Hard things I like doing:
- Backpacking alone
- Weeding
- Shoveling
- Cooking for crowds
- Making things happen
- Cutting off all my hair
- Graduate school (depending on the day)
- Teaching high school
- Making phone calls
- Resolving conflict (the process, not the product)
- Committing
- Taking criticism
I want to elaborate on this last one a touch. Because right now I have a final draft (A-, with an endnote whose first phrase is anbiguous) in my bag and an email from a professor in my inbox,
relating to my final and paper. The final I think I aced. The paper was awful and I turned it in because I'd spent two weeks and hours and hours writing and and it was Christmas Eve and I had to finish, so I finished.
I don't want to read them. They could be super useful, really help me out in the long run, but my stomach feels queasy and my muscles are tight and my breathing a little frantic. I don't want to know. (I've made a deal that I'll read the email when this post is through. It maybe will last forever.)
Once I wrote a confessional email to a friend I'd wronged and/or mislead saying something like we should give us a try. He emailed back, I skimmed it, got the sense that is was negative, and I ignored him for a month. When, after a month, I reread the thing careful, it wasn't, actually, negative, but it had been a month. So.
Writing this out makes this issue sound kind of silly (which was my hope), but the issue remains. And it's kind of a big deal, I think, one of those habits of highly successful people (not one of the 7, but just folk-wisdom generally) is being able to take criticism, right? Eew eew ew.
(P.S. The email was 80% positive. I'm a baby)
3 comments:
I'm also not a fan of taking criticism. I think it's because no matter how much they promise otherwise, there is a part of me that still closely associates my human worth with the grades and comments on my academic work.
I even cut an entire paragraph out of a paper (yeah, with scissors) because of a less than favorable comment about it.
I'm glad 80% of the email was positive, and I'm willing to bet that the last 20% wasn't actually as brutal as you worried about.
Also, when I get papers back, I often walk around for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour in a cold sweat worrying about what might be written on them. It makes the awful things that much more awful (see, self, I TOLD YOU SO!) and the surprisingly nice comments absolutely thrilling.
It's so ridiculous.
If taking criticism well is a sign of successful people, I'm afraid I have a long way to go.
Also, I wonder how closely the criticism thing is related to the non-confrontational thing. It is a form of confrontation, and I think that's why it's so uncomfortable.
P.S. I learned a new thing: while not quite as bad as receiving criticism on papers... reading student ratings can be nearly as stressful. LOL.
I know someone who had the same email experience and it turns out that she was kind of asking him to ask her to marry him. Because he didn't read carefully, and just avoided her, that chance was lost.
It's like ripping off a bandaid to check student ratings and grades during the holiday. Usually, if you're worried about it, you're fine.
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