E, I asked, how do you do it? I'm not good at accepting criticism. I only do well accepting it when someone can ask me to do something else instead (and explain how to do it). But most often the person doing the criticizing doesn't know what I should be doing instead, just what I'm doing wrong. And it doesn't matter if that same person has just told me ten zillion things that I'm doing right...my perfectionist self hones in on the one wrong thing. And if I don't know what to do instead, I get defensive and/or depressed. And actually, depending on the delivery, even if a suggestion of what to do is offered, I sometimes don't want to hear it. Argh.

I hate this about myself, and I really, really need to change it. Today as I was biking home I decided that I need a strategy for practicing accepting criticism. The strategy I will use is to try to paraphrase what the person just said so that we can have a conversation about it (of course, this doesn't work when someone is trying to do real damage).

That's a good plan, but I'm worried I won't be able to act on it successfully because the bigger problem is that I take myself too seriously. Even though a lot of times I think I make choices that show that I don't take myself seriously enough, all it takes is someone coming along saying "no, you're doing that wrong" to suddenly make me realize I take myself too seriously. What the heck is that? How can I simultaneously be selfless and self-important, and often neither one in a good way? It would be so much better if I could just switch the two, so I can take myself and my goals seriously when making decisions, and then be unserious enough to use criticism to improve myself. But yikes, how do I do that? Help!