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 |   A journey of self-improvement - or not. |
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Sup? I'm Char. You may know me from timeless classics such as
and
I blog for things like
[Embed For Use By Upgraded+] Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya They say jump and ya say "how high?" Ya braindead, ya got a fuckin' bullet in ya head |
Artist: The Shins Song: Simple Song [Embed For Use By Upgraded+] "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  Prompt: Describe a time when your work was criticized. How did you react?Ughhhh what happened?!? I was feeling so much more positive yesterday than today.  Just feeling down because of trying to recover from a second surgery and just don't feel like I'm improving even though it was only last week that I had it done. I go for my post-op checkup next week. I really wanted to stay in high spirits today and review or do some birthday stuff but it didn't end up happening.I'll try again tomorrow though.  Now, on this prompt I'm going to be completely honest and admit that I don't have the highest emotional intelligence. Criticism is especially difficult for me to emotionally handle without getting defensive or angry. I can handle constructive criticism when it comes in the form of something like a review here on WDC. I wrote that item. If that item sucks and I open it up for reviews, I appreciate anyone's attempt at helping me improve because I know that it's coming from a place of goodwill. But there are several situations where I do not react well to criticism, and I will gladly rant list those for you now: When I genuinely didn't do anything wrong. For example, in one of my previous jobs, I had asked my boss regularly to train me on a system that was integral to my position. He kept telling me "later, later, later." Then my 6-month performance review came up and guess what he had the audacity to say to me? "You still don't know how to use X system, which is disappointing." WTF...  I still get angry just thinking about it because I put a lot into my work and I had done everything short of outright demanding that he train me on the system. I definitely lost my temper during that review and called him out immediately, to which he backtracked and sheepishly said, "Oh yeah, I've been pretty busy..."  When I actually didn't ask for your opinion. I get ultra irritated when someone expects me to be grateful for criticism that I never even asked for or wanted. The reason this irritates me is because the other person is often presumptuous in their criticism and I think it's rude. For example, when I was in college I missed a week of classes (which I was able to do because I had documented ADA paperwork on file with the school). Despite knowing that my absences were excused, one of my professors made a comment to me about how if I wanted to do well in her class, I'd better focus more time on actually coming to lectures rather than partying. First of all, I wasn't partying, I was in and out of my neurologist's office getting treatment for an intractable migraine. Second of all, I didn't ask for your critique. Your assumptions on my priorities are just shitty and unhelpful. When the other party doesn't understand the circumstances. Partially related to above, but it deserves its own spotlight because it just happens a lot. I actually see this more frequently as a third party where someone makes a critical statement about someone else without knowing that person’s situation, but it’s happened directly to me a fair amount of times as well. Like in the above example, my professor didn’t know I had a migraine and chose to assume that I was partying rather than just asking me if everything was okay. Similarly, I heard one coworker say that another coworker had been staying out too long on lunch. Not a crazy amount of time, but often she was coming back a little more than an hour after her lunch started. Which, side note, if you have time to keep close track of coworkers at work, you need a heavier workload or you need to lose some hours and pay. But anyway, turns out the woman was transitioning her parent with dementia into a senior living community and she was going to check in on her parent at lunch that week. So, you just criticized someone behind their back for taking an hour and ten minutes on lunch instead of one hour while they were going through a major, difficult life decision and still getting all their work done. I would feel horrible if I did that to someone. When I'm emotional about the subject or just in general. Sometimes there are things that make sense to criticize, but the timing of that criticism is still important. You know when you're just having a bad day or week and you totally meltdown over something seemingly insignificant? Criticism is something that can easily spiral my mood if I'm already stressed and emotional about other things. It's like oh great, you want to throw something on top of everything else? There are also topics that are triggers for me too, regardless of my emotional state. My family is one of those topics. If Kira criticizes the way I handle a family situation, I get really upset. Because I'm like you just don't even know or understand all the layers of complexity in those relationships. It's a topic that quickly makes me emotional when criticized. When their goals for me don’t align with my goals for myself. Last one, I swear.  This is a little different than all the above though. I really dislike when someone criticizes me based on what they want or expect from me. Your criticism of me is worthless to me if it doesn’t align with what I want or need for myself.I’m sure some of you have experience with this somewhere in your history. I had friends in school who wanted to go for English or history, but their parents would only help them with school if they went for a science or math major. So they did it, hating their field the entire way, before even getting an actual job in it.  There’s a difference between showing concern for someone, like, “Here are the pros and cons of X, Y, Z decision, are you sure this is what you want to do?” and being like, “How stupid could you possibly be to think that decision is at all sensible?” Or, “What you’re doing worries/concerns me because A, B, C reasons.” vs. “You’re going to hell for doing that because I personally disagree with it.” I’ll shut someone off instantly if the reality of the situation is that I want something for myself that they don’t want for me and they’re going about criticizing me in a judgmental, close-minded way. No thanks. You wore a charm in a chain that I stole especially for you Love’s such a delicate thing that we do, with nothing to prove |
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