on receiving criticism

and trying to be made less crazy by it

I want to spend a little time here examining my relationship to other people’s opinions of me and my work. Now in my sixth decade of life (I’m in my early fifties, so yeah — if you’re 33, you’re in your fourth decade. Sorry, I didn’t make the world), I am reckoning with the fact that I haven’t yet achieved some of the things I’ve dreamt of doing, nor have I taken my writing as far as I want it to go. As I take stock of my choices and accomplishments in this final week of the year, I can see that something or things are getting in the way, making it harder for me to get the outcomes I wish to see. I hypothesize that the high degree of sensitivity with which I experience professional and personal criticism, even from people who love me, even from my own brain, might have something to do with my stalled progress. Am I holding myself back from public risk-taking with my work, and from fully examining my parenting habits, so as to protect myself from having my feelings hurt?

Not marketable

Grad school was a parade of semester-by-semester critique panels that churned my guts into a mass of anxiety about whether art was really for me. Having to hear over and over that my work just wasn’t marketable left me in confusion and mental pain, doubting my abilities and wanting to shrink away. And indeed, I no longer make visual art. This has often been the response that has arisen inside me when I receive the criticisms of others: rather than having my resolve strengthened to do a better job next time, I have usually wanted to quit or leave the immediate situation in which my performance or work quality was being measured.

In professional life, much of my work has been in the public eye. As a former journalist, I’ve had to read a lot of editorial commentary on my work, much of it critical. I have multiple book manuscripts in the pipeline, and yet not a single book exists in the world with my name as author. (I did co-author a book chapter on the public policy work that I did during my time as executive director of the Farm Alliance of Baltimore, but that was just a brief researched essay.)

Journalism was the only discipline where I could understand what I needed to do in order to improve: did it inform the reader meaningfully? Did it reveal a fact heretofore unknown or elucidate a poorly-understood situation for the public? Did it challenge someone in power or give a fair and accurate portrayal that had never before been rendered? I never minded being held accountable to the editorial standards of any publication. They seemed less subjective than the standards of other disciplines, such as nonprofit work, where the standards seemed to be merely to fulfill the intent of the donors of the money that paid for my work. In nonprofit work, one is accountable to the public’s evaluation of how well one is fulfilling the “mission”; but in many cases, the donors are the most vocal about how faithful the organization is to their interpretation of that mission. And internal team culture, in a nonprofit business, can determine the story that is told to the donors.

“Feedback”

At my last job, there was a culture of coworkers giving each other what the millenials refer to as “feedback” liberally and without preamble or consent. In staff team meetings, in work sessions where teams of people were expected to make progress on a group project, discussion could be interrupted and derailed by anyone wishing to make a comment on a manager’s handling of group process, or a critique of my or anyone else’s perceived lack of preparation, unfamiliarity with the content, or other shortcoming. At first, I kept my composure in these moments, gamely agreeing to do more prep before the next meeting, or collaborate more closely on the next grant proposal draft so as not to leave anyone’s voice out.

Gradually, though, I came to recognize this behavior as undermining of my role as a co-executive director, and an opportunistic means of taking control back for the purpose of - what? People had different motivations for derailing meetings, but ultimately the impact of these derailments was that they thwarted group processes and delayed or denied the organization a chance to set a unified course or move in one direction. As the director charged with both fundraising and strategic planning, my work was harmed by these derailments. Eventually, I began to take the feedback itself personally, seeing that criticism was most often aimed in my direction rather than at the people who had longer tenure in the organization. This made for a miserable working existence for me. I remember in particular one meeting I led, on strategic planning, in which one co-worker raised her hand after I’d been talking for about five minutes. She asked why it seemed to be taking so long for me to lead them through the exercises to establish the foundations for the strategic plan. Once this person had uttered her question, another co-worker echoed it, asking if I actually even had a structure or plan in mind for how to get everyone to a finished strategy. Then a third co-worker piled on, demanding to know the same thing. Then the three of them agreed with one another and said that they wondered if Mariya even had a firm grasp of the strategic planning process.

I remember putting my hand in my pocket to try to dry my sweating palm, and then turning around, muttering “I’ll be back soon, I just need a moment” and racing to the bathroom, where I locked myself in a stall and attempted to regain my composure as I hyperventilated and texted my boyfriend in an existential panic. I eventually calmed down enough to go back into the room and accept the apologies that were offered by the coworkers, who clearly saw that I’d been rattled. I was able to salvage some of the content I’d planned to take us through, including a group activity which I felt I led shambolically and without the sort of enthused cheerleading that would have yielded the best possible results. As these things tend to go, with me, the criticism led to a breakdown in my self-confidence, which led me to shut down and stop trying, which led to worse, not better, outcomes.

