Before we dive in today, I have to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who has been leaving ratings and reviews recently on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Here’s something you might not know: each review we receive translates to about 1,000 new listeners. It takes less than two minutes to leave one, and it’s truly one of the most important things you can do to help us grow this show and reach more professionals who need exactly what we’re talking about here.

I want to read you one that came in recently that just made my day. Movielover385073 said: “Melody is such a delight and I love the guests she brings on. This is a must listen for anyone who wants to build their confidence at work.”

Thank you so much for taking the time to write that. It really does mean the world to me and my team. Your reviews also help us bring more great guests on the show.

And speaking of confidence at work — that brings us to our topic for today, which is how to take criticism at work WITHOUT taking it personally.

Because let’s be honest: even the most confident professionals I work with — people running big teams, leading billion dollar initiatives, people who seem to have it all figured out — they still tell me that criticism at work can completely derail them.

You know what I’m talking about. You’re in a meeting, presenting something you’ve worked on for weeks. You feel good about it. Prepared. Then someone says, “I think this approach is missing the mark,” or “This doesn’t feel strategic enough,” and suddenly your heart is racing. Your face is hot.

You’re not just hearing feedback about your work — you’re hearing a judgment about your competence, your worth, maybe even your right to be in that room. But there’s something else happening too: you’re furious. You put countless hours into this. You did your research. You followed the brief they gave you. And NOW they’re telling you it’s off? Why weren’t they clearer about what they wanted upfront? Why are they sharing this feedback NOW, in front of everyone, instead of giving you a heads up beforehand?

But here you are, sitting in a room full of people — including someone with way more power than you — and you have to respond diplomatically. You want to be professional. You want to show you can take feedback well. So you smile and nod and say “Great point, let me think about that,” when inside you’re thinking Are you kidding me right now?

Or maybe it’s more subtle. Your boss sends back a document with tracked changes and comments, and instead of seeing it as a normal part of the process, you’re spiraling. What did I miss? How did I get this so wrong? Don’t they realize I know what I’m doing – why are they micromanaging me like this?  

The irony is, your relationship with feedback and criticism often gets more complicated the higher you go in your career. We often think having more status will make us immune from other people’s input. That we will magically reach this level where it bounces off of us like Teflon. But you have probably seen firsthand how criticism only becomes MORE intense.

Because when you’re senior, you have more stakeholders to answer to. You’re not just getting feedback from your direct boss anymore — you’re hearing from the C-suite, board members, cross-functional partners, your own team members who all have opinions about your decisions. The things you’re working on are more visible, which means more people want to give input and put their stamp on it.

Plus, the feedback itself gets more vague. When you’re junior, criticism is usually pretty concrete and straightforward: “This analysis needs more data” or “The timeline is too aggressive.” But as you climb, you start hearing things like “Your communication style felt a bit defensive in that meeting” or “I need you to be more executive-ready” or “You don’t seem confident in your recommendation.”

Suddenly you’re getting feedback about your presence, your personality, your leadership style — things that feel core to who you are, not just what you produced. Someone tells you that you “came across as too detailed” in a presentation, and you’re left wondering: Do they want me to change my entire approach? Are they saying I’m not strategic enough? Should I completely overhaul how I communicate?

And because these conversations are happening with people who have significant influence over your career — people who make decisions about your promotions, your budget, your team’s future — the stakes feel SO high. You can’t just dismiss their feedback, even when it’s unclear or feels unfair. You have to figure out how to process it, respond to it, and potentially act on it without losing your mind in the process.

This is what I mean when I say that taking criticism personally can completely derail you at work. And it’s not just about feeling bad for a few hours. When you take criticism as a personal attack, it changes everything about how you operate going forward.

You start second-guessing yourself before you even speak up in meetings. You become overly cautious with your recommendations. You stop sharing bold ideas because you’re trying to avoid that awful feeling again.

But here’s the other problem: when you get defensive or shut down, people notice. They start to see you as someone who can’t handle feedback well. Someone who gets resistant when challenged. And guess what happens next? They stop giving you feedback altogether.

