Relationship skill: How to react in face of harsh criticism?

Life can be difficult when we are faced with harsh criticism. Critical comment can become a big monster which jumps wherever you go. It can meet you in workplace in form of your colleagues, boss and even team members. At your home, you can see this giant coming as spouse, kids, relatives and parents. Sometimes, even our close friends can be critical, thinking that it is for our best interests. We try to run away from this huge creature but we find it closer to us. Finally, we try to cut off from all the critical people and at the end, we find nobody left.

We wonder what has gone wrong. We are never taught relationship skills in school but we realize that we need it most in life exam. Ultimately, we stop trying to run away and think of ways of dealing with it.

Here, are some steps to make our life easier when we are faced with negative criticism:

1. When somebody passes a negative comment about you, give a pause in your mind. Try to maintain calm and peace inside yourself. This is first and most important step. This helps to maintain inner stability which is most significant during crisis.

2. Check if the feedback is true or false.

3. If the feedback is true, just remove the emotional content from the picture. Take the pure technical feedback and try to improve on it.

4. If the feedback is false, that is a good news too. It implies that you don't need to make changes in yourself. About the person who gave false comments, we need to remember that he or she might be in disturbed state of mind to do such things. We need to send positive thoughts to that person so that he or she can have peaceful state of mind.

5. When we send positive thoughts towards others, we receive them first while creating in our mind. It helps to end negative situations easily and build a positive atmosphere.

These simple steps can help us to easily get out of a negative situation and even convert it into a positive situation. Negative criticisms will become small things which will not interfere you as before.

I am a big fan of Brahma Kumaris, a world wide spiritual organisation and source of some of the ideas are coming from there. If you would like to do more research, you can visit their website.