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We don’t always take criticism well.
I know I struggle with it. I get wrapped up in the connection with my self worth and the value of my work. It becomes a reflection of who I am. What I’m capable of.
How I made the decisions I did? Why I took that direction over another. It all comes from inside me. My idea. My emotions. My reactions to the spaces.
I become connected with my work. Don’t you take your designs seriously. Don’t you put everything you have into them.
Then you start to get feedback. It can hurt.
Especially when it’s delivered poorly. But we have to learn to accept the feedback to embrace the criticism. It’s not a reflection of you.
Remind yourself this. It’s only a comment a difference of opinion on execution of your idea. What might they have done differently.
Don’t forget, it’s so much easier to comment on something that already exists than it is to create from scratch.
Creating is the hard part. You did the hard part. Now you’re getting a reaction to the work you did. You want your work to create strong emotional reactions.
The artist who has work in a museum. If they were a fly on the wall, they might hear people say, “I could do that.”
Have you ever heard that or said that then actually tried to do that thing. You don’t really know you can do it until you actually try to create it. You find it’s harder than it looks.
We envision the ideal in our heads. How we want them to look. We believe we have the skill to pull it off, but when executed it just falls flat.
If you’ve ever tried to create something you know what I mean. It’s not easy. And you have to take the passing comment for what it’s worth.
You have to mine out the gold from those comments. The ones that matter. The ones that could make a positive impact on the project. That feedback combined with your execution create better work.
They elevate your designs. Architecture is a team effort. As much as I sometimes want it to just be me. Here is my design now built it just like this. It doesn’t work that way.
There’s always feedback. Always revisions and changes that can enhance the design and or otherwise destroy it. You have to be able to recognize valid comments. Learn to mine out the gold from everyone’s comments and keep pushing forward.
