Imagine you got this new cool yellow shirt that you want to wear to your job interview, it has a killer print on it, maybe something that is related to your passion project. You decide to meet your friend for coffee and reveal the shirt and you are excited to see their reaction. You meet them and they tell you “damn where did you get this ugly shirt, weren’t you supposed to have an interview later today?” Ouch.

It’s easy to imagine a similar situation that you yourself have been through.

In these situations it’s understandable to feel a little hurt, and why not? We felt really pumped about our cool new shirt and it’s a valid response to criticism. But, there’s a choice available in that moment, not to suppress the feeling, but to decide what you do with it.

Our minds run two systems simultaneously. System 1 (the fast, reactive and emotional system) and System 2 (slow, rational and reflective). System 1 doesn’t wait for permission. By the time you’re consciously processing what your friend said, it’s already decided how you feel about it. System 2, the slower, rational part, arrives late and usually just builds the case for what System 1 already concluded.

However, there’s a move available before that handoff completes. A brief pause, not a suppression, but a question: where is this actually coming from? Your friend probably wants you to nail the interview. They said it bluntly, maybe poorly, but the intent was likely care, not attack. That question, inserted between the sting and the response, is enough to change what happens next.

Charitable interpretations tend to work regardless of the other person’s actual intent. If they meant well, you received it cleanly. If they didn’t, you extracted whatever signal existed and denied them the reaction they were after. Either way, you win, not by suppressing the hurt, but by deciding what happens next.

The word criticism originally comes from the Greek word “krinein” — to separate, to sift, to discern. So the original critic wasn’t an outside threat or an attacker. They were someone with the capacity to distinguish good from bad, signal from noise. A skilled separator.

Somewhere along the way, the word picked up darker associations: status, power, judgment. The evaluation became something done to you, not by you, or with you.

We have the ability to be part of the discernment. All it takes is a pause: to separate signal from noise, and feel more confident in the direction we’re heading.