Guest host: Kevin Patton of the podcasts The A&P Professor and The Academic Podcaster.

We all do that, right? We podcasters often listen to podcasts with an overly critical ear. That's natural. Everybody does that. Carpenters naturally check out the quality of construction when they visit your newly built home. Engineers sometimes can't help but analyze the arches and beams and cables as they go over a bridge when they take a road trip.

But I think that sometimes all of us—podcasters, engineers, all of us—develop a habit of going right to those things that we don't like. Right to those mistakes or to those things that could be much better. That is, being critical only in the negative sense. And possibly never really getting around to what's working well.

I recently listened to a podcaster talking about having those critical, negative, responses when listening to other podcasts and pretty much giving up on trying to listen to them. And a thought occurred to me. A thought that brought me back to my youth as an apprentice wild animal trainer.

My mentor made sure that I saw as many wild animal acts as possible. We were working in animal shows at a major zoo at the time. But we'd watch circus acts as they came through town, or the next town, or the town just past that one.

After each of these animal performances, we'd talk about it. He'd always ask me—in his best Socratic style—“Kevin, what was the best trick in that act?” And I’d have to think hard about that, because I knew that he’d be questioning any answer I gave. And I knew he'd not reveal his pick until the very end of the conversation.

And as I answered him, he’d ask why I picked that trick and not this other one, which was a pretty good one, after all. Not that ranking the best of what I saw was all that important itself. What was important was analyzing each one deeply enough that I could rank them. That is, getting past my first impressions and casual judgments and have really analyzed each trick I saw performed.

And you know what? It worked. I learned to look at performing animal acts and how trainers presented themselves and interacted with their animals much more deeply.

My immediate goal back then was to better form an idea of what I wanted to do when I got to be a grown-up lion tamer and developed my own show. And I also learned that the first step in enjoying a wild animal act is to look for the best things about it—not the worst things about it. Even if it was a pretty lousy act, there was always something done well. Or kinda well. Even if it was a very simple trick for a person to teach an animal, but it was executed perfectly, which is probably more about the animal than the trainer, I had learned to notice that and appreciate that.

What happened was that I began to enjoy animal acts way more than I ever had. Even the lousy ones. Reflecting back on that, I realize that the big lesson I learned is appreciation.

I was an assistant sea lion trainer back then, later moving on to become an apprentice lion tamer. After a while, I switched to a slightly different species to train and became a college professor. Now past the middle of my career, I mentor other professors in how to teach well. In a graduate degree program that trains teaching professors, it's my job to critique the teaching skills of my learners. And you know what? Looking first and foremost for their “best trick” serves me really well. Looking for a student's "best trick" is a form of criticism, too—just not the negative part of criticism.

That “best trick” technique has worked very well for me on...