Mark McGuinness - Resilience: Facing Down Rejection (13 page)

So first up, recognize that getting criticism out of proportion is
normal behavior
, a quirk or side effect of the way we’ve evolved. Don’t beat yourself up for it. And don’t make it worse by criticizing yourself for getting it out of proportion! You’re only human, and this is what humans tend to do—but there are alternatives…

Your next steps:

1. Next time someone criticizes you, notice how you respond. Try to step back from the situation and look at it more objectively. Do you feel worse than you logically should?

If you struggle to do this, relay the criticism to a friend or trusted colleague and ask them how seriously
they
think you should take it.

2. If you conclude you have a tendency to get criticism out of proportion, start giving yourself the benefit of the doubt: whenever you catch yourself feeling terrible about a piece of criticism, tell yourself, “I’m overreacting again. It’s probably NOT as bad as I assume.”

It may take a while before you take this alternative perspective seriously, but keep practicing and notice what difference it makes.

26. How to turn criticism into a crisis

If you don’t know how to deal with it, your negativity bias can turn criticism into something that feels like a complete disaster.

The critic’s words feel like the confirmation of your worst fears—you were kidding yourself all along, you were stupid to believe otherwise, and you are, in fact a complete and utter failure. Forget just spoiling your day—it feels as though the critic is bringing the curtain down on your entire career. You carry their words around in your head, repeating them and elaborating on their implications, getting more and more anxious and depressed with each repetition.

If that sounds like a familiar experience, read through this chapter to see what you are doing to get the criticism out of proportion—and what to start doing instead, to give yourself a break.

1. Assume the critic is right

Because we have evolved to be on high alert for threats, it’s easy to take criticism at face value, as an authoritative judgment on our work. If you do this with every piece of criticism that comes your way, you are
guaranteed
to feel terrible.

What to do instead:

Adopt an attitude of healthy skepticism to criticism. Don’t dismiss it, but don’t take it at face value. Recognize that it is bound to sting at first, but try not to take your emotional reaction 100% seriously. Give it a little time, then come back to the criticism and analyze it to see whether or not it has any merit.

2. Multiply the critic

In Queen’s famous video for
Bohemian Rhapsody
, there’s a sequence where the four faces of the band members are multiplied into a huge chorus, using state-of-the-art (for 1975) special effects. If you really want to make yourself feel miserable, simply apply the ‘
Bohemian Rhapsody
effect’ to multiply the image of the critic in your mind’s eye—so that it’s not just one person criticizing you, but tens, hundreds, or thousands of people chorusing the criticism (guitar solo optional).

What to do instead:

Remind yourself that this is just the opinion of one person, at one time, in one place. There are plenty of others out there who could have a completely different view of your work.

3. Take it personally

We’ve been here before. By now you should recognize the pattern—taking the criticism as a judgment on you as a person; telling yourself it just goes to show you’re not a real artist/leader/whatever; and visualizing your future career cleaning toilets and making tea for the people who are really up to the job and not just kidding themselves. And so on…

What to do instead:

Focus on the specific aspects of your work or performance that are being criticized.

Does the critic have a point about
these particular instances
? (And remember, if the criticism doesn’t include specific examples, that’s a sure sign of an incompetent critic.)

Tell yourself that even if you have performed badly in this particular instance, it doesn’t mean you are incapable of doing brilliant work in the future.

4. Argue with the critic in your head

This one’s a doozy. You imagine having a conversation with the critic, in which you argue back and defend yourself. The trouble is, the critic isn’t convinced, and you imagine their response to your defense—and so on, back and forth in your imagination, for hours or even days. It’s an exquisite way of torturing yourself, since you get to carry the critic around with you wherever you go, poisoning every aspect of your daily life.

What to do instead:

Wake up!

The conversation is not real.
It’s not happening. Drop it and forget it. Look around you. Breathe fresh air. Go for a walk or run, or coffee with a friend—on the strict condition that you don’t mention the critic once!

Make time to process the criticism and decide what to do with it. Then get on with your life.

5. Call yourself stupid for even trying

One part criticism with two parts regret and recrimination is a powerful cocktail. In this scenario, not only do you get to feel bad about the criticism itself, you tell yourself you were stupid to even dream of succeeding. Who did you think you were? How dumb was that? And so on.

What to do instead:

Imagine an alternative universe where you never took any risks, never dared to dream big, never made any effort to do anything original, never put yourself on the line in pursuit of your ambitions.

How stupid would
that
be?

Exactly!

But you didn’t do that. You stood up to be counted, and were brave enough to expose yourself to criticism for the sake of your dreams. Therefore, you are not stupid. Even if your work was utterly terrible on this occasion, it was still worth doing, if only for the learning (and a juicy anecdote for your autobiography).

6. Let it fester

This is when you don’t do anything in particular with the criticism, but it festers at the back of your mind, like an old sack of potatoes at the back of your grocery cupboard. And just like potatoes, the longer you leave it there, the worse it gets. You may not be aware of it consciously, but the smell infiltrates the background of your life, and not in a good way.

In hypnosis, an ‘open loop’ is when the hypnotist starts telling a story or opening up a topic of conversation, and then leaves it hanging, without a conclusion. The result is that part of your unconscious mind is left waiting for a resolution, which produces a mild trance state.

