How defensive are you?

When criticized, do you ever...

How to be less defensive

How receptive are you to feedback?

These moves, and many more less obvious ones, are all defensive.
A little defensiveness is healthy self-protection...like your immune system.
Excessive defensiveness will prevent you from learning from your mistakes.
After all, why do anything different, if all your mistakes are someone else's fault?
Feeling angry because of changes imposed from above?
Attack the stupidity of your bosses and you feel better!
But this move can be self-defeating if it stops you from understanding their rationale and coming to terms with your own resistance to change.
If you have healthy self esteem, you should be able to admit your mistakes.
If you have low self esteem you will either be too hard on yourself for even small mistakes OR you will go to the other extreme and defensively never admit them!
When you anticipate failure of a project do you start telling people why it will fail?
You're setting up defenses in advance so you won't have to create them after the fact.
Advance defensiveness can increase the likelihood of failure.
Some people will even sabotage their own projects, when they start to think they will fail, if they can do so in a way that ensures their getting off the hook.
Recognizing and avoiding your own excessive defensiveness is not easy if you have developed a pattern of protecting a fragile self esteem in this way.
But you will not keep up with the demand in today's organizations to learn faster if you don't confront this issue for yourself.

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