There’s a great Steve Jobs story about the development of the iPod. Legend has it, Apple engineers had been working for days, weeks, months to complete the very first prototype. Late nights. Early mornings. Lunches at their desks. Weekends in the office. Finally, they arrived at a product that they were ready to show their boss, the one and only Steve Jobs.

So they called a meeting. And full of excitement, anticipation, pride, they handed their creation to Jobs for approval. He took the device, played with it, weighed it, scrutinized it, and promptly rejected it.

“It’s too big” he said.

So the engineers, some of the smartest people in the tech world, explained to him all of the challenges and limitations. The hurdles they had to jump through just to get the prototype as small as it was. They had to “reinvent inventing,” they said. “It’s impossible to make it any smaller,” they said.

Jobs thought for a moment. Then he stood, walked over to an aquarium, and dropped the iPod prototype in the tank. It sank to the bottom, and bubbles floated to the top.

“Those are air bubbles,” he said. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”

Imagine yourself in that room. You’re one of the top engineers in the country. In the world. You just sacrificed a good part of your professional life to build a prototype of a revolutionary product that would make your boss happy and would change the world. You’ve done everything possible to create something that would meet Steve Jobs impossible expectations.

And he throws your hard work into an aquarium.

You have a split second to decide how you’re going to react. What do you do?

Be Calm. Be Confident.

We all know how it feels to have our work criticized. Your mind spins. Your cheeks turn red, the tips of your ears get hot. Your stomach sinks. Your palms sweat.

Your brain and body are prepared for defense. More than anything, you want to lash out, smite your opponent with the perfect rebuttal. The conclusive proof that you’re right and this idiot who dares to question you is wrong.

This is natural and biologically important. We’ve evolved to protect ourselves. In those moments of stress, our bodies release adrenaline so we can react quickly. Our brains release Cortisol, which raises our heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar. This is great when we’re in actual danger. When we’re hunting and gathering on the open plains or in the merciless jungles, these physiological reactions prepare us to fight or fly with agility, speed, and strength.

But we’re not on the open plains or in the jungle. We’re in a new game of survival of the fittest: The modern office.

In the modern office, there may be just as many predators out to get you. Not to eat you. Just to get ahead. But in the modern office, fight or flight isn’t really an option. People who punch their coworkers or flee from conference rooms when their work is criticized don’t tend to hold jobs for long.

What’s required of us is reason, logic, intelligence, moderation, patience. But our brains still interpret criticism as a threat to our survival. In a sense, it is. If enough people say enough bad things about our work, then the perception spreads that we do bad work. In the modern office, perception rules.

So our brains trigger hormones to fight for our survival. Unfortunately, our hormones haven’t caught up to the modern workplace. Cortisol, for all the good it does if you need to run from a lion, isn’t so good if you need to have a difficult conversation with a coworker. Cortisol clouds your thinking and makes you dumb.

Damn. Just when you need your brain and not your muscles, you suddenly have superhuman strength and the thought processes of a toddler.

So what do you do about it?

I recently watched a Ted Talk given by Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin called “How to stay calm when you know you’ll be stressed.”

In the talk, Levitin proposes a strategy called prospective hindsight, where you look ahead to all the things that could go wrong or cause stress in a situation, then try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening or minimize the damage. That way, when you’re in the stressful situation and your brain is releasing that Cortisol, you’re prepared to react because you’ve already thought through the situation.

So if you have a stressful meeting coming up where people will be reviewing and discussing your work, or if you’re about to submit a draft of a design or piece of content for review, take some time to think about your creation objectively as an outsider might. What are elements you might criticize? What are things about the project you’re not as happy with? How would you make improvements? What are some of the subjective things clients might comment on like button placement, photo selection, or font color?

Now you have a chance to process challenging feedback in a safe environment so you can prepare to articulate the reasoning behind your decisions. And for most of us, we’re our own worst critics, so odds are good that what others will say will be tame in comparison to our own feedback.

The second thing you can do is to keep your confidence up. When we lose our confidence, two things tend to happen:

We start believing that our work is mediocre, we lose our drive and ambition, and we start producing mediocre work in a self fulfilling prophecy
Our ego takes over and we get defensive

You’re the expert. That’s why you have the job and that’s why you’re in the field. Someone might attack your ideas for any number of reasons, but an attack on your ideas is not an attack on you. You’ve thought through the product you’ve created and you have reasons for the decisions you made.

