insights.
> From internet.
> Also from your critics.

In this post I would like to write, about handling active criticism. How do you react to it. Or you can rather say, how did I react to it??

Over the past few months, I have been lucky enough to be at the receiving end of some great criticism, advice @ workplace. But all was not quite well over the past few months.

Infact I hated criticism, I hated it, when people said, this could have been better. Why, why? I do not know, nor did I make any effort to analyze the whole thing. Things just whizzed away, I always kept running away from critics. I was indeed afraid of them.

Critics, were some of my friends, colleagues. Sometimes I would even lose my temper and angrily say, this is the only way I can do it. (How bad I feel, when I recollect that day, when I said this.)

Now after few months, things have changed. I am ready to listen and adapt as per even my friends advice. Its a remarkable change, I thought today, when all of a sudden I started to think about it.

When I tried to understand what really caused the change, I was shocked to learn that, when I was not so confident, not so well equipped with knowledge, on/about a particular task, I turned my backs on the advice or criticism recieved.

But once I found a better approach of doing things, I gained more confidence, I found myself listening to the advice of other people, started to debate on different ways to do things.

Yes, that is what I want to infer, the more you are confident about yourself, your approach, the more you can handle criticism. But also you need to be willing to work hard and be disciplined to be confident.(that is the catch point).

I would like to say sorry to all my friends who have been so kind to share their insights and advice, but inturn I turned my back to their advice, sometimes even raised my voice, in dis-agreement. Hope you have forgotten it guys. :)


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Cheers.