Essay On Feedback

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Hey, Do You Mind if I Offer You Some Feedback? When someone asks “do you mind if I offer you some feedback?”, you immediately think that you did something terribly wrong. You don’t know whether to feel proud or to feel ashamed, or even feel like you’ve been attacked and need to defend yourself as much as possible. Difficulty with accepting criticism is nothing new; in fact, it is more common than you think. We are often criticized after completing anything from simple tasks to the most complex projects we can accomplish. Common examples of what we are criticized for are: work ethic, creative works such as music, television, articles, etc., and for any mistake, small or large, we make during our day-to-day lives. Anybody can give constructive …show more content…

Steven Stosny, author of “What’s Wrong With Criticism” for PhychologyToday.com, agrees that the two terms mean different things. According to Stosny, criticism focuses on what’s wrong, implies the worst about one’s personality, devalues and places blame (Stosny). Feedback, according to Stosny, focuses on behavior, encourages one’s potential and focuses on their future (Stosny). The largest culprit of misuse and misinterpretation of constructive criticism is found in relationships. This is where the line is often drawn between what makes “criticism” and “feedback” different, according to multiple …show more content…

Stosny states that “criticism fails because it embodies two of the things that human beings hate the most: it calls for submission, and we hate to submit and it devalues, and we hate to feel devalued” (Stosny). Furthermore, he argues that criticism is used as a form of “ego defense” when we feel devaluated by behavior or attitude as opposed to disagreeing with their behavior or attitude (Stosny). Tony Schwartz, author of the article “There’s No Such Thing as Constructive Criticism” for HarvardBusinessReview.com, says that criticism “challenges our sense of value” and “implies judgement and we all recoil feeling judged” (Schwartz). Schwartz reiterates the point that constructive criticism is a useful tool that isn’t working or doesn’t exist simply because people don’t know how to properly give or receive constructive criticism. To prove this, he lists three reasons why we assume constructive criticism doesn’t work while in reality it actually does. “The first mistake we often make is giving feedback when we are feeling that our own value is at risk. That’s a recipe for disaster, and it happens far more commonly than we think, or are aware” (Schwartz). To summarize this reason he listed, Schwartz states that when we feel like we’re being

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