What Hannah Arendt’s philosophy says about not taking criticism personally

Receiving criticism in the workplace, whether on written reports and projects, presentations or performance reviews, can make us doubt ourselves. It can feel impossible not to take criticism personally because many of us tend to get our self-worth from our careers.

As an academic, I deal with criticism all the time, from feedback on my research to evaluations of my teaching. Sometimes, I feel like the criticism is directed at me personally, and not at the content of what I have written or the quality of my lectures.

In these moments, I try to disentangle my sense of self-worth from what I do and how others perceive me. The work of Hannah Arendt is particularly helpful here. In her book, The Human Condition (1958), the German-Jewish political thinker makes a distinction between “who” we are and “what” we are. She writes:

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world … This disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is – his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide – is implicit in everything somebody says and does.

For Arendt, who we are is synonymous with our unique personalities. But...

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