Feedback Thoughts

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I read the articles 14 Signs Your Perfectionism Has Gotten Out of Control and Overcoming the Fear of Feedback. I have some perfectionist tendencies, although they tend to be focused on specific things  rather than being a generalized perfectionism. Several of the points made in 14 Signs definitely applied to me, and are things that I'm aware of and try to control. Procrastination and a go big or go home mindset are probably two of my worst flaws, but I have managed to wrangle them quite a bit as I've gotten older.

The article about how to overcome a fear of feedback was very interesting. In some situations, particularly when the criticism seemed particularly harsh or unfair, I have had to pull back hard on a desire to lash out. Most of the time, I have a completely backwards way of responding to criticism: I fix the thing I'm being criticized or corrected for, and do it exactly the way the criticizer wants, but I do it out of spite. For example, while I was in Afghanistan, one of my coworkers accused me of never taking out the trash (it was a shared responsibility). My response was to not only take out the trash every single day, but to go out of my way to do all of the office clean up that we shared. He and I still laugh about it. He told me that I have a warped idea of what spite looks like.

There are some situations where I very much want feedback, and I think that I tend to take it well. I think that it comes across better when you aren't only slapped with criticism, but also receive positive feedback to highlight what you're doing right.