Negative Feedback Quotes

Conformity is a problem for many small groups. Members put a higher priority on cohesion than on coming up with a well-reasoned choice. They pressure dissenters, shield themselves from negative feedback, keep silent when they disagree ... ~ Craig E. Johnson

Believe in Your Ability to Cope with Negative Feedback

Just like everyone has a vision blind spot, everyone has cognitive blond spots that can lead to making less than stellar choices. For example, you think an outfit looks good on you, and in reality it doesn't. Or you thought you understood what your boss wanted but later realize you took the instructions in an unintended direction. Since we all have blind spots, making some mistakes and getting some negative feedback is unavoidable. Therefore, unless you plan to go live in a cave, you're going to need a game plan for how you'll cognitively and emotionally cope when negative feedback happens. We'll cover behavioral strategies later in the chapter, but let's work on the thinking and emotional aspects for now.
Experiment: Think about a specific scenario in which you fear negative feedback. If your fears came true:

--How would you go about making the required changes?
--How could you be self-accepting of your sensitivity to criticism? How could you talk to yourself gently about the emotions you're feeling instead of criticizing yourself for feeling upset? How could you be patient with yourself while you're having those feelings?
--What self-care would you do while you wait for your heart and upset feelings to pass? (Yes, rewatching episodes of '90s TV is a totally acceptable answer.)
--What personal support would you access to cope with your emotions? For example, you'd talk to a frie ~ Alice Boyes

You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn't come until after a long chain of wins, until you've accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country. Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants - they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others. Knowing ~ David McRaney

Act As If You Feel Relaxed About Feedback

People sometimes feel a spike of defensiveness when they receive negative feedback. You might feel annoyed at the feedback or feel upset. In these situations, try acting as if you feel relaxed. In other words, fake it till you make it. Acting as if you feel relaxed is one of the fastest ways to actually feel more calm. If you get an anxiety spike when you receive feedback or tend to feel defensive, try making your body language more open. Send nonverbal signals that you're open, even if inside you're not feeling it. Drop your shoulders, lift your head, make gentle eye contact, and relax your hands. When you do this, your thoughts and feelings will start to catch up with your nonverbal cues almost instantly. You won't feel completely relaxed, but it will help. ~ Alice Boyes

It's been kind of extreme - people either love it or they don't like it at all - and I think that's a good thing. It's my first art project where there's not a middle ground. I find it very interesting. But the negative feedback hasn't at all kept me from doing it, obviously. Because I haven't really gotten any negative feedback that I feel is really warranted. ~ Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

Ketoacidosis is prevented by negative feedback. Ketone bodies inhibit fatty acid production and also promote release of insulin which, in turn, inhibits lipolysis. ~ Richard David Feinman

I think by paying attention to the feedback that you get on Yelp, you can very quickly integrate it into your business ... The really savvy folks out there, they don't necessarily take anything negative personally, but use it as constructive feedback and adjust their business. ~ Jeremy Stoppelman

And in situations where a man and a woman each receive negative feedback, the woman's self-confidence and self-esteem drop to a much greater degree. The internalization of failure and the insecurity it breeds hurt future performance, so this pattern has serious long-term consequences. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Hermione," Harry said seriously, as he started to dig down into the red-velvet pouch again, "don't punish yourself when a bright idea doesn't work out. You've got to go through a lot of flawed ideas to find one that might work. And if you send your brain negative feedback by frowning when you think of a flawed idea, instead of realizing that idea-suggesting is good behavior by your brain to be encouraged, pretty soon you won't think of any ideas at all." Harry put down two heart-shaped chocolates beside the book. "Here, have another chocolate. Besides the one from earlier, I mean. This one is to reinforce your brain for generating a good candidate strategy. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Actively seek out and listen carefully to negative feedback. ~ Elon Musk

The crazy creatives are the creatives who never go completely mad. They aren't so easily disheartened by the seemingly endless amounts of scrutiny that creative individuals tend to receive because they, like insanity, are the ones who feed off of opposition and negative feedback and manage to continue along with a healthy ambition. It is the crazy that teaches us to use our gifts wisely and own all the attackers. ~ Criss Jami

Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. ... Hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful. ~ Elon Musk

The longer you pause to process surprising or negative feedback, the more likely you are to learn from it. ~ Susan Cain

When I first started working on 'Staying Dead,' I got some well-meaning but negative feedback from industry folk because - back in 2001 - epic fantasy was still the big thing, alternate history a tight runner-up. ~ Laura Anne Gilman

I think you should always be seeking negative feedback. ~ Elon Musk

Negative feedback can make us bitter or better. ~ Robin Sharma

When you put yourself in the other person's shoes, you can see that the person critiquing you is merely trying to help. ~ Fran Hauser

Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room to grow. ~ Ed Catmull

Ask a man to explain his success and he will typically credit his own innate qualities and skills. Ask a woman the same question and she will attribute her success to external factors, insisting she did well because she "worked really hard," or "got lucky," or "had help from others." Men and women also differ when it comes to explaining failure. When a man fails, he points to factors like "didn't study enough" or "not interested in the subject matter." When a woman fails, she is more likely to believe it is due to an inherent lack of ability.8 And in situations where a man and a woman each receive negative feedback, the woman's self-confidence and self-esteem drop to a much greater degree.9 The internalization of failure and the insecurity it breeds hurt future performance, so this pattern has serious long-term consequences.10 ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Fine-Tune Your Mind to the Benefits of Feedback

When you're in anxiety mode, it's easy to think of feedback as something wholly torturous and psychologically painful. Can you nudge this thinking by attuning to some of the benefits?

