How to handle criticisms in science: Achieving a balance between confidence and modesty in the work place

Whether it was the new Star Wars movie, sparkly outfits worn by people going out on New Year’s Eve, or your aunt’s Christmas pudding, we all likely spent part of our holiday break making assessments, judgments, and the occasional criticism (especially towards puddings). We can all be very critical at times, judging the outfits worn by celebrities or passing judgement on whether a movie or song or day was good or not. But while some may pity those who live their lives in the critical limelight, scientists also find themselves the brunt end of criticisms, whether these criticisms come from peers, mentors, or colleagues.

Science progresses through a combination of new hypotheses and the constant scrutiny which is necessary to establish and validate them. Unsurprisingly, the scientific field is rife with people ready to tear down what you do and judge each individual piece of your work to make sure that what you’ve done or shown is really worth it’s weight. Those of you in graduate school or early career researchers have likely had your fair share of it already, but here are a few more examples to set the tone for the rest of the post:

• You’re in a committee meeting and ready to go through some exciting new data in the hopes that this will be one of your last meetings before graduation. Just a few minutes in, one of your mentors stops you at your third slide while asking you to clarify your figure legend, followed by a 5-minute discussion on the importance of font size and unit clarity on graphs. The rest of the meeting is, as to be expected, a long one.
• Your advisor has just returned from two weeks of conferences and workshops in sunnier, more exotic places than your university and is having a lab meeting to hear updates from everyone on their progress. You had to make a decision about an experiment for your thesis while they were away, but you are happy with the results and excited to show your PI your independence of thought. Instead of being amazed at your intelligence and forethought, your PI points out a small yet crucial mistake in your experimental design which makes your data unusable. At least the candies they brought from their exotic travels taste good.
• You’re sitting at your computer when you notice a new email notification, quickly realizing that it’s the results from a grant application.  You spent weeks of hard work putting together the project plan, working with your PI on preliminary data figures, and both you and your PI were optimistic about your chances of getting the grant. As you open the email to a blunt “We regret to inform you…” start to the email, you quickly glance at the reviewer comments to find phrases like ‘uninformed’, ‘lacking in critical thought,’ and ‘no substantial contribution to the field’.

While scientists may not be criticized on as open of a stage as celebrities and movie directors, it’s still easy to feel the pangs of  criticism at work. When you work hard at a task and don’t achieve the desired end result, when you take a risk to try something independently and fall short of success, or when someone tells you that what you thought was great and wonderful was anything but, it messes with you. But criticism is a part of the job, and a part of what makes science what it is: always looking at ideas from a new perspective and challenging things both old and new to make sure they are sound. The key to a successful scientific career is not in learning how to avoid criticism, but how to grow from it. When you learn how to move ahead from the moments of criticism, you can grow by listening to the message and taking the constructive parts from it, while using each critique as fuel to move towards becoming a better and more self-confident scientist.

The first step in handling criticism is choosing how to respond to it: Learn how to receive critique and grow from it, take the good out of comments, and forget the overly personal parts. At the end of the post there are a few short suggestions of how to do this. Before that, however, we’ll look at the extreme ends of how people can fail to deal with criticism in a positive way:

The softening response: Becoming overly sensitive and losing self-confidence
If you are naturally not a self-confident person, you may find that criticism can hit you very hard and very fast. While you can likely recover on your own with time, the pace of a career in science, especially as graduate students, does not leave you much time in the way of building yourself back up again before the next round hits or before you need to get up and going again. Without time to recover from prior wounds, your outlook can quickly become overly pessimistic. You lose the ability to benefit from criticism and assume you’re simply not cut out for research. This attitude is often self-perpetuating, which can lead to reduced motivation and increased sensitivity to additional comments.

The hardening response: Becoming overly confident and losing self-criticism
On the other side of the spectrum are those who have very high opinions of themselves. They deflect all types of criticism by having an inflated self-image, but by doing this they can lose critical insights by being too quick with their defenses and assuming the critic was wrong. While in no danger of losing self-confidence, they can easily become attached to their own ideas and may deflect valid critiques or alternatives, just because they don’t want to admit they might not be 100% right. Too much pride can lead to a stubbornness which can hinder scientific progress, and can even bring a person to a dead-end halt in the middle of their career if they do end up eventually being wrong.

