There’s a big difference between Serious vs Personal Criticism. I heard a quote the other day from Bill Clinton.
He said, “You must have discipline in personal attacks. When you are angry you are already taking it personally, and you can’t take it seriously.”
This is important when we think about the role emotional intelligence plays in our day-to-day business interactions because we are always going to get criticized.
Sometimes that criticism is serious, meaning that we need to be doing something better than what we are currently doing. That’s positive feedback that we can use to improve ourselves. But sometimes criticism is just personal, and that can be hard to take.
When we are emotionally intelligent, we know how to deal with anger. Anger is that emotion that tells us we are perceiving something isn’t fair. So when we understand what we are feeling, anger in this case, and we know how to manage our anger and resolve it, work through it, then we can be emotionally intelligent on the other end; meaning with the person that is giving that feedback. Or maybe we ignore them all together.
But either way, we can then look at criticism in the form that it is being given and deal with it appropriately.
I’m Roberta Fernandez, Your Ability Activator.
