Yesterday, I shattered the ice
To draw water-
No matter, this morning
Frozen just as solid.
–Rengetsu
Imagine that a friend walks up to you and tells you everything about you (incorrectly), pushes you around, and in the process greatly offends you to the point where you doubt your friendship.
Do you do that to your singing voice? 
Your voice is the result of actions taken by your body, and that body is always in flux and changing over time. Therefore, literally, you have a slightly new voice every day. You must take time to relearn it.
Your improvement at singing will be short lived if you are getting better at forcing your voice into places that it does not want to go. If you do not break the ice and pay attention to your voice, then you may not have a voice by the end of the day. It will have left you just like Rhett left Scarlet; frankly, my dear, it just won’t give a damn. It saw that you wanted it to be something else, and it cannot do that.
Accept that you are beginning again every day and treat your voice like a precious object. Explore it. Play with it. Listen to it. Challenge it but ultimately accept it for what it is.
Be kind, and your voice will reward you.
A very good point. It is SO true. As a singer,I always find it funny how we get the exact results we wanted, when it feels the best. Then, we’re like “Whoa. Am I doing it right? I don’t feel like I’m doing much of anything except breathing.” Getting to know the voice requires us to get rid of all judgment and preconceptions of what the voice should sound like, according to ourselves or others. Only then, can the true voice emerge. :)
Yes, absolutely. The “others” part is particularly important because we can be very sensitive to other folks’ opinions of us, regardless of their credentials. I was teaching someone recently who said that someone near to her (I am being vague purposefully) who was not a vocal teacher said that she was singing nasally.
She doesn’t in the slightest sing nasally, but I could see that she had taken it to heart. The person hadn’t done it maliciously, I’m sure, but we artists are sensitive much of the time.
What could regular misleading or outright malicious comments do to our opinions and expectations of ourselves?
Exactly. I’ve had many such comments that I’ve taken to heart. For instance, my high school choir teacher told me that my voice was too small for me to ever make it in opera. At the time, I took it as truth and it got me down. Now that I look back on it, I wonder how anyone can tell a 16 year old with no technique that their voice will never be big enough! That’s quite unfair, really. Haha. In the end, though, I think we have to take the things to heart that we feel mesh with what we know our voices to be…and throw out the stuff that seems highly inaccurate to us. That is always more difficult for someone who does not yet know their voice, at all.