preview

Response To Criticism Essay

Satisfactory Essays

Take a deep breath in and let it out. It’s always nerve-racking to step out on stage under the hot lights with hundreds of people staring at you, but this time it was different. I felt like everyone sitting in that audience was criticizing every move that I made and every line I paused too long on. Knowing that all these criticisms were running through the minds of the people sitting in the audience, only made the mistakes I was making seem more prominent. The problem was that no one was actually criticizing me, and if they were, it wasn’t because they hated me, or hated what I was doing. It was simply because they noticed I made a mistake and were thinking about my mistake. Criticism is like a knife to my self-esteem. I have always had a …show more content…

When this happens, I find myself only focusing on the criticism and letting it overtake my thoughts. Criticism was like an ocean that I was drowning in. Instead of taking into account all of the praise and compliments I received, all I could think about was all of the negatives people had to say. Burns states, “Whenever you have a negative experience, you dwell on it and conclude, ‘That proves what I’ve known all along.’ In contrast, when you have a positive experience, you tell yourself, ‘That was a fluke. It doesn’t count.’” (35). That is what was happening in my mind every time I came across any type of situation in which people looked upon something I did either positively or negatively. There’s a lot of situations like that unfortunately. Eventually I became so depressed by my distortion that I stopped wanting to see anyone, because I didn’t want the possibility of criticism. When I assume that everyone is criticizing me, I am under the impression of the JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS distortion. The thought going through my mind are along the lines of no one thinks anything positive about anything I do or say, or I will never be good enough for anyone and that is why people criticize me. In the article “Opening the Closed Mind: Making Assumptions, Jumping to Conclusions” the author states, “Too many of us, however, jump to conclusions. We are too certain about what other people mean or do” (Berman). I believe

Get Access