When you are subjected to negative feedbacks about the creative work that you have done passionately, how do you tend to react? Does your temper shoot up to the roof, when a less knowledgeable person of your field criticizes you? Do you feel dejected, frustrated and unhappy? Well, feeling a surge of negative emotions is normal! But the trick is not to get your anger or disappointment take over you and speak or doing something that you might just regret later.
Let us a take an example of a web designer who has been working extremely hard on a webpage and, in the end, is extremely satisfied by the brains and blood put into it. The client has a very prestigious profile that comes with promises of more opportunities, hence extreme care and effort has been put to it and on the D-day, the designer goes to show the work expecting praise and appreciation. However, the client announces it was not up to the expectations or worse, and passes an extremely demeaning comment. You should be adhering any of these three steps when such a situation arises.
1. The very first thing one should do is to channelize the built up negative energy and letting it go. Deep breaths help in relaxing the muscles and pacifying the mind to focus on the agenda at hand. It’s highly probable that you end up portraying a defensive attitude but it’s always wiser to choose not to do that. This helps a person in maintaining openness towards accepting criticism of all sorts.
2. The next step involves learning others perspectives. This gives an insight to how the project can be interpreted by a layman. So the important factor is to allow the critic specify where exactly his or her dissatisfaction lies. Comments bearing negative connotation or lack of proper examples to support the comment are very common. Don’t be surprised if the comment hurts your self-respect as well. People are likely to judge your creativity with a single track viewpoint. So a series of questions probing into what is the area that is bugging the person can lead to fruitful outputs.
3. Last but not the least, it is you alone who has to find a solution. Whether you are willing to compromise on the current state of your project or deliver it without any changes is entirely a rational decision that you have to take at that point. If you are not willing to accept a middle ground, the best way out is to show data or statistics of customers who have been benefitted by accepting the work without any changes and relying on expert advice. This will not only boost your goodwill, but also lend you creative satisfaction.
To conclude, the ultimate goal should be to satisfy the clients as well as yourself in the process.
