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Ask: How am I getting in my own way?
Here, our reactions are caused not by the feedback itself, but by our relationship with the person giving us the feedback. This is the challenge of we. The question
The dynamic that Louie and Kim have fallen into is so common that we’ve given it a name: a switchtrack conversation. Their conversation gets smoothly shifted, as if by railroad switch, from one topic to two. Soon they are each heading in their own direction, moving farther and farther apart.
we look at two key kinds of relationship triggers: (1) what we think about the giver, and (2) how we feel treated by the giver.
Want to fast-track your growth? Go directly to the people you have the hardest time with. Ask them what you’re doing that’s exacerbating the situation. They will surely tell you.
When we say, “accept me as I am,” are we really just asking for immunity from critique? Forgot
Being accepted isn’t an escape hatch from responsibility for consequences,
template for signposting is this: “I see two related but separate topics for us to discuss. They are both important. Let’s discuss each topic fully but separately, giving each topic its own track.
Often when we feel hurt, frustrated, ignored, offended, or anxious, we try to keep feelings out of the picture. We use the guise of well-intended coaching to instead offer a selection of “tips.” But we’re not really offering coaching
So when you receive coaching, a question to ask yourself is this: Is this about helping me grow and improve, or is this the giver’s way of raising an important relationship issue that has been upsetting them?
Instead of arguing with her dating advice, ask: “What are you worried about?”
When something goes wrong in a system, we each see some things the other doesn’t, and these observations are not randomly distributed between us.
That’s Systems Insight Number Two: Each of us sees only part of the problem (the part the other person is contributing).
Systems Insight Number One is this: Each of us is part of the problem.
in relationships, “This is how you are” really means “This is how you are in relationship to how I am.”
Marriage researcher John Gottman reports that 69 percent of the fights married couples currently have are about the same subjects they were arguing about five years ago.
“accidental adversaries.”3 If two people bump into each other enough and cause each other enough frustration, each will begin considering the other an “adversary.”
But often the true culprit is the structure of the roles they are in, which are (accidentally) creating chronic conflict. If we are each at one end of a rope and our job is to pull, then merely doing our jobs creates a tug-of-war.
It’s impossible to overstate the extent to which role confusion exists, even in the most well-run organizations.
Sometimes role clashes arise not from confusion but from clarity.
It’s essential to disentangle the individual from their role by taking two steps back and asking:
How are our roles contributing to how we see each other, and to the feedback we give each other?
You can’t take meaningful responsibility for causing a problem until you understand the combination of factors that actually caused the problem.
Meaningful accountability requires the manager to take a more detailed look at why the employee made the choices she did,
There are two common feedback profiles that are particularly challenging to deal with on the topic of accountability: shifters and absorbers.
Shifters find themselves constantly assaulted by everyone else’s incompetence or treacherousness. They are victims, powerless to protect themselves.
In this frame of mind, there is nothing I could have done to change the outcome, because the causes are all external to me.
Pay attention to your own silent switchtracking reaction to others’ feedback:
The next step is to be accountable: Figure out your contribution to the problem and take responsibility for it. Otherwise the giver will hear your suggestion to look at “our relationship system” as making excuses.
In these conversations, there are two big messages you are trying to send: First, I take responsibility for my part, and second, we are both contributing to this.
Pleasure is a rough proxy for the healthy and safe; pain is a rough proxy for the unhealthy and dangerous.
your “reaction” to feedback can be thought of as containing three key variables: Baseline, Swing, and Sustain or Recovery.
Whether we are easily swamped or nearly waterproof, there’s one wiring challenge we all face: Bad is stronger than good.
Bad news is emotionally louder than good, and thus will have bigger impact.
Surprisingly, negative feedback and positive feedback are mediated by different parts of the brain; in fact, they appear to be mediated by different halves of the brain.
who have more activity on the right
called the nucleus accumbens.
Research suggests a 50-40-10 formula for happiness: About 50 percent of our happiness is wired in. Another 40 percent can be attributed to how we interpret and respond to what happens to us, and 10 percent is driven by our circumstances—where
How you feel in that moment has a big impact on the story you tell yourself. If you are already in a dark mood, you’ll tell a darker story. If you’re frustrated, you’ll tell a frustrated story.
When it comes to feedback, strong feelings push us toward extreme interpretations.
When you feel lousy about yourself, you are effectively Googling “Things that are wrong with me.”
of the biggest blocks to receiving feedback well is that we exaggerate it.
He is easily triggered, and once triggered, his strong feelings shape and distort the story he tells about what the feedback means.
Each of us has our own set of reactive behaviors in response to criticism, our own feedback footprint:
It’s especially important to figure out how you tend to respond during that first stage—I run, I fight, I deny, I exaggerate—so that you can recognize your usual reaction and name it to yourself in the moment. If you name it, you have some power over
Figuring out your patterns is as simple as asking yourself this question: “How do I typically react?”
You do this by asking yourself three questions: What do I feel? What’s the story I’m telling (and inside
that story, what’s the threat)? What’s the actual feedback?
The point is not that everything we add to the story is wrong. But we have to be clear about what we’ve added, and be aware of our patterns over time for the kinds of things we tend to add.
But while the feedback is mild, the wound is deep.
