If you are anything like me, you won’t have to work very hard to remember negative remarks – they tend to stick to the lesser and weaker parts of my psyche like barnacles. And while I try not to allow negative feedback to derail me, I also think its a bad policy to simply ignore it. Sometimes I need to know that what I’m doing isn’t connecting, and negative feedback is one way (just one, mind you) to measure that. The first trick is to hold loosely to negative feedback and not let it define me or my work as a whole. The second trick is to give that negative feedback some context.
Here is something true: It’s dangerous to let ourselves be defined by our lesser parts in any way. Zeroing in on all the things you aren’t good at and spending all your energy to get those areas up to par will likely leave you confused end exhausted. Figure out what you’re best at and work from there. Then you can narrow the specific areas you need to work on by their relationship to our natural strengths and gifts.
(For the record: I think your strengths and gifts are almost always better indicators of who you are as a person and an artist.)
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This is an excerpt from my book Title Pending, which will be released this Fall/Winter. Join the email list for more like this, news about the release and content no one else gets.