Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well

by Douglas Stone

Being able to say no is not a skill that runs parallel to the skill of receiving feedback well; it’s right at the heart of it. If you can’t say no, then your yeses are not freely chosen. Your decision may affect others and it will often have consequences for you, but the choice belongs to you. You need to make your own mistakes and find your own learning curve. Sometimes that means you need to shut out the critics for a while so you can discover who you are and how you are going to grow. Writer Anne Lamott puts it this way: . . . Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. You get one, your awful Uncle Phil gets one, I get one. . . . And as long as you don’t hurt anyone, you really get to do with your acre as you please. You can plant fruit trees or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all. If you want your acre to look like a giant garage sale, or an auto-wrecking yard, that’s what you get to do with it. There’s a fence around your acre, though, with a gate, and if people keep coming onto your land and sliming it or trying to do what they think is right, you get to ask them to leave. And they have to go, because this is your acre.1