This sounds great in theory right? No more uncomfortable conversations! But actually, this is a terrible place to be. You WANT to know what people are thinking about you, your work, your team. That feedback — even when it’s wrong, even when it’s unfair — is your political intelligence. It tells you where you stand, what battles you need to fight, what perceptions you need to manage. When people stop being direct with you, you lose that barometer. You’re flying blind, which is not good.

So yes, the more visible you become, the more opinions you’re going to hear. Some will be helpful. Some will be poorly delivered. Some will be biased. Some will have more to do with the person giving it than with you or your work. You’ll want to argue. You’ll want to get upset and throw a tantrum (I know I do sometimes). But you STILL need to respond diplomatically. How to process it WITHOUT it totally destabilizing you.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to tackle today. Some ideas to take criticism that doesn’t involve pretending it doesn’t sting or developing some superhuman level of zen.

Will you suddenly become someone who gets excited about criticism? Probably not. You’re probably never going to love being told your work needs improvement. But you can start getting better at not letting it completely throw you off. At staying a little more strategic and a little less reactive.And you can definitely start giving other people less power over how you feel about yourself.

Let’s start with an important reframe: feedback is engagement.

Now, I want to be really careful here because I know you might be rolling your eyes and thinking, “Melody, my boss just tore apart my presentation in front of the entire leadership team. That didn’t feel like engagement — that felt like a public humilitation.”

I get it. And I’m not asking you to be grateful for poorly delivered criticism or to pretend that all feedback is given with pure intentions. What I’m asking you to do is zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

Because, the majority of the time, when someone takes the time to give you substantive feedback — especially someone senior — it means you’re on their radar. You’re worth their mental energy. You’re important enough for them to invest effort in trying to make you better.

Think about it this way: who doesn’t get feedback? The people who are invisible. The people whose work doesn’t matter enough to comment on. The people who are just… there. When someone bothers to tell you what’s not working, it’s because they believe it can work. They see something worth developing.

But here’s where this gets more nuanced, and this is important: not all feedback is created equal, and not all communication styles deliver it the same way.

In my book Managing Up, I have an entire chapter called The Styles Conversation. I talk about how there’s two dimensions to communication styles. Dominance and sociability. DOminance being how much control they like to have and how quickly they like to move and sociability being how much they prioritize relationships and connection. The two styles that are lower on sociability are what I call The Commander and The Controller — and they are particularly relevant here. These are people who more naturally pressure-test ideas. They poke holes not because they want to tear you down, but because that’s how they stress-test concepts. It’s how they think. It’s how they interact.

If you’re working with a Commander, they might say something like, “This strategy is completely off-base. You’re not taking into account the market at all” That’s not an attack on your intelligence — that’s their way of pushing you to think more deeply. They’re engaging with your ideas by challenging them.

Controllers tend to be more systematic in their criticism. They might say, “I see seven problems with this approach,” and then methodically list every potential issue. Again, this isn’t personal. This is their way of ensuring excellence. They engage through analysis and critique.

The problem is, if you don’t know these communication styles exist or know how to work with them– you take their approach personally. You think the Commander is attacking you when they might just be engaging with your ideas in their natural style. You think the Controller is nitpicking because they don’t trust you when they might simply be processing information the way they always do.

I’m not saying their intentions are always pure or helpful. A Commander might be challenging your ideas because that’s how they think, or they might be doing it because they want to assert dominance. A Controller might be systematically critiquing your work because they genuinely want to improve it, or because they’re threatened by your success.

The point isn’t to assume the best intentions — it’s to recognize that their communication style gives you information either way. Whether they’re challenging you to help you grow or challenging you to undermine you, understanding their pattern helps you respond more strategically instead of just reacting emotionally.

When you understand that this is how these people communicate it helps you separate the content from the delivery. You can focus on what they’re actually trying to tell you instead of getting derailed by HOW they’re saying it.

