Learning to Appreciate Feedback & Negative Criticisms

While I pride myself on being thick skinned enough to not allow negative criticism or feedback to get me down, sometimes it does.  As a designer, I learned way back in art school that art is subjective.  Not everyone will like it, especially professors.  My design professors were very hard on us during critique.  They often told us of their own art school critique horror stories and told us that they were being hard on us out of love.  It would prepare us for the real world, and it did.  In the beginning of my career and before I learned how to read client’s, some of my artwork was rejected by managers, creative directors and clients.  I learned to brush it off and get back to work to create something that would appeal to them.  I learned that it was not about what I liked, but what the end-client or consumer liked.

In a lot of ways, negative critiques made me a better designer because it made me think beyond myself.

As a full-time freelancing creative, I have had to learn how to do the same thing with negative feedback or critiques that were not related directly to design.  At first, someone being negative about the way I ran my business, my marketing strategies or the business processes I had, would rub me the wrong way.  It made me bristle on the inside, while I smiled on the outside.  I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears, close my eyes and say, “la, la, la, la, la, I can’t hear you!”

Because it is for the most part, just me as the business owner; the designer; the marketer; and the project manager, a lot of my processes, marketing strategies and the way I run the business are based around my own needs.  The majority of the negative feedback I have received related to the business, has been unsolicited and from people not very qualified to give advice.  However, I have received some feedback that I really needed to listen to in order to find a balance between what my own needs were and that of my audience/clients.  The world does not revolve around me and neither does my business.

Listening to negative feedback and knowing how to filter out what is noise and what is something that truly needs to be addressed can be a challenge.  However, I think it is necessary to learn and achieve growth.  If you visit here frequently, you may notice that I often pose questions and solicit feedback.  It is because I really want to know, learn and grow from the knowledge and feedback I receive from others.  I think it makes me a better business person.

It is not always easy to hear, but you can’t grow if you don’t listen.