Eradicating the Fear of Constructive Criticism

“The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself–the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us–that’s where it’s at.”

– Jesse Owens

While reading please take a second to think of words that you have identified that commonly indicate constructive criticism. After that reflect on the red and black marks that teachers applied to your original academic works, these marks typically signified incorrectness or deficiencies. Now think, what type of emotions those marks evoked, were they neutral emotions or one’s that were angry and catalyzed by the negative energy. Previously, I did the same reflection and one of the words that I pinpointed was deficiency. Deficiency in its most rudimentary form is a synonym for insufficiency, although the societally tainted version of the word commonly connotes a negative statement, and is typically used in a negative context, although the word is not negative in its essential form and moreover does not signify imminent doom. Yes, there are countless euphemisms that we could use to replace the word in a sentence however, by doing so we are implying that there is a reason to be fearful of the word, furthermore, perpetuating its negative interpretation. Deficiency simply means that there is an area that has been identified that you have room to improve upon and expand on, ultimately resulting in the enhancement of the individual. I performed a similar filtration process on myself and found that I was highly sensitive to constructive criticism, highlighting my weakness were difficult for me to comprehend and process, this would have eventually become problematic if I would not have diagnosed this issue when I did. In conclusion I encourage all to embrace their deficiencies and be willing to accept the challenge to improve in those areas.

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