Feedback Thoughts: My Harshest Critic

Hey Guys,

So, a little bit about me and negative feedback. I quickly found out while playing sports in high school and college that my biggest critic was always me. Even when coaches or teammates would tell me I had done a good job, I felt like it wasn't enough and that is what I told myself. Come to find out a while later that is actually how I feel about a lot of aspects of my life, so I have recently been doing some reading and research into that area of psychology and mental health. So I was happily surprised that the article "A Simple 5-Second Habit to Rewire Your Harshly Self-Critical Brain" was so relevant to my own situation. In the article Joel Almeida talks about reality-based self-congratulation which in short is just the concept of mentally congratulating yourself for every small step towards your goal or inline with your set out intentions rather than self critic for things that pull you away from your goal or intentions. For me this seems like a really great way to take myself out of the critic position and put myself into a "fan" position in my own life, metaphorically. I hope to implement this tactic in many areas of my life, but when it comes to this class I think it would be most helpful not necessarily when dealing with feedback from others, but when dealing with anxiety or shape about starting and finishing assignments.

Another article that struck pretty close to home was "Behavioral research illuminates the very human heart of when, why, and how we fail" by Cassie Werber. In this article Cassie goes over a lot of behaviors and ideas surrounding failure. One of the behaviors that I found really interesting was knowing when to quit.This is a really weak point for me first because I can become so fixated on certain tasks that quitting doesn't even cross my mind, and second because even when I consider quitting I worry that one decision to quit could turn me into a "quitter" which was not allowed in my family. But the advice given in the article is to quit when you aren't learning anymore which I think helps me because it gives me a sign post for when enough is enough. It gives me criteria and justification I can point to when I start to beat up on myself, in a scenario where I have decided to quit, and show myself that there is a reason and that it is not that I am a quitter.

So I hope some of this was helpful to others out there that might struggle with self-criticism, or knowing when to quit.

Photo via Pixabay by johnhain: Word Cloud

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