Someone starts telling you
what is wrong with your work.
By the second sentence
you already have a reply.
By the third
you are not listening any more,
you are waiting,
holding a small, reasonable
piece of context
that explains everything.
And the moment they pause,
you use it.
"Yes, but the deadline."
"Yes, but that was the old design."
Every word of it may be true.
It still costs you the thing
you actually needed.
Because what you have just done
is teach that person
what happens
when they tell you something.
They get an explanation.
They do not get a change.
Do it three times
and they stop bothering,
and you lose the only free source
of information about yourself
that exists.
Nobody is obliged
to tell you that you are wrong.
They do it because
they think it will land.
So let it land.
Say nothing for three seconds.
That is much longer than it sounds
and it is where the whole habit lives.
Then say back
what you heard,
in your own words,
and ask one question about it.
Not a defensive question.
A question that shows
you are trying to understand
the shape of the complaint,
not its weakest point.
Only after that
do you decide
what you think.
You are allowed to disagree.
Plenty of criticism is wrong,
or arrives from someone
who has never carried
the thing they are describing.
But you cannot sort
the right from the wrong
while you are defending,
because defending
is a state where
everything looks wrong.
Context is a reply.
It is not a rebuttal,
and it works far better
an hour later
than it does in the same breath.
There is a cheap test for this.
Think of the last three times
somebody criticised your work.
If you can remember
what you said back
more clearly
than what they actually said,
you were not listening.
You were preparing.
The people who get better fastest
are not the ones
with the thickest skin.
They are the ones
who leave a gap
between hearing
and answering,
and put something useful in it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)