[thewebcount]

TL;DR - it helps to learn about patterns of thinking, particularly cognitive biases

Long version: Plenty of good advice here, but I wanted to add something that helped me in this regard. I grew up in a household where everything was criticized for any and all reasons, most of which could be boiled down to "I feel bad and in order to make myself feel better, I'm going to do something that makes you feel worse than me." Being born into that kind of atmosphere makes it very difficult to understand that a) it's not normal, and b) criticism (when used appropriately) isn't about making a person feel bad, it's about trying to improve something. It was just never used appropriately in my household growing up.

So many (way too many) years later, I started getting into the skeptical movement. What initially attracted me was that it was about tearing apart stupid ideas (so pretty similar to what I grew up in). Someone would claim to have a photograph of Sasquatch or a UFO, and people would show how the photo wasn't what it claimed. But it was a lot deeper than that. There were doctors debunking bogus medical cures, and people pointing out that businesses were scams, etc.

That was all well and good, but as I read more and more about how to get better at spotting these sorts of things I read a lot about cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Something soaked in because I found as I understood my own thinking better, I had a better understanding of what could and likely couldn't be other people's motivations for saying the things they said. Whereas before I might think, "Oh that person's just saying x because they dislike me," or "because they're jealous that I have y," or whatever, these days I'm better at saying, "Well, they might just be saying that because they don't like me, or it could be they don't have the same experience as me, and don't understand my motivation for why I think like this. I can try explaining my motivation and see if they understand or not. And maybe they'll understand or maybe they'll explain something to me to help me understand their point of view." (It's more complicated than that, but it's hard to explain in a comment.) Anyway, a lot of the pain of getting criticized evaporated when I could reason better about other people's motivations.