That brings me to tip number #2. Feedback is data.

And I mean that in the most practical, straightforward way possible.

When someone gives you feedback — whether it’s helpful, harsh, or completely wrong — they’re telling you something. Not just about your work, but about them, about what matters in your workplace, and about how things really work around there.

Let’s say you present a strategy to your leadership team and three different people give you three completely different responses. One person says it’s too risky. Another says it’s not bold enough. The third person wants more numbers to back it up.

If you’re taking this personally, you’re thinking: Great, I can’t do anything right. Everyone hates this. Or what is wrong with everyone – no one can give a straight answer here.

But if you’re treating this as information, you’re thinking: Interesting. These people don’t agree with each other about what we should be doing. Some want to play it safe, some want big moves, some want proof. Good to know 

See the difference? Same feedback, completely different takeaway.

Here’s another example: you have a boss who seems to criticize everything you do. On the surface, this feels awful and personal. But if you step back and look for patterns, you might notice: What kind of work do they actually praise? What sets them off? When do they seem most critical?

I had a client whose manager constantly told her she was “too detailed” in presentations. She was taking this as an attack on her analytical skills. But when we looked at when this happened, we realized it was always right before he had to present to his own boss — someone who hated getting bogged down in details. His criticism wasn’t really about her work. It was about his own stress around looking good to senior leadership.

Once she figured this out, she started leading with the big picture and putting the detailed analysis at the end. The criticism stopped. Not because she became less thorough, but because she learned to read what was really going on.

This is what I mean by treating feedback as information. You’re not just hearing what people say about your work — you’re learning how your workplace actually operates.

Sometimes you learn about preferences – we were talking about this a moment ago when it comes to communication styles. Sometimes you learn about politics. Multiple people tell you to be “more collaborative” on the same project? That tells you something about how relationships work at your company. Someone reacts way too strongly to your proposal? There might be budget fights or personal conflicts you don’t know about.

And sometimes — you learn about people’s hang-ups. A colleague who always shoots down your ideas? They might see you as competition. A boss who constantly asks you to “socialize” ideas before presenting them might be conflict-averse and wants you to do the hard conversations for them.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore feedback or assume everyone has bad intentions. But you can learn things beyond just “what should I fix?”

Here’s how to practice this: when you get feedback that bothers you, step back and ask:

• What does this tell me about what this person cares about?
• What pressures might they be under?
• What does this tell me about how decisions get made here?
• What might they be worried about that they’re not saying directly?
• What would have to be true for this feedback to make sense from their perspective?

When you do this, you can extract value from the feedback without taking it as a personal indictment.

Let me unpack that last question: “What would have to be true for this feedback to make sense from their perspective?”

This is about putting yourself in their shoes and trying to understand their reality, even when their feedback feels unfair or wrong.

Let’s say your boss tells you that your quarterly report “lacks strategic thinking” when you know you spent weeks analyzing market trends and competitive positioning. Instead of getting defensive, you ask: What would have to be true for them to see it this way?

Maybe they’re under pressure from their own boss to show more forward-looking vision. Maybe they define “strategic” differently than you do — perhaps they want future scenarios, not just current analysis. Maybe they’re worried about looking tactical to senior leadership and need you to help them seem more visionary.

Or let’s say a peer criticizes your project timeline as “unrealistic” when you’ve built in plenty of buffer time. What would have to be true for this to make sense to them? Maybe they’ve been burned by missed deadlines before. Maybe their team is already overloaded and they’re panicking about taking on more work. Maybe they know about budget cuts or resource constraints that you don’t.

This question forces you to get curious instead of defensive. It helps you understand that their feedback might be perfectly logical from where they sit, even if it doesn’t match your experience. And that understanding gives you options for how to respond that go beyond just feeling attacked or dismissed.

Sometimes you’ll discover that their perspective makes perfect sense given information you didn’t have. Sometimes you’ll realize their feedback says more about their fears or constraints than about your actual work.