The more open loops you have in your mental experience, the more your mind becomes enveloped in trance, and the harder it is to wake up and bring your full attention to your present experience. Which is fine if you trust the hypnotist and they bring you out of the trance at the end! It’s not so good if the trances consist of criticisms, resentments, arguments, and other unfinished business. That kind of trance, you can do without.

What to do instead:

Close the loop. Process the criticism and come out of your trance. Open your eyes and wake up.

27. Get some perspective

As we saw right back in
Chapter 3
, if you care about your work, you identify with it—so it’s inevitable that criticism will hurt. But you don’t have to experience agony every time you receive a negative review or a suggestion for improvement. ‘No pain no gain’ is true up to a point, but if you’re blinded by pain you won’t gain very much.

You will never look at your own work with complete objectivity, but here are four ways you can distance yourself from it, to get criticism in perspective and make better use of it.

1. Distance in space

Here are some practical tips from Leonardo da Vinci’s advice to artists in his
Notebooks
:

We know very well that errors are better recognized in the works of others than in our own; and that often, while reproving little faults in others, you may ignore great ones in yourself… I say that when you paint you should have a flat mirror and often look at your work as reflected in it, when you will see it reversed, and it will appear to you like some other painter’s work, so you will be better able to judge of its faults than in any other way. Again, it is well that you should often leave off work and take a little relaxation, because, when you come back to it you are a better judge; for sitting too close at work may greatly deceive you. Again, it is good to retire to a distance because the work looks smaller and your eye takes in more of it at a glance and sees more easily the discords or disproportion in the limbs and colors of the objects.

This is great advice for artists and designers, but even a writer like me can benefit from a modified version. If I’m stuck on a piece of writing, I translate it into a different format: I’ll take a handwritten draft and type it up on the computer; or if I’ve been working on the computer, I’ll print it out and look at it in the next room. This helps me see the text with fresh eyes, as Leonardo says, as if I were looking at the work of another writer.

Video is a terrific tool for stage and sports performers, showing you things about your movements you could never see otherwise. The same goes for audio recordings for musicians, singers, and speakers.

Sometimes it helps to change the environment where you experience the work. In the film
24 Hour Party People
, the members of Joy Division sit in Tony Wilson’s car to listen to their album for the first time, because this is how their audience will hear the songs on the radio.

2. Distance in time

As well as physical distance from the picture, Leonardo suggests that the artist take a break in order to come back better able to judge. Even a short interval can be enough to break the connection with your work and approach it afresh. Many writers follow a similar pattern, setting aside separate times for drafting and revising their text. Here’s Maya Angelou describing her writing routine:

“If April is the cruellest month, then eight o’clock at night is the cruellest hour, because that’s when I start to edit and all that pretty stuff I’ve written gets axed out. So if I’ve written 10 or 12 pages in six hours, it’ll end up as three or four if I’m lucky.”

I always try to finish a piece of writing at least one day before I’m due to submit or publish it—I call this ‘letting it marinade.’ When I read through it after a break I invariably find several things to tweak that I couldn’t see before. By allowing yourself more time to review and revise your work, you sharpen your critical faculty and improve the work.

And when you receive a stinging critique, try not to let your first reaction be your final one. In the heat of the moment you are not the best judge of the criticism. So make an effort to return to it a few days later, and ask yourself—honestly—whether the critic had a point.

3. Seeing through others’ eyes

The easiest way to find out how your work looks to others is to ask them. Make sure you pick people whose opinion is informed and relevant and who won’t spare your feelings.

I attend
Mimi Khalvati’s
poetry workshop because she has an almost supernatural ability to see to the heart of a poem, even in early draft form, and suggest unexpected ways of improving it. She doesn’t hold back if the writing isn’t up to scratch, but she does it so skillfully that even if she’s telling me to rewrite the whole thing I come out of the class eager to get back to work.

If you can find a teacher as good as Mimi, pay plenty of attention to their words. In a work situation, your boss, colleagues, and customers are obvious people to ask. If you’re a performer of any kind, you probably won’t need to ask, as there will always be plenty of people on the sidelines who are eager to tell you what they think of you!

If you aren’t able to ask someone else for real, the next best thing is to use your imagination. Put yourself in their shoes and notice how the world looks through their eyes. Imagine the kind of things they are likely to say.

Try to get at least two different perspectives on your work (in addition to your own).

4. Mental distance

What you’re really trying to achieve with all these techniques is to create
mental distance
between yourself, the work, the criticism, and your reaction.

Remember your mindfulness practice?

I keep coming back to it because it’s helpful in many different ways. In this case it can help you see the criticism for what it is, get it in perspective and—eventually—let it go.

Hold the criticism and your response to it in your attention—without trying to avoid it, or put it out of your mind. And without exaggerating it or feeding it by arguing with it. While you’re doing this, focus on your body, your breathing, and your surroundings. Keep doing this until you start to ‘see round the edges’ of the criticism—and beyond it.

Notes:

Leonardo da Vinci, “Of judging your own pictures,”
Notebooks
, section 530, Project Gutenberg translation:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5000/pg5000.html
“>

“A Day in the Life of Maya Angelou,” interview by Carol Sarler,
The Sunday Times Magazine
, 27 December 1987

Mimi Khalvati:
http://www.mimikhalvati.co.uk/

28. When to ignore the critics

Leonard Cohen is not your typical rock star. Not only does he write slow, melancholic, poetic songs, with a minimalist acoustic accompaniment, he has also spent several years living the reclusive life of a Zen monk, a disciple of the teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi.