Before we dive in today, I wanna take a moment to say thank you to every one of you who has been leaving ratings and reviews recently on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Here’s something you might not realize. Each review roughly translates into about a thousand new listeners. It takes less than two minutes to leave one.

It is truly one of the most important things, one of the most helpful things you can do to help us grow this show and reach more professionals like you who need exactly what we talk about here. I wanna quickly read one review that came in recently that just absolutely made my day.

Movie Lover said, melody is such a delight. Thank you. And I love the guest she brings on. This is a must listen for anyone who wants to build their confidence at work. So thank you so much, Movie Lover, for taking the time to write that it. Truly does mean the world to me and my team. We put so much time and effort into producing this show, bringing it to you, so your reviews mean a lot to us, and it also helps us bring more great guests on this show. Now, in that review, Movie Lover said this is a must listen for anyone who wants to build their confidence at work.

And speaking of that, 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 people I have worked with, those who are running big teams, they’re leading billion dollar projects, the people who seem to have it all figured out, they still tell me that getting criticism at work can completely derail them.

You probably know what I’m talking about. You’re in a meeting, presenting something you worked on, you feel good about it, you’re prepared, and then someone says, well, 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 are 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 probably furious. You have put countless hours into this. You did your research. You followed the brief they gave you, and now people are telling you it’s off.

Why weren’t they clear about what they wanted upfront? Why are they just sharing this input now in front of everyone instead of giving you a heads up beforehand? But here you are, you are sitting in a room full of people, including some with way more power than you, and you have to respond diplomatically.

You want to be professional, you want to show, you can take the feedback well, so you smile and nod and say, yeah, great point. Let me think about that. When inside you’re boiling and you’re thinking, are you kidding me right now?

Maybe it’s more subtle though. Maybe your boss sends a document back to you with track changes and comments, and instead of seeing that as a normal part of the process, you spiral. You think, 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 of all of this is that your relationship with feedback and criticism, it often gets more complicated the higher you go in your career. We often think that having more status, that that is going to make us immune from other people’s input, that we will magically reach this level where we have enough experience that things are just going to bounce off of us like Teflon.

But you have probably experienced firsthand, criticism only becomes more intense. Because when you move into the middle layers of an organization or even the upper or senior levels, you now have more stakeholders to answer to. You’re not just getting feedback from your one direct boss anymore. You’re hearing it from the C-suite, your clients, your customers, your board members, your cross-functional partners, your own team members who all have opinions about how you do things. The things you’re working on are inherently more visible. Which means more people want to give you input and they want to put their stamp on it. The feedback also tends to get more vague.

When you’re junior, criticism is usually pretty concrete. It’s pretty straightforward. But as you climb, you start hearing things like, your communication style, you, you felt a bit defensive in that meeting. Or I need to see you be more executive ready. You don’t seem to be confident in your recommendations.

It seems like all of a sudden 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 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 often happen with people that have significant influence on your career, people who make decisions about your promotions, your team budgets, your team’s future, the stakes feel high.

You can’t just dismiss it, even when it feels unclear or 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. 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 to second guess yourself before you even speak up in meetings, you become overly cautious about your recommendations. You stop sharing bold ideas because you’re trying to avoid feeling awful again.

And then the other problem is when you get defensive or shut down, people notice that they start to see you as someone who can’t handle feedback well. Who gets resistant when they are challenged.

Then guess what happens? They stop giving you feedback altogether. That may sound 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. You want to know what they think about your work, your team. That feedback, again, even when it’s wrong, even when it feels unfair, that is political intelligence. It tells you a lot about 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 are flying blind, which is not good. 

So yes, the more visible you become, the more opinions you are going to hear. That is just a fact. Some will be helpful, some will be poorly delivered, some will be biased. Some will have much more to do with the person giving you the criticism than it has to do with you or your work. You will want to argue. You will want to get upset and throw a tantrum because I know I do sometimes. But you still need to respond diplomatically. You still need to process it without it totally destabilizing you. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today.

I’m going to give you some ideas to take criticism that doesn’t involve pretending it doesn’t sting or developing some superhuman level of zen.

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

So let’s start with an important reframe. Feedback is engagement.

Now I wanna be 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 did not feel like engagement, that felt like humiliation. And I get it. And I’m not asking you to be grateful for poorly delivered criticism or to pretend that every piece of feedback you get is given with pure intentions.

But what I am asking you to do is just try to zoom out and look at the bigger picture, because the majority of the time, when someone takes the effort to give you substantive feedback, especially when it’s someone senior, it means you are on their radar. You are worth their mental energy. You are important enough for them to invest effort into trying to make better.

So think about it this way, who doesn’t get feedback? The people who are invisible, the people whose work isn’t substantive enough for someone 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 has potential. There’s something there worth developing.

This is where this gets a little more nuanced though, and this is very important. Not all feedback is created equal. Not all communication styles deliver it the same way.

In my new book Managing Up, I have an entire chapter that’s called The Styles Conversation, and I talk about how there are two dimensions to our communication styles.

We have dominance and sociability. Dominance is how much someone likes to control a situation, how quickly they like to move, and sociability is how much they prioritize relationships and connection.

There are two styles that are lower on sociability, and in my framework, I call those the commander and the controller. And those two are particularly relevant here. The commander and the controller are people who more naturally pressure test ideas. They poke holes, not because they are wanting to tear you down, but because that’s how they stress test concepts.

It’s how they think, it’s how they interact. So if you’re working with a commander, they may say something like, this strategy is completely off base. You’re not taking into account the market at all. That’s not necessarily an attack on your intelligence. That’s their way of pushing you to think more deeply. They’re engaging with you and your ideas by challenging them.

Controllers, they tend to be a bit more systematic in their criticism. They might say, I see three problems with this approach. And then they methodically list out every potential risk and issue. Again, this isn’t necessarily a personal attack.

It is their way of ensuring excellence because they care a lot about that. They engage through deep analysis.

The problem is if you don’t know these styles exist or you don’t know how to work with them, that’s when you start taking their approach personally. You think the commander is attacking you when they may just be engaging in their natural style. You think the controller is nitpicking because they don’t trust you when they’re simply processing the information in the way that they always do.

Again, I’m not saying that their intentions are always pure, and helpful. A commander might be challenging your ideas because that is 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 it to improve, or they may be doing it because they’re threatened by your success.

The point here is not to assume best intentions. It’s to recognize that someone’s communication style gives you information either way, whether they are challenging you to help you grow, or they are 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 content from the delivery. That way, when you do that, separating content from the delivery, that’s when you can focus on what they’re actually trying to tell you instead of getting derailed by how they are saying it.

All of this brings me to tip number two. Feedback is data. And I mean that in the most practical, straightforward way possible. When someone gives you feedback, whether it is helpful, harsh, or it is completely wrong, they are telling you something, not just about your work, but about them, about what matters in your workplace, about how things are really done around here.

So 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 says they want more data to back it up. If you are taking this personally, then you’re thinking, great, I can’t do anything.

Right? Everyone hates this. Or maybe something like, what is wrong with everybody here? No one can give me a straight answer on what they want us to do next.

But if you’re treating this as information instead, you’re thinking. Oh, interesting. These people don’t agree with each other and about what we should be doing. So some of the people wanna play it safe. Some want bigger moves, some people want more proof. That is good to know.

Do you see the difference? It’s the same feedback, but completely different takeaways.

Or, here’s another example. You have a boss who seems to criticize everything you do. On the surface, this feels awful, right? It feels like an attack on you, but if you step back and you look for patterns, you might notice what kind of work do they actually praise? What sets them off? What do they tend to harp on more? When do they seem most critical?

I once had a client whose manager constantly told her she was too detailed in her presentations in how she shared information. And so, naturally 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 her boss had to present to their boss, someone who hated getting bogged down in the details. So the criticism wasn’t really about her work, it was about her boss’s stress, looking good to his own leadership. And once she figured this out, she started leading with the big picture. She started putting the detailed analysis at the end, and the criticism almost stopped. Not because she became less thorough, but because she learned to decipher what was really going on there. And that’s 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 someone’s preferences. Like a moment ago we were talking about this, when it comes to communication styles. Sometimes you learn about politics. If multiple people tell you to be more collaborative on the same project, that tells you about the expectations about how things should be done at the company.

If someone reacts super strongly to your proposal, there might be a budget fight or a personal conflict you didn’t know about, and you just happen to step on that landmine. And sometimes you learn about people’s hangups and insecurities. A colleague who always shoots down your idea, they may see you as competition.

A boss who constantly asks you to socialize your ideas before presenting them, they might be conflict averse, and they want you to do the hard conversations for them.

That doesn’t mean you should ignore feedback, or you should assume that everyone has bad intentions, but you can learn things beyond what should I fix here?

Right, go a layer deeper, and here’s how to practice this.

When you get feedback or criticism that bothers you, step back and ask a few of these questions. What does this tell me about what the 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 are not saying directly? What would have to be true for this feedback to make sense from their perspective?

So when you do this, when you ask some of these questions, you can extract value from the criticism without taking it as in a personal indictment.

I wanna unpack that last question though. What would have to be true for this feedback to make sense from the other person’s perspective? So this is about putting yourself in their shoes, trying to understand their reality. So let’s say again, let’s take a manager example, and your leader tells you your quarterly report, it doesn’t have strategic thinking when you know you spent weeks looking at market trends, competitive positioning, trying to bake that all in.

So instead of getting defensive, you might ask what would have to be true for them to see it that way? Maybe they’re under pressure from their own leader to show more forward-looking vision. Maybe they define strategic differently than you do. Maybe they want future scenarios, not just a look at the current state of things. Maybe they’re worried about looking tactical up their own chain of command.

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

So this question, it forces you to get curious instead of defensive. It helps you understand that their feedback may be perfectly logical from where they sit, even if it doesn’t match your experience.

And that understanding, it gives you options for how to respond that just go beyond feeling attacked or dismissed. Sometimes you’ll discover that their perspective makes perfect sense given the information that you didn’t have.

Okay, tip number three. It is 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 this chance twice as coincidence. Three times is a pattern. That means you should triangulate what you hear. Take action when you hear something three times from three different sources.

I know that might sound risky, especially if you are someone who has been conditioned to be responsive and accommodating. But when you try to act on every single piece of feedback, you are constantly just bouncing all over the place. You lose your sense of self because you’re just trying to appease everyone and show up however they want you to instead of how you actually are.

So let me paint a picture for you. Let’s say Michael gets feedback from his manager that he needs to speak up more in leadership meetings. So he starts contributing more and sharing more of his thoughts. Then a peer tells him he’s dominating the conversation and he should give other space. So he pulls back.

Then a different stakeholder mentions. He seems disengaged during strategy discussions, so he tries to jump back in. And within a couple of weeks, Michael has just been bouncing between people’s different contradictory expectations, which only leaves him exhausted and confused.

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

Maybe someone has said, your emails are too long and you need to be more concise. Before you go and completely change your communication style, pause, pay attention to whether other people are giving you similar feedback.

Maybe you notice that there seems to be a consistent theme, or can you differentiate, maybe it is just this one person’s preference. If three different people in three different contexts tell you the same thing, that’s a pattern worth addressing. If it’s one person’s feedback, that might mean more about their particular style, their time constraints, their preferences, more than it being a fundamental problem with how you communicate.

So this triangulation rule, it also protects you from feedback that tends to be 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 that they can position themselves as the expert on a certain project.

Maybe they’re trying to mold you into their image of what someone in your role should look like, at least their impression of that. Or maybe they’re just projecting their own insecurities onto your work. But when you triangulate, you can separate the signal from the noise.

Now, of course, context matters here. If the CEO of your organization tells you that your team needs to move faster on product launches, you’re probably going to find ways to do that, even if you think the current pace is appropriate, you do that because the CEO’s opinion carries serious weight.

If your direct boss keeps mentioning that you should loop in the legal team earlier on contracts. You’ll probably adjust your process with them specifically, even if other managers prefer to involve legal later because your manager holds so much sway over your trajectory.

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 though? When you are put on the spot, when someone gives you criticism that hits hard and you can feel your face getting hot, your heart is racing, your brain is scrambling for the right response. Instead of just saying, you know what, screw you. Well, here’s the first thing you’re going to do.

You’re going to put space between receiving the criticism and responding to it. So you can rehearse responses here, things like, I wanna digest what you said and be able to get back to you. Or, I’m surprised to hear that. I’d like some time to think through what you just shared. This is one of the most powerful things you can do to stop taking criticism personally.

When you are cut 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, they push you usually in one of two extremes. Either you get defensive, you start explaining why the feedback is wrong. Or you immediately agree, you start apologizing for everything you might have done incorrectly. Neither of those reactions serves you. When you give yourself space to process, though, you give yourself the chance to shift out of that emotional reaction and into a more grounded state.

So, let me give you an example. I had a client, we’ll call her Janine. She was in a leadership meeting when her VP said, your team, you seem to be struggling with this new process that we’re rolling out, and I’m hearing all these complaints from other departments about how you’re missing deadlines, how there’s confusion about the next step. So Janine’s immediate instinct was to jump in to explain all of the reasons why the rollout was a challenge. There were technical difficulties, they had budget constraints, there were other competing priorities. She wanted to defend her team. She wanted to justify why things weren’t going smoothly. Instead, she took a breath and she said, you know, I hear your concerns and I’d like some time to mull this over, so can I get back to you tomorrow with a plan for how we can address some of this? That pause gave her time to do a few different things.