--You may find out you've done something well.
--You may discover that things you perceive as minor aspects of your work are seen by other people as major strengths.
--You may achieve more success because what you produce after feedback is better. For example, someone gives you a tip or suggests a change that improves your work. You realize you like the new version, but it wasn't something you would've attempted without a push in that direction.
--Through feedback, you may get new insights that help you solve problems you've been stuck with. The feedback giver may offer useful information about how he or she previously solved the problem you're currently having.
--Lastly, the process of receiving feedback can strengthen your relationship with the person giving the feedback. It can be a bonding experience.

Experiment: Try one (or both) of these options:

Option 1: Think of one specific instance in the past when negative feedback has actually been useful to you.
Option 2: Go through each of the listed benefits of feedback, and write one example of a specific situation in which you received that benefit. ~ Alice Boyes

While paying attention to positive and negative feedback is very important, it is not enough. What also matters is acknowledging and responding to this feedback. This is how you nurture your relationship with your audience. ~ Cendrine Marrouat

If I had my way, I wouldn't do annual reviews, if I felt that everybody would be more honest about positive and negative feedback along the way. I think the annual review process is so antiquated. ~ Carol Bartz

Negative feedback is better that none. I would rather have a man hate me than overlook me. As long as he hates me I make a difference. ~ Hugh Prather

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped. I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag. Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene. ~ Oliver Markus

Your dominion has nothing to do with a negative person's opinion. Flee from people who only hung on passport-size dreams and you'll see your bigger picture! Go for the big one! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

I am happy to say that everyone that I have met in my life, I have gained something from them; be it negative or positive, it has enforced and reinforced my life in some aspect. ~ Walter Payton

Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other. ~ Honore De Balzac

If we want to grow, the way to break a pattern of negativity is to face anything negative with love. ~ Molly Friedenfeld

Noble again chose Larry McCarthy, the veteran media consultant who was known for his ability to distill a complicated subject into a simple, potent, and usually negative symbol. McCarthy had a reputation for being a particularly shrewd consumer of O, or opposition research on the rival candidates he was targeting. He often honed his ads using polls, focus groups, micro-targeting data, and "perception analyzers" - meters that evaluated viewers' split-second reactions to demo tapes. McCarthy ~ Jane Mayer

If people call your work perceptible, be it in positive or negative terms, do ask them about what made them draw that conclusion. ~ Mohith Agadi

Today's circumstances are out of your control but you CAN control your response. Don't let a negative outlook kill your joy today. ~ LeCrae

The underlying strategy of the Fed is to tell people, "Do you want your money to lose value in the bank, or do you want to put it in the stock market?" They're trying to push money into the stock market, into hedge funds, to temporarily bid up prices. Then, all of a sudden, the Fed can raise interest rates, let the stock market prices collapse and the people will lose even more in the stock market than they would have by the negative interest rates in the bank. So it's a pro-Wall Street financial engineering gimmick. ~ Michael Hudson

Positive thoughts emanate when we are in a sate of joy and negative thoughts come when we are in a state of sorrow. ~ Girdhar Joshi

Reviews are great. I can read negative reviews and say, 'You know that point they made ... they were dead on.' ~ Kelley Armstrong

Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force ... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.. ~ William James

"To fashion stars out of dog dung, that is the Great Work. To take a negative experience and, by comparing it to something worse, make it feel good, is the great skill." ~ Alexandra David-Neel

Whether you like it or not, you are branding yourself. The concern is whether the brand is a positive one or not. It is therefore expected of every aspiring achiever who wants to make an indelible impact to first of all create and maintain a good brand. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Because it is possible to create - creating one's self, willing to be one's self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) - one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one's possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one's possibilities brings guilt toward one's self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one's environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one's environment or established patterns within one's self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creati ~ Rollo May

It's when you meet another wretch who is as negative as you about everything that the thunder rolls and the lightening crashes and real life starts - because genuine communication has started ~ Ben Watson

You're not a bad person for having negative thoughts or feelings. You're not getting it wrong or failing in life. You're not less spiritual, less human, or less evolved for going through an emotional funk or for feeling stuck. At your core, you are a learning and growing being. And you are doing just that. ~ Emily Maroutian