By staying confident, you’ll be able to have a rational, articulate conversation about how to move forward, instead of resorting to accusations, personal attacks, or defensiveness.

Consider the Source

People are complex. Many of us work for large, multilayered organizations with communication styles, tendencies, belief systems, and identities all their own.

Negative criticism can come from any number of people for any number of reasons. And it can be tempting to write people off as idiots when they question our work. The client relations rep who hands you notes scribbled on printed web pages. The sales exec screaming for a bigger, yellower “buy now” button. The marketing director with a few “minor changes” that will have you working through the night.

And you’re right. They’re idiots. Moving on.

Kidding.

I’m not asking you to find ways to disparage the source. I’m asking you to try to empathize with the person criticizing your work and think about why they might be responding the way they are without assuming they’re not smart or they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Here are a few reasons people might be responding to your work in ways that seem counterproductive or off target:

Insecurity. Challenging criticism can be the result of people feeling like they’re outside of their comfort zone and a step or two removed from their day-to-day work. Modern organizations are set up to promote people who do good work (which is a good thing), but this often takes people away from what they were good at in the first place and moves them to unfamiliar terrain with little to no training on how to be successful in this new role. An employee is promoted to leadership. We’re taught that the leader should have all the answers. So the new leader thinks they should know it all. But they don’t. So they get insecure and do a few things to compensate:

They make things up to exert their influence and be an active participant.
They revert to ideas, concepts, and strategies they do understand so they can stay in their comfort zone.
They focus on seemingly minor details — button color on printouts, copyediting issues that would be looked at in later project phases, the presence of lorem ipsum or placeholder visuals after you’ve explained that the images and text are for placement only — instead of thinking about overall strategy.

So what do you do about insecurity? Avoid blaming them or accusing them of not understanding. Instead, focus on moving forward and let them know that you’re happy to help. Try not to use insider jargon that they aren’t familiar with. This will just lead to more insecurity. And share your knowledge. Look for teaching moments. Share resources and articles that support the decisions you’ve made so they feel more confident in the future.

Anxiety. In early March, a designer and developer named Brandon Gregory wrote a great article for A List Apart called Defeating Workplace Drama with Emotional Intelligence. I highly recommend reading it. In the article, he talks about the anxiety problem. On a lot of projects, there are individuals who are given a tremendous amount of responsibility for the outcome of the project, but aren’t given power to ensure the success of the project. Not only do these individuals not have the skillset to do the project work on their own, but they often don’t have the power to influence resources, budgets, or timelines. As a result, they feel a little bit like they’re trying to keep a speeding train on the rails when they don’t know how to drive a train, and they’re not even sure there are rails.

So teach them. Teach them how to drive the train, and make sure they know you’ll be there to help while they’re learning. Let them know that you care just as much about the outcome of the project as they do.

Identity. Sometimes, people just need to have their hands in a project so they feel like they’re being productive or taking ownership of something.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely one gave a Ted Talk on things that makes us feel good about our work. In the Talk, Dan shares a story about cake mixes. Cake mixes started being sold in the ‘40s. At the time, all you had to do was add water, put the mix in the oven, and voila you had cake. They weren't popular at all. And they tried to figure out for a long time why they weren’t popular. And what they figured out was that there wasn’t enough effort involved. You couldn’t serve that cake to guests. It wasn’t your cake, it was someone else’s cake. So they took the eggs and the milk out of the mix. Now you had to crack the eggs, you had to measure the milk. Now it was your cake.

That’s how people can feel about creative projects. If I have my say about a headline, or offer some insight on button color, or criticize a photo, now I’m involved. It’s my project

Or it could be that the person providing the criticism is right. As was likely often the case with Steve Jobs. Which leads to the next tip.

Try to Understand

People who create things hear a lot of, let's say interesting, feedback.

Things like:

doesn’t pop
not enough brand
too brandy
misses the mark
wordsmith this
rewrite
refresh
I don’t like this word choice
more here
no!

So...how do you get something out of feedback like this?

You’re gonna need to dig.

Look for the positive. Ask the client if there are any elements that are working well or that they do like. Ask them why. Now you’ll know what resonates.

