Every day we go about our lives doing things the best way we know how. We parent, we are friends, we are lovers, we work and we handle the daily challenges which come our way.
Many of these things we do automatically, most of the actions we take in a day require little to no planning and therefore we immediately believe the way we do things is probably the best way, but what happens when somebody turns up with some criticism and forces us to question our processes?
In certain cases criticism may be welcome, you might have a problem at work or have to carry out a laborious task when a colleague’s criticism will help you to improve, speed up and ease the process, On the flip side of this, I have been around long enough now to see people being criticised on their parenting skills and choices. Some parents may need a little help and guidance from time to time, but this seems to be a popular topic where criticism is not at all welcome. I’ve seen people being criticised for not calming their baby quickly enough, for not having children at an age which others see fit, for choosing bottle feeding over breast, the list could go on and on.
People criticise every single day, infact you might do it yourself and not even realise. When was the last time you looked at what somebody on the television was wearing and thought to yourself that it was a horrible outfit, or look at someone in the street and think to yourself that you wouldn’t be seen dead out dressed like that? It’s become so normal for us to judge others on their actions, looks and choices. A contributing factor to this becoming so normal may be the fact that we open magazines and look at websites every day which will happily shame people for their lifestyle choices, their weight and their clothes. Once surrounded with something for long enough, it naturally becomes normal for us.
Be it constructive or not, criticism can be a hard thing to have to listen to. I’m sure at some point we have all received some sort of criticism which has been hard to handle, but how do you feel when the criticism is aimed towards you?
One thing I have noticed is that alot of people who are rather quick to criticise other or a situation are normally the worst at accepting it themselves. I include myself here as criticism is something I have always struggled with. Although I’m fond of learning new things and enjoy being taught how to improve upon actions and processes, I seem to take any form of criticism rather personally, normally I take it very badly, even if I don’t show it. I immediately believe that I’m not good enough and feel humiliated. Sometimes it will even cause a small amount of anger to bubble to the surface and immediately I will want to hit back with something along the lines of ‘Yeah, well you’re not perfect, you do this and that wrong!’ It makes me feel paranoid, judged and as though anyone who criticises me must think less of me.
Looking back I believe I never really favoured being told what to do and how to do it. I always quite liked to work things out for myself and find my own way. I was always the person who advised other people too so I believe that built the foundations for me being the sort of person who handles her own, therefore when anybody tries to criticise me, I don’t respond well.
This is something I have really battled with during my adult life as it’s something which can become genuinely upsetting for me, I still struggle with other people’s criticism now, however when you learn to provide yourself with a little constructive criticism from time to time it can become very useful.
One of the first things you have to do is to be honest with yourself, look at your situation, is what you’re doing right now really the best way to deal with this? For example, I love my home being spotless clean. When there were a certain amount of cleaning tasks to be carried out I would normally try and get them all done by myself and end up stressing myself out because they weren’t being done quickly enough and I’d become annoyed because other people in the house wouldn’t just get up and help. I would let the annoyance of this eat away at me, before I knew it I was being moody with my partner and seemed to think that he should know exactly why I felt so stressed. Then I began to take a step back and actually consider what I was doing, how was he supposed to know what was bothering me when I wasn’t actually telling him, I just assumed he should know. I explained what I had thought about to my partner and now if something needs doing, I’ll discuss it with him. It’s made the whole process so much smoother. Things get done quickly, I’m not stressed and I’m not upsetting my partner by having a random angry outburst. I managed to successfully critique my actions and in turn managed to improve upon them.
Criticism is something which is never going to go away, but how about we try to begin using it to help ourselves rather than beating both ourselves and others up and in turn causing feelings of inadequacy. Start seeing what actions you can criticise in order to make them better and remember, you wont be able to do this successfully until you can admit that your way might not necessarily be the right way.
