What We Like to Hear. What We Don’t Like to Hear. What We Need to Hear.

I remember one or two arguments with my mom when I was little where she insisted she had told me something and I swore I’d never heard it. Later, when I was married, these arguments went both ways—one of us insisting we told the other something and they swearing we never did. I have since come to see, firsthand, how people will often simply reject something said to them and later swear it was never said.

The way our brains work, short-term memory is stored only until we sleep, during which our brain, among other work, transfers short-term memories we deem worth keeping to long-term memory. How does our brain know, when we are unconscious, which memories to keep and which to discard? It takes cues from our feelings about what we heard. If the memory brought a strong emotional reaction, good or bad, it’s a keeper. Memories that seem inconsequential to us are tossed.

When people hear something they don’t want to hear, we have the talent of ignoring it, simply refusing to absorb it, refusing to react. This lack of emotional tagging to a memory often causes it to be overlooked when it’s time to sort it out and keep it. Some people are better at this than others. Good or bad? That’s for others to say, not me.

As we attend workshops and classes and conferences, we authors hear a lot of advice on how to approach and pursue our given profession. The things we like to hear are compliments about our own writing, of course, encouragement and inspirational ideas on how to conquer certain challenges, beautiful success stories from our friends and colleagues, etc.

The things we hate to hear (well, I do, anyway) are stories about how competitive the industry is and how impossible it is to make it as a writer, criticisms about our own writing, whether we know them to be true or not, stories about the success of colleagues we secretly know are less talented than we are (but would never, ever say it), etc. Do we block these out? Maybe not, but if you’re like me you don’t exactly dwell on them, either.

Do we need to hear the things we don’t want to hear? Maybe sometimes. But I maintain that what’s more important is hearing what we need to hear from something we don’t want to hear. For example, when someone lectures us on the statistics of how many aspiring writers fail to ever publish, which no one needs to hear, what we should hear is, “Work harder!” When we are forced to sit silent during a critique group while someone cruelly dissects and eviscerates our hard work, what we need to hear is, “I’ve written something worthy of critique, all it needs is an edit.”

Is this being a Pollyanna? Again, not my call. But it is healthier, I suspect, to hear the things we don’t want to hear, instead of blocking them out, then spinning the encouraging and positive things we need to hear out of them.

I’d welcome your own “spin” on this in the comments below.