Tackling Criticism

Proverbs 15:31,32 To be counted among the wise, you must learn to accept helpful criticism. If you refuse to be corrected, you are only hurting yourself. Listen to criticism, and you will gain understanding.

Resilience is something that we need to instil in our children as they’re growing up because life can be tough down the track. But how resilient are we? How well, for instance, do we cope with criticism?

In a 2019 Harvard Business Review article, bestselling author and social scientist Joseph Grenny wrote this:

Even when criticism is delivered kindly — and on the internet, it rarely is — it can threaten the crucial human psychological needs of safety and self-worth. Tackling criticism in a resilient way requires detaching yourself from what’s being said, so that you can bypass any feelings of inadequacy and defensiveness.

And that’s the issue, isn’t it? Even helpful criticism threatens us to the core of our being. Even well-meaning criticism stirs up our emotions to make us defensive. And so we end up missing out on the great lessons, the great benefits, that healthy criticism can bring.

Proverbs 15:31,32 To be counted among the wise, you must learn to accept helpful criticism. If you refuse to be corrected, you are only hurting yourself. Listen to criticism, and you will gain understanding.

That’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? To be wise we have to learn to accept criticism, to set aside the emotions it stirs up, to evaluate honestly and openly whether the criticism is valid and if it is, to do something about it – fearlessly and unflinchingly. Because if we don’t, we’re the ones that miss out. If we don’t, we’re only hurting ourselves.

Listen to accept criticism – receive it and act on it – and you will gain understanding. You will, ultimately, be counted among the wise.

That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.