So first of all, she could process her emotional reaction. She was frustrated because she felt like her team was being unfairly criticized and they were working with a lot of limits. But she also recognized that the VP wasn’t necessarily attacking her or her team. She was just doing her job. She was flagging a problem that needed to be solved. So that space gave her the opportunity to gain that perspective.

Second, it allowed Janine to gather more information. She was able to talk to her team to look at the data, to see where were the real bottlenecks.

Third, it gave her time to craft a response that addressed the actual issue rather than just digging her heels in and getting defensive.

So when she went back to that VP the next day, she was able to say, here’s what we found. Here’s what we’re going to do differently, and here’s the timeline for implementation.

Now the other benefit of a pause is that it changes the dynamic of the conversation. When you immediately defend or apologize, you’re essentially handing control over to the other person. You are 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 are maintaining your agency. You are signaling that you take the feedback seriously enough to consider it thoughtfully, but you are not going to be pushed into just a knee jerk response. That actually tends to increase people’s respect for you, not decrease it. Most people recognize that that thoughtful, informed response is much more valuable than just a immediate one.

So practice those scripts.

I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. Let me reflect on what you shared.

That’s helpful feedback. I’d like to think through how we best address that.

Or I wanna make sure I fully understand your concerns. Could we revisit this at the end of the week?

Give yourself that gift of time.

My final tip for you today is go on offense. Actively seek out criticism instead of waiting for it to find you. And I know that might sound a little masochistic maybe, because if it’s already hard to handle, why would I want to seek out more criticism? Because instead of it being something that happens to you, something you have to defend against, you have to just absorb and roll over and take, it becomes something you are controlling or directing.

So think about the difference between these two scenarios. In the first, you’re caught off guard when someone mentions in passing that, leadership has concerns about the direction you’re taking. Your mind starts racing. ‘Cause you’re like, well, well, what concerns, how long have they been talking about this? What does this mean for my role?

But in a second scenario, let’s say you proactively schedule time with some of your stakeholders and you come out and ask them, as we are finalizing the roadmap for the rest of the year, what would you like to see on there? What are you most worried about? You might hear the same exact concerns, but the emotional impact is totally different.

You are psychologically prepared to receive it. In that second scenario, you are in a learning mindset. You are the one driving the conversation rather than having it thrust on you.

The other thing is the criticism you get, when you ask for it, is usually more useful than the kind you get when people are just frustrated. They are much more likely to be specific and helpful rather than just venting or exploding at you.

The key is making feedback, seeking a regular part of how you operate, not something you only do when you are worried about your performance.

So find ways to build it into your natural workflow and your interactions.

So let’s say at the end of big projects, you might have a debrief session where you specifically are asking what could have gone better. You might have questions like, if we did this again, what would we change? Or what surprised you about how this unfolded?

So make it clear, you want honest input. You don’t just want praise for what went well. During one-on-ones with your manager, don’t just give updates, ask for their perspective. You can say, what should I be prioritizing that I’m not? Where do you see me getting in my own way? What would make the biggest difference in your opinion about how I’m showing up?

After presentations or important meetings, follow up with a few key attendees, and instead of just a vague question like, well, how do you think that went? It usually gets you a polite, high level of response. Ask something more specific, like what questions did that leave you with? What would’ve made that more useful to 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 that my work didn’t land with them in the way I intended.

So the goal here isn’t to become someone who gets excited about feedback. That’s not realistic for almost all of us. The goal is to become someone who can handle it without it completely throwing you off course.

Here’s something I haven’t mentioned yet. That may be the most important piece of all. The people who give you the harshest criticism often can become your biggest advocates once they see you handle it well. I’ve seen this happen countless times where there may be an executive who tears you apart in a strategy meeting. If you respond well to that, if you ask clarifying questions, if you come back with a stronger approach, they often become the person who is singing your praises just a few weeks or months later.

People respect others who can take a hit and who can come back swinging. They start to see you as someone who can operate in the big leagues, someone who they can trust with difficult conversations, more challenging work. So the very people whose criticism stings the most today might be the ones opening the doors for you tomorrow.

Alright, that is all for today. I hope you enjoyed this. I will catch you on the next episode.