No matter how sweetly it is packaged, criticism hurts. It comes disguised as feedback from your boss or professors, belittling taunts from friends, customer complaints and nagging from family members who seem to get secret satisfaction in pointing out your flaws.

There is an amazing technique to handle criticism well and come out a winner no matter who said what about you.

Criticism hurts because of the delivery, sometimes people are directly negative, but it also hurts because somewhere we identify with it. Criticism exposes our flaws that we want no one to know. That's why we feel bad and want to fight off the criticizer.

Pretending to be thick-skinned or acting like criticism doesn’t affect you doesn't work. At least not for long.

You will still be carrying the hurt forever. We want to process this hurt, and feel truly motivated to do better than before. That is when you benefit from criticism. You feel empowered instead of beaten down.

EFT or tapping is a great way to process the hurt and extract all that is useful in someone's criticism of you. If you've never done tapping before, it is a mix of eastern acupuncture and western psychology that brings surprisingly fast relief for many emotional and physical problems. All you need to do is focus on what is making you feel bad and tap on certain points on the face and body.

Say you go to work every day and every day you see a colleague who is quite critical of you. When you come home, tap on the EFT points focusing on this person's behaviour and how it makes you feel. Do this until you are no longer be triggered by this person's remarks. You may notice that they will lose interest in you or they will move out or something better will happen. All because you are no longer transmitting a "come, pick on me" signal.

Learn more about how to use EFT to handle criticism and deal with critical people: http://tap-easy.com/eft-fear-criticism

Author's Bio: 

Sonal Pandey (http://tap-easy.com/about) is a computer engineer turned self-help blogger. Her philosophy on self-help advice is that it should be targeted, effective, and easy to incorporate quickly. Through her blog, Tap Easy (http://tap-easy.com), she offers Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) tapping scripts and videos to help you overcome limiting beliefs, raise self-esteem, release anxiety and stress to bring positive changes naturally.