Later, two of the same coworkers subjected me to a private critiquing session of my work that landed on me as would blows from a bullying middle schooler. As my tears fell, they noted their own observation that I seemed to be taking it too personally; they seemed to be in agreement that my work was slovenly, under-informed, under-prepared, un-serious. (This work consisted primarily of grantwriting, which in fact yielded over one hundred thousand dollars for the organization that arrived after I left the job. I had set them up with the funds that they needed to keep from laying off staff, and I quit so as to prevent them from having to pay out unemployment.) But even as their critiques of my work quality were off the mark, so was my reaction to the criticism.

Why did I take my coworkers’ unfounded criticisms so personally? Why did I freeze up rather than defend myself? Why was I so unable to control my emotions in that closed room with two people whose comments I ought to have been able to deflect with a “I suggest that you trust my process, you have zero evidence for the claims you are both making about my work” or even by saying “I hear you, but what you are pointing to is a difference in style, not quality, and I have the fundraising success to back up my methods.” More to the point, is my tender, reactive way of handling professional criticism actually good for me and the outcomes I seek?

Probably not.

Arrrrrrr

I am sure that many people share my tendency to spiral after receiving criticism, even criticism that is intended to be constructive and which is offered in a spirit of kindness and loving generosity. My boyfriend routinely offers me criticism on my cooking (my knifework with root vegetables has been a particular point of contentiousness), my handling of my kids and their various dysfunctions, and my cleaning habits. Usually, though not always, this is offered in a spirit of love; usually, though not always, I receive it like a shot across the bow of my own personal pirate ship. That is to say, I hit the deck, recover my wits for a hot minute, then strap up and try to fight him like a sea dog.

Again, why? How does it actually help me to react with such overt hostility to a sentence like “I’d like to see the 14 year old do a better job of taking out the trash when it’s his night, and I think you can get him there because you’re a great mom”? Nothing about my boyfriend’s criticisms are even the slightest bit hostile. But I will turn on him and snarl first, and then he is often patient enough to remind me to actually receive and evaluate what’s been said.

The core issue

To get to the innermost layer of this issue, I need to look at how I was parented and taught as a kid. My parents taught me to excel at academics, which was a true gift; but getting A's on my assignments also meant never being on the receiving end of teacher criticism. I rarely had to deal with teachers thinking I wasn’t a gifted or good student; when a teacher did give me negative feedback, I could ease my discomfort by pointing to all the other teachers who thought I was terrific. I hated practicing the piano, but my mom insisted I stick with the lessons and keep trying to practice; every performance I gave was riddled with stops and mistakes, to such a noticeable extent that people must have wondered why I had been accepted into the piano studio where I had my lessons. (I was eventually dismissed from the studio; my teacher, whom I loved like a third parent, agreed to keep my forty-five minute lesson time slot for us to just talk every week. This act of generosity transformed my hurt feelings at being told I wasn’t good at piano into relief that I could still see my favorite adult whenever I needed.)

I never did learn, then, how to graciously receive and evaluate criticism, except in one place: in my journalism classes and from my classmates at school whenever I had an article published in the Trapeze. Our teacher, the amazing Jeff Currie, taught us through careful debriefing sessions never to take criticism of our writing personally. He told us that writing journalistically was a craft that needed to be honed constantly, and which was subject to correction by any person in possession of the facts, even someone we hated or disagreed with. Being held accountable to the truth gave me a quick education in how to receive criticism without ego attachment. We learned to say, “I stand corrected.” This was key: we had to learn the truth in order to tell the truth, not just make assumptions or believe the version of things that seemed to be true.

However, in journalism and in academics, we are generally told in writing what we’ve gotten wrong. In parenting, in life, and in the workplace, feedback comes in more confrontational forms, and my brain’s particular wiring tends to interpret this criticism as threat. How do I, after fifty two years, tell my sweet brain that it’s gotten that part wrong? Nobody is threatening me, of course. They want to see me improve. More often than not, the critics want something better for all of us. I need to practice pausing after someone offers me a critique: take a beat, consider the intent of the critic, and receive the feedback accordingly. If I can achieve this, with consistency, I can really test the hypothesis and see if my outcomes improve along with my ability to receive criticism. Good luck to me!