Coping with NEGATIVE Feedbacks and How to Improve Oneself?

NEGATIVE FEEDBACKS ? = Fix it

    Ever imagined of getting a negative feedback? Ever thought of an unhappy customer's reactions? This may happen to you in the near future, when you fail to deliver services or products as intended for customers. Dealing with it is very simple, just read along and learn the professionals' techniques.

What is NEGATIVE FEEDBACK ?

    Before we start on the meaning, let's separate it back into two individual words. Negative and feedback.

• Negative (Adj.) - Consisting in or characterized by the absence rather than the presence of distinguishing features. Not desirable or optimistic.
• Feedback (N) - Advice, criticism, or information about how good or useful something or someone's work is.

    So, combining both of the words together gives you the meaning of negative feedback as; undesirable criticism about how bad something or someone's work is. Now that we know the meaning, let's dive deeper into the reasons of it happening.

Why people have NEGATIVE FEEDBACK ?

    Ask yourself before you read. Do you want a bad service? Would you like to buy an unreliable product? Of course, no one wants that. Everyone wants to spend the least and benefit the most from whatever you use. When you invest on something, either in the form of work, money or time, you would definitely expect the outcome to be positive. What if it doesn't? Well you would probably spread the word about how bad or unpleasant something was, so that others won't have to face the same as you. For example, you paid the amount of a car, but you get a bike. This is where you get mad, so the negative thoughts start to form up and later get expressed as a feedback. 

    On the other hand, another reason of having a negative feedback is to tell the person who gave you a bad product or service to learn the needs  of a customer and improve for better. This is where the seller might lose a customer or something for compensation, but they get to learn the needs that what customers really want. If they can fix the problem, it is for their own benefit.

How to deal with NEGATIVE FEEDBACK ?

    Whether you are doing a project in school or a merchant selling products, you will have to face negative feedbacks at some point. Well, it does have the potential to cause discouragement, but with the right mindset and a few communication skills you can learn to view it in a new light and use it as a tool for improvement. It is a big challenge to accept it, but once you overcome that, it can strengthen your self-esteem, enrich your relationships, and eliminate your adverse tendencies. Let's see how we can deal with it.

• Ask clarifying questions - ask questions to shine the light on what specifically you can do to fix the issue or improve it for better future results. Asking more and directly will benefit you in getting more information while also making the opposite person criticize more honestly.

• Realize that negative feedbacks aren't personal - it defines your actions or products, not who you are as a person. Don't make them affect your personal daily life. Separate your work from your personal life.

• Ask for feedbacks regularly - this is how you can slowly learn and get used to it in daily life before facing something bigger at work. Just like exercising, you can't become muscular in just a day, but rather slowly everyday.

• Take time to control your emotions - when getting feedbacks take deep breaths and remain calm, stay cool. Don't make the words come straight into your mind, but slowly filter out the irrelevant stuff and receive only the actual feedback.

• Change point of view - put yourself in the shoes of your critic to see the situation from a different perspective. You may feel that your action is right, but in other's view it may not be that. Think as if you are that person, what will you really want.

• Determine if the feedback is constructive or destructive - keep the constructive in mind to improve, but if it's destructive and irrelevant to your work, just forget it. If you carry the destructive words, it will definitely affect your work. Take the constructive feedback, try to understand them, find solutions, then apply them to your work for improvement.

    These are just some basic, short and easy ways to deal with negative feedbacks, but very effective for everyone's use. I hope that you have learned something new today that will benefit you forever starting after the very second you finish reading my blog. 😅 If this isn't enough for you, there are plenty more ways to cope with it out there.

Go and explore! Good luck. 👍