The nonexistent response: Becoming apathetic
A third option is to become entirely apathetic to the stream of criticism. Instead of defending their own ideas, trying to improve their work, or trying new ideas they do none of it, an apathetic researcher carries on stuck to their plan of research and avoids deviating from it. While not at the extreme of either case, apathy generally leads to mediocre research based on questionable ideas that were never defended nor improved upon, with any chance for greater success or implementation lost in the stagnation of effort.

The balanced response: Stay true to yourself while learning what to fix
As with our rubber vs steel post, there is a balance in work and in life where we must be strong and unwavering yet flexible and adaptable. It’s working towards this same type of balance that helps you deal with and grow from criticism during your career. There are times when you need helpful criticisms to improve your work while not letting the overly negative/personal criticisms get under your skin. Tell yourself that, despite the occasional misstep, you are on the right track and are learning more every day.

For the moments of being too soft: don't take criticism directly to heart, but listen instead to what the message at the heart of the issue is. Instead of taking it personally that your committee member made an off-handed negative comment about figure legends, think less about the tone and more about the message, and work towards making clearer figures for your next committee meeting. And for the times or the people that are too hard: It’s possible that those grant reviewers were all jerks, but it’s also possible they had something valid to say. Even if it was an idea you really cared about, a fresh set of eyes provides a perspective that you wouldn’t have had if you had only looked at things your way-even if the critique itself was a bit of a blow at first.

Part of achieving a balanced response is by knowing what side of the spectrum you tend to stay on and doing exercises to keep yourself balanced Even if you already have some new year’s resolutions on your ever-growing to do list, you can start off the year by working on the following as you muse over your own personal reactions to criticism in the workplace: 

• Ask for critiques and critical evaluations. It seems masochistic to ask someone to tell you what’s bad about you, but doing so shows others that you are confident in yourself yet want to learn and improve. Ask your PI, your graduate committee members, teachers, or co-workers about areas you can improve and suggestions on how you can work to get there. This also puts you in a position where you can prepare for interviews and job transitions, as you’ll have your answer on your strengths and weaknesses ready for the interview panel and can talk about how you’re working on it already.
• Learn to humbling accept and cherish praise. Just as you should neither ignore nor dwell upon criticism, don’t forget to accept a compliment and take them to heart. Listen to positive feedback and take it as truth, not just someone trying to make you feel better, and kindly thank those that give it out instead of telling them they’re wrong about you. Take the positive things and think about how you can balance any perceived negatives, and think of how to better use the skills or passions you already have to both enhance the good and work on the bad.
• Keep it all in perspective. Think about the view of the critique from a third person’s perspective and see if the statements are justified from a neutral perspective. What was the critic’s point? Maintain the perspective that non-personal and constructive criticisms are there to help you, not to hurt you. And if you feel like you are getting more criticism than positive feedback, talk to a trusted group member about your frustrations and get their feedback and perspective on the situation and see from their eyes whether you’re taking things too personally or not.
• Learn to recognize the difference between constructive and overly-personal criticism. While it is often hard to get a read on message tone (especially by email), think about the core of what someone is trying to tell you during their critique and see if it’s based on logic and science or if it’s more personal. Personal attacks and critiques that don’t provide a foundation for improvement should be given less credence than critiques that also offer suggestions and a potential way forward.
• Remember what got you here in the first place. Even during times when you feel like you can’t get it right and that people seem to be against your ever move, remember what got you to this current point in time. It’s your skills, knowledge, talents, and most of all your passion for science that led you to where you are and will keep you going in the next stages of your career.

A career in science is rife with skeptics and critics, but it also provides a means for personal growth and technical progress. Be sure to keep your head held high up against the array of jerks you’ll run into in your field, but listen to what they say and take the meaningful parts along with you.  You may not always live up to the hype or get a 5/5 star review, but if you stay true to yourself while always working to improve, you can have an impactful and purposeful career worthy of the awards season!