4 Critical Steps You Must Take To Keep Criticism From Destroying Your Business

It has been said that if you and your business are not being criticized you must not be working hard enough

. This criticism comes in many forms and from all different directions. It can be healthy criticism from people who care about you and your success, to criticism from those who simply wish to slow you down and give you trouble.

With everything in life, you get to choose how you handle this criticism. Here is how I deal with it effectively.

Step One: Breathe Deep - Regain Perspective

Not only is it easy to feel attacked when you first receive criticism, it is human nature to become immediately defensive. Knowing this, it makes sense to take a deep breath and wait a few seconds before you respond.

Nothing is worse than clicking "send" on an email you should never have sent out to a customer or a business associate. I have done this countless times. I have written emails to customers that, after having read them a second time, could not believe some of things I said! Unfortunately I could not take them back since they were already sent.

The idea here is to give yourself time to regain your perspective on the situation. A simple deep breath, and waiting a few seconds before responding really helps. I even go so far as to have my wife come in and read my responses to upset customers and business partners before I send them.

By allowing a third party to enter into the situation I am able to get an objective viewpoint and save myself the frustration of coming off like an unprofessional mess!

Step Two: Take Time To Evaluate

Buy taking a deep breath and trying to regain perspective on the situation, you are setting yourself up for Step 2 in the process. No matter how critical the situation is you always have time to evaluate the situation and make sense of things BEFORE you respond or do what is necessary to fix a problem.

The key is to not allow criticism to get in the way of your goals for that day. It is far too easy to get involved with a situation that you feel needs your immediate response, only to lose sight of your own goals for that day. If you are in the middle of a project or task that is important to your business, you are going to want to work on setting aside the criticism until you are able to think about it and respond with your full mind. You don't want to let one email ruin your day.

If you try and respond immediately, more often than not, your response will be an emotional one. Whether the criticism has validity or not is not the point here. The point is that you are going to want to separate yourself from the situation and allow enough time to pass so that your emotional response can be separated from your logical response. This way you can see things much more clearly. No one's perfect and even if you're darn close, there's probably room for improvement.

Step Three: Pay Attention To Your Own Thoughts

We are emotional beings. Of that there is no doubt. We are also very good at allowing our emotions to guide our thoughts, then allowing our thoughts to run crazy! After receiving criticism of any kind, it is really easy to become overwhelmed with negative emotions. As I mentioned before, it only takes one email to ruin your day. We can get angry with those who criticize us or at those who misunderstand our efforts to help them. Over time, if we don't get control of these negative emotions they can kill our business and leave us feeling like we may never reach our dreams.

But there is good news. We have complete control over our thoughts. We just have to practice to maintain that control. The hardest part of this process is learning to become conscious of our thoughts first. We have to acknowledge we are starting to have these negative thoughts towards our customers, business partners and our business as a whole. Then and only then can we change them.

The obvious change is to recognize the negativity and turn it into a positive. That old saying, "turn that frown upside down" really works! You can decide here and now that your business is more important to you than anyone else and that someone else's thoughts and criticisms are not going to ruin your day.

Step Four: File It

Another way to help regain control of the situation and turn a negative into a positive is to put the criticism where it belongs.

If there's some validity to it, then you can use this as a teaching tool showing you where you can make your business stronger. If the criticism is totally off base, such as your competition blasting you in a forum because they can, defend yourself, but toss their responses in the garbage. You don't need it. Let it go.

If you're receiving criticism, it means you're taking action. And if you are taking action, it means your business is growing.

As you start to achieve success in business you will receive criticism, both positive and negative. On the negative side you will have to deal with the serial refunder, the customer who can never be pleased, lazy business partners who expect you to do all their work, and of course, people who are envious and jealous of your success, who have nothing better to do than try and tear you down and bring you to their level.

On the positive side you will find customers who may be upset, but who offer valid criticism of your sales process, checkout process, training materials and mentoring.

The trick is you need to be able to recognize the difference between the positive and negative. Use the positive criticism to make your business better, and change the negative to a positive, and then use that too!

And always remember this: You WILL receive criticism because you are doing something daring and different. You are taking a risk with your own business. It is a challenge that most do not accept nor take on. Most are content to simply work for someone else their whole life. You are a member of an elite group. Be proud of yourself and stick with it!

by: Adam Bauthues

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