You don’t have to be thick-skinned in order to take criticism and doing a lot of retrospection doesn’t cover for the feedback others can provide. It took me a while to realize this but, as hard as it is, being able to listen to what others have to say is a liberating experience.

We have to constantly re-evaluate ourselves, our actions, and the areas of our life that can be improved. An easy one that comes to mind is our relation with money. We all want to be smarter about how we handle it, and so we re-evaluate our actions with regards to money often enough in order to adjust and achieve our financial goals. The same needs to be done for other areas of our life, including our careers. As professionals, we ought to be interested in learning what things we are doing right, and what things we can improve so that we can guarantee progress and improvements in what we do.

One of the hardest things about facing criticism is to not take it personally, and here’s where most of the practice comes in. How can we look past the emotions and focus on what is really relevant about the criticism being shared.

I could spend many words sharing spiritual, philosophical, and life changing strategies on how to not be emotional. Truth is, it’s extremely hard and it will keep happening throughout our careers. Instead, I will share a few things that I do to help with the process:

Seek for feedback⌗

Part of the constant re-evaluation process is about seeking for feedback rather than just waiting for it to come. When we ask for feedback, we are getting others to focus on a specific thing, to help us improve that one aspect, rather than taking a complete stab at us.

This process will also help catching problems sooner rather than later. Yearly reviews are good to take a step back and look at the whole picture, whereas constant re-evaluation will help with the progress of specific areas. It helps reviewing our actions, in context, when there is still an opportunity to change.

Ignore personal attacks⌗

Giving feedback is not an easy task. Many people do it in good faith and still fail at it. Others use it as a way to attack people personally. The rule of thumbs is to ignore any sort of feedback that attacks you at a personal level. That brings no benefits and much less joy to your life.

Change or delegate⌗

Not all criticism should result in a change in ourselves. Sometimes there are things that are out of our scope, we don’t enjoy doing, or that we would rather not change. We have to be clear about the things that we want to change and the ones we would rather delegate to others.

By accepting the things we can’t change we are keeping ourselves focused on our goals, on what we really want to improve, and we will also act on the areas we know we can’t change by handing them off. If you can’t fix something, find someone that can.

Take time⌗

Take time to reflect on the feedback. Don’t react too fast but don’t sit on it for too long. Accepting criticism requires accepting that there are things we can do better, that we have to improve. It’s liberating but scary.

Part of the task is to see what changes we can make for this process to be effective and permanent. Old habits die hard, and we often go back to them after a while. Let’s make sure we incorporate changes in a more definitive way.