Feedback Thoughts

I read the two following articles about the impacts of rejection and management of feedback from yourself:

• Seven Ways to Crush Self-Doubt in Creative Work
• Why Rejection Hurts So Much - And What To Do About It'

Between the two, I thought the article about rejection was the most interesting because it took an evolutionary approach. It talked about how perhaps humans developed the feeling of rejection from social ostracization as a survival mechanism because when we were tribes people being exiled or an outcast was like a death sentence. It turns out scientists have found that similar regions in our brain that are active when we experience physical pain are also active when we experience emotional pain, i.e. when we are ridiculed, ostracized, and experience rejection from friends or possible love interests. Thus they speculate that mechanism could be a result of humans learning to tell when they need to change their ways so that they can still be a member of the social group.

The same article also went into detail about ways of reducing one of the major sources of rejection: ourselves. It discusses ways of overcoming both self-criticizing behavior and how to help yourself feel better after feeling that kind of emotional pain. Similarly, the other article, Seven Ways to Crush Self-Doubt in Creative Work, naturally discusses ways to overcome that loud voice in your head that tries to discourage you from doing your best or trying something new, particularly with education. I think my two favorite pieces of advice from that article are "7. Trust Yourself" and "4. Embrace a Growth Mindset." To summarize the two: don't suppress your inner self; to not be afraid of failure, and to instead think of it as a way to figure out what to try next time. The author of the article, John Spencer, had a wonderful quote from Dweck in his book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success using infants that I thought I would also put here:

“Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn. Infants stretch their skills daily. Not just ordinary skills, but the most difficult tasks of a lifetime, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide it’s too hard or not worth the effort. Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward."

Let you be you and let everything be a learning opportunity to grow. Source: Pixabay