Born to Create: How Creativity Sparks Connection, Innovation, and Belonging in our New World of Work

by Anne Jacoby

Feedback may be (ironically) the biggest unspoken challenge facing our professional lives. How to strike the right tone, deliver messages through the right channels, and provide criticism that’s genuinely constructive takes a lot of social and emotional calculus. But by the same token, of all operations, feedback—and communication in general—has arguably the greatest impact on culture. No matter how awesome your team’s work is, or how much customers and clients gush about your company’s services, if those triumphs aren’t communicated to any and all interested parties, they might as well not have happened. Even mentioning feedback can have a high emotional charge for many of us. We might clam up, feel judged, and slip into defensive mode. We suddenly feel less than, even though subjective feedback from one person is likely not a universal truth. Still, it tends to feel that way. At the risk of coming across as a little woo-woo, we must first learn to seek out feedback from ourselves. What’s the feedback in our own body telling us about this experience or work? What feedback might we give someone else in a similar situation? These “Love Notes of Resistance” are a form of self-feedback that I’ve learned to heed.