Even Beyoncé isn’t exempt from harsh criticism and feedback — and you can learn from the way she responds to it.
The 42-year-old singer is set to release her eighth studio album, “Cowboy Carter,” on Friday. Its lead single, “Texas Hold ‘Em,” has already made her the first Black woman ever with a No. 1 song on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. But she wasn’t always met with open arms in the genre.
“This album has been over five years in the making. It was born out of an experience I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t,” Beyoncé wrote in a recent Instagram post.
She was likely referring to a 2016 performance of her first country song, “Daddy Lessons,” at the annual Country Music Awards. Joined by The Chicks, who were known at the time as the Dixie Chicks, Beyoncé put on a six-minute show that received an onslaught of social media backlash.
“@Beyonce [with] the @DixieChicks at the #CMAawards50… SO NOT country!! HATED IT!!!,” one user on social media platform X posted. “Much as I like some country crossovers, @Beyonce and @DixieChicks was a step too far,” someone else wrote.
Instead of letting those opinions deter her, Beyoncé spent five years crafting her country album, she wrote.
“Because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive,” she wrote. “The criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me. [Cowboy Carter] is a result of challenging myself, and taking my time to bend and blend genres together to create this body of work.”
She added: “My hope is that years from now, the mention of an artist’s race as it relates to releasing genres of music, will be irrelevant.”
How to manage negative criticism
Just about everyone knows what it feels like to receive external criticism that hits you in the gut.
“Negative social feedback, the sense that you might be excluded or thought poorly of, actually influences your nervous system,” Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant told CNBC Make It in 2018. “That can feel like you can’t breathe … and in some cases, it feels like you’ve just been the victim of an attack and you don’t know if you can be successful moving forward.”
Your manager’s harsh critique of a project you just turned in — or even your spouse saying a meal you made wasn’t their favorite — can send you spiraling, if you aren’t practiced at internalizing feedback in a healthy way.
Start with these three steps, Grant said:
Practice listening to outside opinions.
- Ask people around you to provide small critiques of your professional or passion projects, to help you become more comfortable receiving feedback.
Assess your response to negative feedback.
- Prioritize figuring out ways to improve going forward, rather than focusing on how the criticism makes you feel. Your goal should be to avoid incurring the same upsetting critique again.
Predict the feedback you’ll receive beforehand.
- “Prepare yourself by imagining what is the most negative feedback I could possibly get in this situation,” Grant said. Any negative feedback you receive afterwards will probably sting less, and won’t be so surprising.
These tips can help you better process criticism without taking it personally, and separate legitimate feedback from character attacks that can trigger your “flight or fight” emotional response, Grant added.
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