How do I get over being depressed over a poor employee performance evaluation?

Someone wise once gave me a fantastic piece of advice.  When you receive negative criticism, instead of seeing it as a personal insult, approach it instead as useful feedback. 

Sometimes our image of ourself does not match other peoples perceptions of us.  Sometimes we do the things we do with good intention and feel desperately hurt when the outcome is not recognised or worse still criticised. 

It's natural to feel deflated and a little depressed when your intentions have been good and you have been putting our best foot forward, yet you still recieved a poor employee performance evaluation. But how can we make the most of this useful feedback? 

The first thing to do after you receieve a poor employee performance evaluation is to go away and reflect a little.  Take a neutral position and look at the situation from the point of view of the person who has evaluated your performance.  Assume there is no malice involved and try to see what they see. 

Where is their obvious room for improvement?  If you were the person doing the evaluation, what would you want, need, expect from your employee?  Are you meeting those expectations?  After looking at the situation through someone else's eyes and writing down the areas that you can see that need to be improved, take this list to the person who has evaluated you. 

Thank them for their evaluation and be honest. Tell them that, at first, you felt deflated by the less than glorious employee performance evaluation, but you went away and thought about it because this job matters to you, and you are wanting to get it right.  Ask them to go over each negative aspect with you, asking for detail such as, "Instead of doing X in that situation what would you like or expect to see in my performance?"  

Involve your evaluator in your improvement process.  Ask for specifics such as, "Exactly how would you like me to improve that aspect of my work, and is there any advice that you can give me so that I can make sure I meet your expectations next time?"  

What you are doing with this approach is setting up a collaboration between you and the person that is evaluating you.  Instead of someone else retaining power and handing over the responsibility entirely to you, you are seeking to share the responsibility for your performance with your evaluator by both of you acknowledging exactly what needs to improve and how it can be done.  When you are clear about what is expected, it lets you ask relevant questions which help you to achieve the improvement.  

Also, take heart; life is a learning curve and we can't know how to do something until we have learned how to. And even then, when situations change sometimes, we have to re-learn what we thought we knew in new and unfamiliar ways.  Learn to receive negative evaluations as your greatest opportunities to evolve and grow.  Focus your mind on how you would like to become better and better at what you do.  Imagine how great it will feel when you exceed the expectations of your evaluator and yourself, to become fully and confidently competent in all that you do.