Only 'that voice' is real...

Vanita was being always criticised by her seniors at work. One of them was harsh and one of them was too soft in giving feedback. She never had an issue with accepting feedback but she could not handle the harsh criticism. She always used to feel bad and used to get discouraged but slowly and gradually she she tried to improve her performance and started getting positive comments. She started feeling good. But the story doesn't stop here rather it starts from here. She learned one more thing from these experiences. She gained insight that human mind is so influenced by external environment that it can easily get encouraged or discouraged by mere comments of people. If its getting encouraged, its good but what if its getting discouraged with every critical comment?  Its totally bad and unhealthy. So why to get influenced by external factors. Isn't it a valuable insight gained by Vanita?

Has it ever happened with you? You might have come across people who discourage you, blame you, disappoint you, envy you, get harsh with you knowingly or unknowingly, directly or indirectly, with good intention or bad intention. We feel bad at such times. Its natural but its more required that we shouldn't feel bad about it and should bounce back.

Handling such harsh people and their harsh comments is one of the important tasks one should learn in own life. Every critical comment should make us stronger and stronger, better and better and more important cooler and cooler. These critical comments should be treated as learning lessons. They teach so many things. One, they teach that how they can hurt one and why and how we should avoid using them. Second, they teach us how to get stronger and become better version of us. So many more things like these, we can learn. I believe, one should always answer the criticism with positive and constructive action and not by hollow and shallow words fueled by momentary anger and resentment.

Second aspect which I want to highlight here is comments given by people are just momentary or could be relatively long lasting but they should be treated with no attachment. People will always have two mouths. If you do as they expect you will be rated good and if you don't meet their expectations, you will be rated bad. And the interesting point here is expectations made by people are never intrinsically good or bad. E.g. Boss A wants a work done in X way but boss B may want the same work done in Y way. And sometimes both the ways have equal pragmatic value and thus we cant judge which one is superior. So consequently, we cant claim that employee following X way is better than one who is following Y way or vice a versa.

So never feel bad if someone is criticising you for adopting some different style of expression. We just need to take care of one thing that our style should have pragmatic and expression value. People's comments should be treated calmly and should be given only that much importance which they deserve, not more than that and not lesser than that.

In midst of all this chaos, only that voice should be listened to and followed which is there deep down within us.

Take care.

- Dipti S. A. Shinde