Feedback Thoughts

For this assignment, I read the articles and chose my two favorites to discuss in further detail.

Article 1: Silence the Critical Voices in Your Head

I chose this article because I feel it is one of the ones I most strongly can relate to.  Growing up and even now, I have always had a tendency to focus on the negative; I can never seem to get the negative thoughts out of my head, no matter what I try.  For some reason, the negative thoughts had so much more weight than the positive. People would be afraid to give me criticism because I had a habit of taking it so personally and literally, that I thought they no longer liked me as a person. I know I would blow the criticism out of proportion, but I believe that is because I did not know how to deal with it.  After reading this post and realizing I was not alone, I found a lot of comfort and confidence in the four strategies provided to overcome this: look for the positive, hear the positive, dig in to understand the positive, believe the positive, and act as if it were true.  These are all feasible tasks that I can practice in my daily life to help me change my frame of mind and viewpoint.

Article 2: Seven Ways to Crush Self-Doubt in Creative Work

(Girl Questioning; Image from Pixabay)

I chose this article because I feel as though I am a victim of self-doubt; sometimes I even let self-doubt take control of my life and prevent me from doing certain things because I tell myself I am not capable of doing them.  For instance, I am about to be applying to grad schools to hopefully get my PhD, and all I hear is negative voices in the back of my head asking why I ever thought I would be good enough for this, how I will never make it in, and how all my studying will turn out to be a waste of time.  The seven steps provided in this post shed some light on how to find confidence in myself again.  The first one really stuck out to me: Don't Compare Yourself to Others.  This stuck out to me because I feel in our day-and-age with all the social media we have, it is so hard to see pictures of other people doing cool things, having great relationships, etc, and not comparing their lives to our lives. I fall victim to that every time I get on Instagram, and I know this is a bad habit I need to break.

Overall, I have always looked at feedback in a negative way, but his activity has helped show me that feedback can, after all, be a positive thing. Over the past years of being a student, the most productive feedback assignments I have received was when we did partner projects, and then had meetings with another partner group to discuss critiques. This was very helpful because it did not feel as though I was being attacked by myself, it felt as though someone else was helping take the weight of the criticism off of me, and allowed me to breathe a little bit.