How to handle negative feedback (without taking it personally)
Everybody loves negative feedback, right? It is essential to figure how to improve your workflow and boost your results. It lets you know where you went wrong, and where you need to improve.
Okay, so perhaps that doesn’t mean you have to love it. But it does make it a valuable fact of professional life. And learning to cope with incoming criticism enables you to make the most of it, while impressing your colleagues and boss with your positivity and resolve.
This process involves more than an element of careful listening. You may be primed for incoming negative feedback before it happens, because you know you’ve messed up or because you know your boss doesn’t dig your way of doing things.
That’s no reason to shut it out. There’s always something to learn. First listening and then thinking about criticism helps you profit from every morsel of advice (good or bad) and to deliver an appropriate rebuttal if necessary.
The feedback process is not just a professional matter. It is deeply social. To help untangle the procedural and emotional threads that bind the experience of receiving negative feedback, the folks at CashNetUSA have created this excellent new step-by-step guide.
Who knows, if you get good at receiving negative feedback, you might even learn to love it.
Photo by Pim Chu
