» News
Is Criticism Really Positive?
It is! Provided you have the skills to communicate it in a positive way. If not and would like to, the process of reframing below explains how.
Reframing means helping people to reinterpret problems and find solutions by changing the frame of the problems.
Let’s have a look at how you can reframe critics and criticism. Critics are troublemakers. They only see problems, difficulties and operate from the “failure” frame. Namely, they try hard to find reasons why something won’t work.
The problem with what they say, “criticisms”, on a linguistic (language) level is that these are a kind of generalized judgments, e.g.:
This proposal is too expensive.
That suggestion just won’t work.
It’s not realistic.
If you want to respond to these, you can agree or disagree and this is what people generally do. If you agree fine, but if you disagree, we get a huge mismatch, which usually leads to – conflict.
Let’s imagine that you are extremely tolerant, and/or you know one of NLP presuppositions, which says that behind any behaviour, there’s a good intention. If so, you can probably handle criticisms such as:
This project doesn’t hold water.
What you would probably find more difficult to deal with is a criticism such as:
You are quite irresponsible to suggest such a project in times like these.
In the first sentence, the critic attacks a problem and in the second one, a person. If you are familiar with the Robert Dilts’ Unified Field (Logical Levels), you probably already know that this is an attack at the identity level and the critic becomes a killer.
Before I explain what to do, I’d like to underline that all criticisms are positively intended. Their purpose is to evaluate the output of the “dreamer” and put it on test. It’s just that very often criticisms are communicated awkwardly and are thus greatly misunderstood.
How can you express criticism without being misunderstood or misinterpreted and avoid conflicts, i. e. how to reframe it:
1. Find out exactly what the objective is. The objective is positive (e. g. manage meetings productively) and not negative (e. g. avoid conflicts in meetings).
2. Turn the criticism into a question to open options for responding to it. An example of that would be to say instead of “There’s no budget for it” something like “How are we going to afford it?”. The question is positive (afford) and gives the other person the possibility of outlining the details of the plan, rather than having to disagree with or fight with the critic.
3. When you ask a question use the HOW and not WHY frame. The latter still presupposes a problem frame.