Ask questions. Ask them for examples of things that do pop. Ask them what they think their brand is and what they think their business sounds like. Anytime they don’t like something, ask them why, and keep digging until you pinpoint the reasons.

Talk about goals. If you created something, and the client thinks it won’t accomplish their goals, you likely need to revisit the project goals to make sure you’re on the same page. Make sure you both understand what you’re trying to accomplish so you can take an objective look at whether or not the product will accomplish it.

Listen. This is the most important thing. You need to really listen to what your client or coworker is saying. They’ll feel heard and empowered. You’ll get information about their goals, their tastes and preferences, and the best way to work with them moving forward. Also, it buys you time. Asking questions saves you from knee-jerk reactions, being put on the spot, or having to respond right away.

Get rid of your Fear

We become fearful when people critique our work. We fear being wrong, we fear not knowing, we fear embarrassment. We fear loss of status. And this fear causes us to become irrational and defensive. We dig our heels in because we fear that any loss of ground is an admission of failure.

Kathryn Schulz wrote a book called Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. In a Ted Talk on the topic of being wrong, she says: “our capacity to screw up, it's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system, something we can eradicate or overcome. It's totally fundamental to who we are. Because we don't really know what's going on out there. And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity.”

Think about a couple of things.

Collaborating with others and using the diverse ideas of others almost always results in a better end product — unless you’re Steve Jobs.
Meeting someone halfway, or changing your mind, or saying “I hadn’t considered that. Thanks for pointing it out.” isn’t an admission of failure.

Stanford researcher Carol Dweck wrote a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, where she talks about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset:

“In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb.

In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.”

When we have a growth mindset, we don’t need to fear criticism. Instead, we learn and grow from criticism.

Fight if You Must

So you’ve gone through the rest of the phases of dealing with challenging criticism, and you still just flat out disagree with the criticism you’ve been given. What do you do? You have two options:

You can prepare to push back
You can choose not to die on that hill and move on

I’ll tackle these two in order.

You’ve decided you so strongly, so fundamentally disagree with the feedback that you’re going to push back. Here are some things to keep in mind.

Clients and stakeholders often underestimate the amount of objective decision making that goes into creative work. They see design, wording, or style choices as arbitrary preferences or whims of the creator.

But when it comes to web work, a lot of our decisions are likely based on:

User experience best practices
Identity guidelines
Technology limitations
Performance considerations
Browser and device constraints
Concerns for sustainability

When we make something, we have to consider competing objectives and goals, prioritize, consider constraints, and make choices.

Make sure you can articulate the reasons for your choices so you can help your clients or stakeholders see your thought process. Find ways to explain your work and your priorities without sounding defensive or elitist. Affirm what your client already knows, help them grow in their understanding, and make them feel like they’re part of the process.

If your clients begin to see the creative process as objective choices you can make together, they can help you determine what’s most important and even become your advocates.

Let Go of Losing Battles

One of the most important things you can do to keep moving forward on a project, or to succeed in your career, is to choose your battles wisely.

I’m going to write an article about this in the near future, so I won’t cover too much now. But there are certainly times when the best decision is to let it go, make a change or revision no matter how much you disagree with it or it hurts your ego, and move on.

If this is the direction you decide to take, it’s important to truly let the issue go and move on.

Our brains are wired to maintain what neuroscientists call a “negativity bias.” In an interview for the Greater Good Podcast, psychologist and best-selling author Rick Hanson explains it this way:

“Our ancestors, the ones who lived to pass on their genes, got better and better and better at making a crucial decision many times a day about whether to approach something or avoid it. Approach the pleasant, avoid the unpleasant. Approach the carrot, duck the stick.

Alright, now the problem is that sticks are much more important to pay attention to in the wild than carrots because if you miss a carrot today, you’ll get another chance at one tomorrow, but if you don’t avoid a stick today—Wham!—you’re not gonna get a crack at a carrot tomorrow…

the brain, to help us survive, preferentially looks for, reacts to, stores, and then recalls negative information over positive information.”

Research from relationship psychologist John Gottman at the University of Washington demonstrates that it takes at least 5 positive interactions to make up for 1 negative interaction.

So, if you’ve decided to let an issue go, you need to make sure you don’t carry the negative feedback with you. Grow a thick skin. Remember the positive feedback, and let the negative roll off you. Otherwise the negative will start to affect your outlook, your attitude, and your future work.

When Someone Rips Your Work