How to handle criticism in a healthier way

[Vxvxen]

Recently, I’ve had an encounter at work which did not turn out so well. I did a task at work that I didn’t follow the sequence of doing it in the proper format. I got some criticism from my colleague and people talking behind my back saying that I wasn’t doing my part right. Sometimes, I see other colleague face the same thing like I do too. How to handle the emotional trauma of being criticised? I totally didn’t mean to make mistake but it gives me a sense of trauma, small anxiety and a sense of rejection. I can recall a few times that it happened in several different occasions. Long story short, I apologised to my colleague and redo the task. It had ended and forgotten of.

What was hard to handle was to digest the criticism in a constructive way without feeling traumatised of it. Sure, I can brush it off and act like nothing happened and move on and do the task right next time. However, It can be a build up of resentment of feeling unworthy subconsciously and leads me to have self esteem issues, afraid to speak up on my own opinion, and try to avoid engage with more people in general next time by silencing myself in a protective manner.

Has this ever happen to you? How do you heal from the trauma of criticism? How to do you overcome it and still be confident to be your unapologetic self while being self reflective at the same time?

[nistake]

Yup, I've just recently faced the same issue.

A project manager, who's way higher in the workplace hierachy than me, just bursted into the office and started heavly criticizing some stuff he needed to deal with. I'm not talking about calm and constructive criticism, I'm talking about loud, rude and inappropriate venting.

The thing is, there are a lot of people working for him, so he didn't know that the stuff he was criticizing was done by me. At that moment, I didn't speak up (nice guy conditioning). I heavly felt the mixture of resetment, anger and worrying building up. I didn't know what to do, so I was just sitting at my desk and tried do deal with the anxiety by myself. Thankfully, I didn't succeed, so I decided it was time to bite the bullet and face the guy head on. I spoke with him and I calmly explained why I did what I did. He was also a bit calmer so we could discuss the issue in a rational manner. Funny thing is, I turned out that I didn't make a mistake per se, but the work I did could've been executed a little bit better. Overall, it wasn't really that much of a problem.

So I think communication is really important in this case. Sometimes it's really hard to calmly accept the criticism, because the ego's reaction is just immediate defense at all costs. Ask questions like what could be improved next time and try to learn from it. However, if you feel that the criticism was unjustified and/or not appropriate, call him/her out on it. It takes balls, that's for sure, but in the end, it's really satisfying. It shows that you have boundaries and you deserve respect, just like everybody else.