How to Handle Negative Feedback

Negative feedback can be hard to take, whether it’s in a performance review or a passing comment from a colleague or friend.

Sometimes it’s enough to make you question your worth or even your very identity. (Is that the way people see me? Am I a bad person?) 

I know, because I’ve been there. An occupational hazard of my career is that I am inundated with feedback:

• During my time as an actor, I received the customary 14 “no’s” for every “yes.” Imagine daily rejection being part of your job description!
• As an author, I’ve come to accept that the occasional one-star Amazon reviews come with the territory.
• And as a speaker, audience evaluations call to mind the words of an old song: “Along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometime.”

So I’ve developed a few approaches to handling negative feedback in a way that’s constructive and preserves my sanity. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.

Consider the source.

I used to survey my friends on potential cover designs for my books, which I’ve since learned from other authors is a big mistake — lots of opinions and little consensus.

The most helpful feedback on any issue comes not from a general audience, but from a select group of knowledgeable people. In this case, my target buyers or people who know cover design. 

So, when you receive or seek feedback, think hard about the source. Is their opinion informed by expertise and experience or simply personal taste or even bias? 

Get a second opinion.

On the other hand, it can be helpful to check with a friend when a particular piece of feedback feels personal. Find someone who knows you well and whom you can trust to give you the straight story. 

Ignore the extremes.

In the professional-speaking world, they say to throw out the best audience review and the worst, and look at the middle — that’s where the truth lies. 

It’s a pretty good rule of thumb for any group feedback you get. But like all rules, there are exceptions. Which gets us to the next point.

Learn from the negative.

As painful as it can be, there’s sometimes truth in the negative. When an audience member dislikes a specific story or section, I might ask myself whether it’s grown stale in the telling.

If they dispute a point, then perhaps I didn’t state it as clearly as I could have. Or maybe I failed to offer enough supporting evidence. Maybe I was just plain wrong. 

Try your best to look at negative feedback objectively.

Turn it into a positive.

Sometimes a negative comment will actually reinforce my thinking. An Amazon reviewer complained that my latest book was too short.

That concerned me at first, but then I reminded myself that I don’t like reading (or writing) dense, technical books. So the person looking for a super-long read is not my target reader. 

My target is the one who described the book as “a perfect airplane read.” It’s important to understand that you and your work are not for everybody. And that’s OK.

Understand that it’s not personal.

Early on in my acting days, I was struck by the fact that I could 100% nail an audition and still not get the job. That’s because there are countless factors beyond the actor’s control.

Maybe I didn’t have the right hair color or I was too short for the actor they cast opposite me or maybe somebody else simply did a better job.

Eventually, you learn not to obsess over it and to understand that rejection — the ultimate negative feedback — may not be about you at all. And the best approach is to put it in the rearview mirror and move on.