Responding to Criticism (1988) by Steve Andreas

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Responding to Criticism (1988) by Steve Andreas

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One of the fundamental presuppositions of NLP is that “There is no such thing as failure, only feedback.” That’s a nice thought, and it points in a very useful direction. However, for a majority of people it’s just a cute sentence that doesn’t automatically change their experience or response. Most people (roughly 70%) respond to criticism with immediate over¬whelming bad feelings. Then they try to climb out of the emotional hole they have just dug for themselves by rationalizing, trying to access a good state, trying to be objective, etc. Since they are already in a bad state, usually none of these attempts work very well. And since most of their efforts are directed at regaining a good state, they typically do not make good use of any feedback information contained in the criticism. If they do make use of this information, it’s usually much later.
At the other extreme, some people (perhaps 20%) respond to criticism by simply rejecting it. They protect themselves from any bad feelings, but they also prevent themselves from even considering whether any part of the criticism they receive is valid or useful feedback.
A third group (less than 10%) can listen to criticism without imme¬diately feeling bad. They can also carefully consider whether the criticism contains useful information, and use that feedback in a productive way to modify their future behavior.
Of course these three groups aren’t rigid categories. You can probably find an example of each of these different responses in your own life, depending upon your state of mind, the context, the criticizer, the frame, etc. Most of us occasionally get into bad states in which we respond unpleasantly to the most innocuous comment. Most of us also have times when we’re in such a good state that no matter how harshly we’re criticized we can process it simply as interesting information.
Several years ago we became curious about the internal structure that allowed the “experts” at responding well to criticism to do it with such ease. We have modeled a number of people who are characteristically very good at responding to criticism in a useful way. While there are. slight variations, all of them use the same basic internal process, and this strategy can be easily and quickly taught to others.