An easy way to handle criticism

A few  years ago, when I had just joined the reputed Pt. Deen Dayal Upadhyay Management College @ 17Mall Road, Meerut, I was invited to  a conference  where I was one of several invited keynote speakers. The audience was around 100 senior professionals and I felt prepared, but a bit nervous. Giving talks, like this, are not necessarily new for me, but only a few times have I been featured in such a prominent role. Once I got going with the talk two things happened that I was unprepared for. First, there was a technical issue with some of my PowerPoint slides where the words were misaligned on some of the figures. My guess is that whatever version of PowerPoint the conference was using must have been different from mine, which I didn’t notice until I was well into the talk. Second, I ended up getting through my talk much faster than anticipated. I was slotted for an hour and had planned to talk for 40 minutes and then take questions, but ended up only talking around 25 minutes. Questions did fill up the rest of the time, but still, it wasn’t what I had planned, and I wondered if people would feel disappointed.  

A few days later, after an interesting and interactive session  with the final year BBA and BCA students of the prestigious and sought after IIMT Mall Rd. Campus-Meerut, I received short feedback report from people who had attended the conference. The good news was that over 85% of people felt the talk was “very good” or “excellent”, but that still left a few viewing it as “OK” or “poor”. When I read the narrative comments my initial fears during the talk were realized, with a few people specifically pointing out how my slides looked unprofessional and that they were disappointed that I spoke for such a short period of time. For about half of the day, after reading these, I was crushed and I questioned  my  worth as a speaker. Perhaps I had really let the audience down, and I wasn’t valuable enough to take the stage in such high profile roles.

But then after a little while, while strolling in the lush green lawns of DDUMC, I remembered something – something a highly respected mentor of mine had told me a few months ago, and once I remembered it, I started feeling better quickly. The message was this:

Broca , people barely, if ever, think about you.
The point of the message was that no matter how critical people are of you, for the criticizers it’s more often than not a fleeting thought and within a minute they are thinking about something else, most often of themselves !! For example, take a moment and try to remember what you have thought about in the last hour. How much of it had to do with what is wrong with others versus the stressors, worries, or even joys of your own life?

As a professor, I have seen that   this type of insecurity runs rampant among graduate students. I have frequently experienced graduate students, like  at my current college, Pt.DDUMC-Meerut , fearing ‘feedbacks’ concluding that I have  stable negative feelings about them even if  I have offered just a small healthy  criticism.  The reality is that professors – like anyone else – have so much more going on in their minds that dwelling on one particular person for very long rarely occurs. In fact, whatever critical thoughts I had about some student  usually completely vanish within an hour or so. And  so my advice and  conclusion  : If you find yourself in a place of worry or even panic over people’s opinion about  you, remember that they are barely thinking about you. The next time you see them whatever that negative thought was , should have completely& utterly disappeared , replacing it with a genuine and confident smile on your face making you feel 10 feet taller !! See the Miracle happen when the other person acknowledges your smile reflecting that he really does not remember anything about that so called embarrassing moment of opinion & criticism you were so worried about!!