A LITTLE STINGING CRITICISM - by Emetekefe Akpovwovwo

Words, once launched, do not return. They land somewhere in the chest of the person who receives them and they stay there, sometimes for a lifetime. Dale Carnegie understood this with a clarity that most of us only arrive at after we have done enough damage to look back and regret it. In his landmark work How to Win Friends and Influence People, he wrote with quiet devastation “If you and I want to stir up a resentment tomorrow that may rankle across the decades and endure until death, just let us indulge in a little stinging criticism, no matter how certain we are that it is justified.” It doesn’t need to be a thunderous assault or a prolonged campaign of cruelty. Carnegie was saying that just a little stinging criticism is all it takes to wound a person in ways that time struggles to heal.<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/Black_and_Gold_Elegant_Salon_Logo.png"/> We do not often think of ourselves as cruel people. Most of us would resist that characterisation with genuine offence. Yet, if we were to sit quietly with our memories, we would find scattered across the years a trail of moments in which our tongues moved faster than our wisdom. The mother who told her daughter, almost in passing, that she would never be as sharp as her brother. The manager who dissected a junior colleague’s presentation in front of the entire team, under the guise of honest feedback while performing something far closer to humiliation. The husband who, in a moment of frustration, told his wife that she was overreacting again and watched something behind her eyes go still. We committed these acts and moved on with our day. The recipients, however, did not always move on. They carried the words home with them, turned them over in the dark and sometimes arranged their entire sense of self around them.Carnegie’s insight strikes at something profoundly true about the human condition: we are not, as we flatter ourselves, rational beings who respond to logic and evidence. We are creatures of emotion, bristling, as he put it, with prejudices and motivated far more powerfully by pride and vanity than by reasonable argument. This is not a weakness to be scorned. It is simply the architecture of being human and when criticism arrives, however valid, however well-intentioned, it rarely reaches the part of us that can assess it dispassionately. It reaches the part that feels. It reaches the ego, the identity, the self-image painstakingly constructed over years and the natural response to that kind of assault is not reflection. It is defence, resentment, withdrawal. Consider the extraordinary tragedy of Thomas Hardy. One of the finest novelists to have graced the English language, a man who gave the world Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, stopped writing fiction entirely because of critics. Not because the criticism was entirely without merit or because he lacked talent but because the cumulative weight of sharp, pointed, public disapproval was more than even a gifted soul could absorb without cost. He retreated into poetry and never returned to the novel. The world was poorer for it. Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, went further still, criticism and despair drove him to take his own life at seventeen. These are stark illustrations of the stakes involved when we decide, casually and often carelessly, to wound another person with our words.Now bring this closer to home. Think about the family dinner table, where some of the most lasting damage is done in the name of love and concern. Parents who correct children relentlessly, who catalogue failures alongside achievements, who believe that criticism sharpens are not lying about their intentions but intention does not determine impact. The child who is told repeatedly that their efforts are not quite good enough does not typically become more diligent. More often, they become afraid. They become perfectionists unable to rest or they become people who stop trying altogether, because the sting of attempting and failing feels far worse than the numbness of not trying at all. At work, criticism wears its most respectable disguise. It dresses itself in the language of performance management, developmental feedback and organisational standards. Some of it, genuinely offered and carefully delivered, serves its intended purpose but the kind Carnegie warned against, the reflexive, impatient, superior brand of criticism, is everywhere in professional life. The colleague whose idea is dismissed before it has been fully heard. The employee whose mistake is announced rather than addressed privately. The professional who is corrected not to help them grow but to establish the critic’s own dominance in the hierarchy. These interactions do not build better workplaces. They build people who learn to keep their heads down, to stop contributing ideas, to do the minimum required to avoid notice. Then there is social media, the arena in which Carnegie’s warning finds its most terrifying modern expression. The internet did not invent cruelty but it perfected the conditions for it. It removed the face of the person being criticised, stripped away the physical cues that remind us we are dealing with a human being and wrapped the act of wounding someone in the language of opinion and free speech. What Carnegie described as a private, interpersonal phenomenon has become a spectator sport. The criticism that might once have been delivered quietly is now delivered publicly, permanently and often by strangers. We have watched what this does. Writers who published one brave and honest piece, only to be met with such concentrated contempt that they never wrote publicly again, a digital Thomas Hardy multiplied across a generation. Ordinary people who posted a photograph, a thought, a moment of joy and found themselves facing a wall of mockery that left them questioning the post and themselves. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/Green_and_White_Simple_Abstract_Banner_Landscape.png"/> Conversely, here is what the critic always forgets and what Carnegie understood with such calm precision “sharp criticism and rebukes almost invariably end in futility.” They do not achieve what they purport to achieve. They neither reform the recipient nor raise standards. They create walls. They create silence. They create resentment that, as Carnegie warned, may rankle across the decades and endure until death. The person being criticised, rather than examining their behaviour, begins to examine the critic. Defences go up. Pride asserts itself. In that defensive crouch, the possibility of genuine growth is foreclosed. This is not an argument against honesty. It is not a case for a world padded with flattery and empty affirmation, where nothing is ever corrected and no one is ever held to account. Accountability and truth matters. The question is always one of how; how we deliver what needs to be said, with what spirit, in what setting and with whose wellbeing genuinely at the centre of the act. There is an enormous difference between criticism offered in service of the other person and criticism offered in service of the critic’s own frustration, superiority or need for control. One is care, while the other is what Carnegie called it: stinging. Perhaps the most searching question any of us can ask is what we are hoping will happen after we deliver the criticism. If the honest answer is that we want the other person to feel smaller, to feel the sting of our disapproval, then we are not in the territory of helpful feedback at all. We are in the territory of punishment. Punishment, as any serious student of human behaviour will tell you, changes what people do in front of us. It very rarely changes who they are. Think back to the last time someone truly helped you improve. The teacher who believed you could do more and said so in a way that made you want to prove them right. The mentor who named a weakness but stayed in the conversation long enough to help you work through it. The friend who told you a hard truth with such evident care that you received it not as an attack but as a gift. That is what Carnegie was pointing us towards, a fundamental rethinking of the spirit in which we engage with the people around us. The world is already generous with its stinging words. They float in the air of every environment and every comment thread. They are dispensed daily, casually, without full awareness of what they cost. The remarkable, countercultural act is to pause before adding to that supply. To ask what is actually needed here. To consider the creature of emotion standing before us, bristling with their own pride and their own accumulated wounds and to choose, deliberately, a different way.Have you ever been on the receiving end of criticism that stayed with you long after it was delivered or been the one who gave it and later wished you hadn’t?

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