Either way, you get valuable insight about how you need to show up or improvement you need to make. But this is where tip #3 comes in. It’s counterintuitive but absolutely crucial: you don’t have to act on every piece of criticism you receive. In fact, you shouldn’t.

There’s a saying — once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern. This means you should triangulate what you hear. Take action when you hear something three times or from three different sources.

I know this might sound risky, especially if you’re someone who’s been conditioned to be responsive and accommodating. But here’s what happens when you try to act on every single piece of feedback: you end up in constantly reactively. You lose your confidence and sense of self because you’re just trying to appease everyone and showing up however they want you to, instead of how you actually are.

Let me paint you a picture. Michael gets feedback from his boss that he needs to “speak up more” in leadership meetings. So he starts contributing more, sharing his thoughts. Then his peer tells him he’s “dominating the conversation” and should give others space. So he pulls back. Then a stakeholder mentions he seems “disengaged” during strategy discussions. So he tries to jump back in. Within a month, Michael has just been bouncing between different people’s contradictory expectations, exhausted and confused.

This is why triangulation matters. Instead of immediately adjusting your behavior based on one person’s input, you wait to see if this is an isolated opinion or part of a broader pattern.

Let’s say someone tells you that your emails are “too long” and you need to be more concise. Before you completely change your communication style, you pause. You pay attention to whether other people give you similar feedback. You notice whether this seems to be a consistent theme or just one person’s preference for bullet points.

If three different people in three different contexts tell you the same thing, that’s a pattern worth addressing. But if it’s just one person’s feedback? That might be more about their reading style, their time constraints, or their particular communication preferences than about a fundamental problem with how you write.

The triangulation rule also protects you from feedback that’s more about politics than performance. Sometimes people give you feedback not because it will help you improve, but because it serves their agenda. Maybe they want you to tone down your expertise so they can position themselves as the subject matter expert. Maybe they’re trying to mold you into their image of what someone in your role should look like. Maybe they’re just projecting their own insecurities onto your work.

When you triangulate, you can separate the signal from the noise.

Now, of course, context matters here. If the CEO tells you that your team needs to move faster on product launches, you’re probably going to find ways to accelerate your timeline — even if you think the current pace is appropriate — because their opinion carries serious weight. If your direct boss keeps mentioning that you should loop in the legal team earlier on contracts, you’ll likely adjust your process with them specifically, even if other managers prefer to involve legal later.

Alright so far we’ve talked about reframing feedback as engagement, seeing it as data, and not acting on every piece of input you get.

So what do you do when you’re put on the spot? When someone gives you feedback that hits hard and you can feel your face getting hot, your heart racing, and your brain scrambling for the “right” response instead of just saying screw you!

Put space between receiveing the criticism and responding to it. You can rehearse responses like: “I want to digest what you’ve said and get back to you.” Or, “I’m surprised to hear that. I’d like some time to think through what you’ve shared.”

This is one of the most powerful things you can do to stop taking criticism personally.

When you’re caught off guard by criticism, your brain goes into threat mode. Your body floods with stress hormones that make it nearly impossible to think clearly. And those fight or flight instincts usually push you toward one of two extremes: either you get defensive and start explaining why the feedback is wrong, or you immediately agree and start apologizing for everything you might have done incorrectly. Neither serves you well.

But when you create space to process, you give yourself the chance to shift out of emotional reaction and into a more grounded state.

Let me give you an example. I had a client, Jeanine, who was in a leadership meeting when her VP said, “Your team seems to be struggling with the new process rollout. I’m hearing complaints from other departments about missed deadlines and confusion about next steps.”

Jeanine’s immediate instinct was to jump in and explain all the reasons why the rollout was challenging — the technical difficulties, the resource constraints, the competing priorities. She wanted to defend his team and justify why things weren’t going smoothly.

Instead, she took a breath and said, “I hear your concerns and I’d like to mull this over. Can I get back to you tomorrow with a plan for how we can address this?”