Everything said about Gen Xers
both positive and negative
was completely true. Twenty-somethings in the nineties rejected the traditional working-class American lifestyle because (a) they were smart enough to realize those values were unsatisfying, and (b) they were totally fucking lazy. Twenty-somethings in the nineties embraced a record like Nirvana's Nevermind because (a) it was a sociocultural affront to the vapidity of the Reagan-era paradigm, and (b) it fucking rocked. Twenty-somethings in the nineties were by and large depressed about the future, mostly because (a) they knew there was very little to look forward to, and (b) they were obsessed with staring into the eyes of their own self-absorbed sadness. There are no myths about Generation X. It's all true. ~ Chuck Klosterman

It takes just as little time to see the positive side of life as it does the negative side. ~ Jimmy Buffett

That I isn't I anymore. It's someone else, the character who plays me, someone who's a better actor than I could ever be. I'm just the writer. Someone else is starring in my part. I remember him just well enough to try to write about him. A case of the negative sublime. I guess art's always after the fact. The real is imaginary, or imagined. Reconstitution, reconstruction, representation is all we're left with. Autobiography becomes biography in the end. ~ Charles Wright

We often think we express negative emotions, not because we cannot help it, but because we should express them. ~ P.D. Ouspensky

Notice When You Don't React to Situations in an Anxious Way

Even the most anxiety-prone person doesn't always react to situations in an anxious way. Start paying attention to situations in which you:

--Naturally make positive predictions
--Feel confident in your ability to complete challenging tasks
--Receive feedback without personalizing it or catastrophizing
--Ask for what you want without being excessively hesitant
--Feel accepting and relaxed

Start to notice how you are sometimes anxiety-prone and sometimes confident, rather than thinking about anxiety-proneness and confidence as being mutually exclusive traits. ~ Alice Boyes

Negative people will always try to drag you down to their level. As hard as they may try ... don't let 'em! ~ Timothy Pina

Some people have a negative attitude, and that's their disability. ~ Marla Runyan

A society that places a low value on its mothers and the process of birth will suffer an array of negative repercussions for doing so. Good beginnings make a positive difference in the world, so it is worth our while to provide the best possible care for mothers and babies throughout this extraordinarily influential part of life. ~ Ina May Gaskin

I do my job in Type O Negative. ~ Josh Silver

Most people ask ineffective questions of themselves, in their head, which trigger lame or negative thoughts and negatively affect their feelings, decisions and results. ~ Maddy Malhotra

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy. ~ Francis Crick

We must fill our minds with a truth loud enough to drown our the incessant defeatist voice of the negative ego. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

One who gossips usually carries boredom in one hand and bitterness in the other. ~ Suzy Kassem

It was easy to get wrapped up in some of the negative stuff, but obviously I chose not to. I didn't want to get in trouble and end up in prison where I can't play football. It was as simple as that. ~ Jermain Defoe

We all produce excuses and negative emotions involuntarily. Guess what? That's never going to change. ~ Anonymous

But if you want to know who the scariest person in the group is, look for the one who's been fighting zombies without smearing her eyeliner. ~ Mira Grant

Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm. ~ Oliver Burkeman

You were a negative, a dark absence, a clump of cells crying to come together. You were a pause in the flickering before consciousness. And when the atoms swirled, and when the skies yawned, and when a nervous god, still virgin to creation, called you forth: did you marvel at your
luck? Clumsy thumbprint of an awkward deity - did you slaughter the heavens, once freed? Did you grab the stars by their throats? Did you wear the skins of dead galaxies, your eyes ablaze with impossible fury? ~ Amber Sparks

Most fear comes from the anticipation of an event rather than the actual event itself. We worry beforehand as a form of preparation. We want to get ahead of our negative predictions. It's disguised as mental precaution when it's actually self-inflicted torment. The price of being ready for future suffering is that you suffer in the present moment. ~ Emily Maroutian

There's going to be positive and negative in anything in life. ~ Samuel Larsen

Give thanks for all that shows up in your life including the stuff that you perceive to be negative, the things that you wish wouldn't have happened. Don't take anything forgranted. ~ Wayne Dyer

Negative thinking is something we all do. The difference between the
person who is primarily optimistic and the person who is primarily
pessimistic is that the optimist learns to become a good debater. Once
you become thoroughly aware of the effectiveness of optimism in your
life, you can learn to debate your pessimistic thoughts. ~ Steve Chandler

The reader's feedback is the muse for great written works of art. ~ Sarah Scott

Even in my stand-up, there's a lot more positivity and enthusiasm rather than negative, I-hate-everything vibes. ~ Aziz Ansari

I'm an incredibly negative person, so any form of success is only ever going to be a relief to me and set my default position back to neutral. ~ Catherine Tate

There is a lot of negativity and bad habits that just need to be cut out of our lives. Sometimes we hold on tightly to the things that are actually causing us a lot of pain. We are our own worst enemy. We cling to all the wrong things. We subconsciously do things that are very bad for us, the worst being that we tell ourselves every day that "we're not good enough" and "it's our fault". Well cut it out! ~ S.R. Crawford

We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. we do not destroy the heretic because he resist us: so long as he resist us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. ~ George Orwell