In this month’s blog I would like to tackle the concept of critical friend. In the next NL you will find an article on this topic. What all critical friends have in common is that they are good listeners and respond to problems and questions with integrity and a positive attitude. Of course the two words appear to contradict one another. They are like the oxymoron ‘a terrible beauty is born’ in a poem by Yeats. A critical friend is a bit like ‘hate the sin but love the sinner.’ Do you agree?
I very much agree with ‘hate the sin but love the sinner’…many a time I’ve realised that I might fall for the same ‘sins’, not continually but, depending on the nature of the problem, every now and then a variety of ‘sins’ in disguise keep haunting me.
I reckon being a critical friend may be as helpful and challenging as having one because this is a two-way process – not only do we comment or help colleagues with ‘mirroring’ their experience and become more conscious of their actions but also, through this process, we tend to realise how much of this we actually do and experience. Being an outsider, an objective observer, can also help us realise, analyse and overcome owr own ‘sins’…and get ourselves a critical friend!