That pause gave her time to do several things. First, she could process his emotional reaction. She was frustrated because he felt like his team was being unfairly criticized when they were working with limited resources. But she also recognized that the VP wasn’t necessarily attacking them — she was flagging a problem that needed solving. She had space to gain that perspective

Second, she could gather more information. She talked to her team and looked at the data to see where the real bottlenecks were.

Third, she could craft a response that addressed the actual issue rather than just digging her heels in. When he went back to the VP the next day, she was able to say, “Here’s what we’re going to do differently, and here’s the timeline for implementation.”

The other benefit of the pause is that it changes the dynamic of the conversation. When you immediately defend or apologize, you’re essentially handing control to the other person. You’re letting their feedback dictate your emotional state and your response.

But when you say, “Let me think about that and get back to you,” you’re maintaining your agency. You’re signaling that you take feedback seriously enough to consider it thoughtfully, but you’re not going to be pushed into a reactive response.

This actually tends to increase people’s respect for you, not decrease it. Most people recognize that thoughtful responses are more valuable than immediate ones.

So practice those scripts: “I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. Let me reflect on what you’ve shared.” “That’s helpful feedback. I’d like to think through how to best address this.” “I want to make sure I fully understand your concerns. Can we revisit this tomorrow?”

Give yourself the gift of time.

And my final tip for you today is: go on offense. Actively seek out criticism instead of waiting for it to find you. I know that might sound masochistic. If it’s already hard to handle, why would you ask for more of it?  Because instead of criticism being something that happens to you — something you have to defend against or absorb — it becomes something you’re controlling and directing.

Think about the difference between these two scenarios: In the first, you’re caught off guard when your boss mentions in passing that the leadership team has “concerns about the direction you’re taking the product roadmap.” Your mind immediately starts racing. What concerns? How long have they been talking about this? What does this mean for your role?

In the second scenario, you proactively schedule time with key stakeholders and ask, “As we finalize next year’s roadmap, what are you most worried about? What opportunities do you think we might be missing?” You might hear the exact same concerns, but the emotional impact is completely different. You’re psychologically prepared to receive it. You’re in a learning mindset rather than a defensive one. You’re the one driving the conversation rather than having it thrust on you.

The criticism you get when you ask for it is usually more useful than the kind you get when people are just frustrated. They’re more likely to be specific and helpful rather than just exploding at you.

The key is making feedback-seeking a regular part of how you operate, not something you only do when you’re worried about your performance. Build it into your natural workflow and interactions.

At the end of big projects, schedule debrief sessions where you specifically ask what could have gone better. Include questions like “If we did this again, what would you change?” or “What surprised you about how this unfolded?” Make it clear you want honest input, not just praise for what went well.

During one-on-ones with your boss, don’t just give updates — ask for perspective. Try questions like “What should I be prioritizing that I’m not?” or “Where do you see me getting in my own way?” or “What would make the biggest difference in how I’m showing up?”

After presentations or important meetings, follow up with a few key attendees. Instead of asking “How did that go?” — which usually gets you polite responses — try “What questions did that leave you with?” or “What would have made that more useful for you?”

Look, you don’t have to like getting criticism. No one does. I know I certainly don’t. Even after years of coaching people through this exact challenge, my stomach still drops when someone tells me my work isn’t landing the way I hoped. The goal isn’t to become someone who gets excited about feedback — that’s not realistic for most of us. The goal is to become someone who can handle it without it completely throwing you off course.

But here’s something I haven’t mentioned yet that might be the most important piece of all: the people who give you the harshest criticism often become your biggest advocates once they see you can handle it well. I’ve watched this happen countless times. The executive who tears apart your strategy in a meeting? If you respond thoughtfully, ask clarifying questions, and come back with a stronger approach, they often become the person singing your praises to senior leadership. People respect professionals who can take a hit and come back swinging. They start to see you as someone who can handle the big leagues, someone they can trust with difficult conversations and challenging work. The very people whose criticism stings the most today might be the ones opening doors for you tomorrow.

That’s all for today. I’ll catch you on the next episode!