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

by Douglas Stone

But the experience is ultimately exhausting. Shifters find themselves constantly assaulted by everyone else’s incompetence or treacherousness. They are victims, powerless to protect themselves. Life happens to them. In fact, life happens at them.

Vince and the board. Because no one is asking the systems question, Benny does what Benny can do under the circumstances: He starts giving the board budgets that are twice as high and timelines that are twice as long as he did previously. Now he comes in under (new) budget and on (new) time.

like Benny’s may seem like good ideas at the time. We’re often tempted to solve a short-term problem without taking account of the long-term cost.

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.

When you first realize that this Me + You intersection is in fact a Me + Everybody intersection, you might feel a bit disheartened. But there’s good news here, too. Me + Everybody systems can actually be fairly simple to change, because when one of you changes (i.e., you), the whole system improves. And in this case, multiple systems will improve. It’s a rare life circumstance where so much is within your control.

And that’s what seeing systems does: It creates possibilities.

Looking at systems: Reduces judgment Enhances accountability Uncovers root causes

Feedback can be threatening because it prompts questions about the most challenging relationship you have: your relationship with yourself.

Your particular wiring—how sensitive or insensitive you are, how quickly you bounce back—influences how you experience both positive and negative feedback.

“Okay, so that’s how I’m built. That’s how I showed up in this world.”

But for simplicity’s sake, we can say that your “reaction” to feedback can be thought of as containing three key variables: Baseline, Swing, and Sustain or Recovery.

Twin studies have led to estimates that about 50 percent of the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.

First, people who have higher happiness baselines are more likely to respond positively to positive feedback than people with lower self-reported well-being.

But it turns out that infants who are what research psychologist Jerome Kagan calls “high reactive” are more likely than others to grow into adults who are high reactives. High reactivity in infants can translate into a big swing for adults.

Bad Is Stronger Than Good Whether we are easily swamped or nearly waterproof, there’s one wiring challenge we all face: Bad is stronger than good.

This observation sheds light on an eternal riddle about feedback: Why do we dwell on the one criticism buried amid four hundred compliments?

Bad news is emotionally louder than good, and thus will have bigger impact.

Whether you swing wide emotionally or barely budge, the last variable is duration—how long it takes you to return to your baseline. Do you recover quickly from even the most distressing feedback, or are you brought low for weeks or months?

When you experience negative feelings like fear, anxiety, and disgust, your brain shows increased activity on the right side. When you experience positive feelings like amusement, hope, and love, your brain shows increased activity on the left side.

People with numerous connections effectively have a superhighway to deliver reassuring signals, while those who are slower to recover have narrow country roads.

Alita is likely a cortical righty. Compared with a less sensitive colleague, she’ll feel more physiologically aroused, more anxious, more depressed. It will be harder for her to find hope or humor (which are mediated more by the left side) and more difficult for her to calm herself down.

But Krista’s nucleus accumbens stays active, continuing to release dopamine and maintaining the emotional high long after the honk fades. For Alita, the positive feelings evaporate in minutes.

This sense of control over your emotional state means you feel more confident about your ability to cope with whatever life throws your way. You will tend to be optimistic that the future will be bright and confident that regardless, you’ll manage things well. That’s a pretty good definition of peace of mind.

But while aspects of our temperament are inherited, there is ample evidence that they are not fixed. Practices such as meditation, serving others, and exercise can raise your baseline over time, and life events that involve trauma or depression can have a profound impact as well.

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

but what’s certain is that there is a lot of room to move in that magic middle of around 40 percent. That’s the piece we have control over—the way we interpret what happens, the meaning we make, and the stories we tell ourselves.

When we are at our most engaged, most creative, and most energized, we achieve that delicious state of unselfconsciousness called “flow.”19 But when things go wrong, it’s worth slowing things down to observe the effect our emotions are having on how we tell the story.

In these examples, the feeling comes first. The feeling colors the story and influences how we perceive the characters in it. But there’s a second pattern between thoughts and feelings, and confusingly, it’s just the opposite: Sometimes the thought is first, and the feelings follow.

When it comes to feedback, strong feelings push us toward extreme interpretations. One thing becomes everything, now becomes always, partly becomes entirely, and slightly becomes extremely.

Feedback has its own etiquette.

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 it.

“How do I typically react?”

If you are then exposed to the real thing, your body recognizes the threat and knows how to deal with it. In

And that one thought really helps. I’m not fighting or resisting my thoughts and reactions; I’m just noticing them. Once I think, ‘Yep, this is the part where I have my overreactions,’ I actually start to calm down.”

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?

What do I feel? As you observe how you feel (or remember how you felt), try to name the feeling: anxiety, shame, anger, sadness, surprise.

As you notice your story about what the feedback means, don’t worry about whether it’s true or false, right or wrong, sensible or crazy; for now, just listen to it. Pay special attention to the threat.

What’s the actual feedback? Our mind takes what was said and immediately tells a story. It’s important to peel back that story and ask yourself, what exactly was the feedback? What was said? With Seth, it was his boss’s single comment about “everyone” being disorganized, including Seth. Everything else going on in Seth’s mind beyond that was his own story—his assumptions about what his boss must have meant, his fears about losing his job, his concern about how he would live with himself.

This often happens when we have open wounds. Your

Time: The present does not change the past. The present influences, but does not determine, the future. Specificity: Being lousy at one thing does not make us lousy at unrelated things. Being lousy at something now doesn’t mean we will always be lousy at it. People: If one person doesn’t like us it doesn’t mean that everyone doesn’t like us. Even a person who doesn’t like us usually likes some things about us. And people’s views of us can change over time.

and revising your story to be consistent with them. If the feedback is about right now, am I turning it into always—always was, always will be? If the feedback is about a specific skill or action, am I turning it into all of my skills and all of my actions?

Asking, what is this feedback not about? gives you a structured way of staying balanced.

Now, break it down into the two columns in the chart. What is this not about? It doesn’t predict your future. It doesn’t tell you if you’ll get the next job. It doesn’t say that you will never work in your chosen field.

isn’t much play in the joints. But there is. While consequences are “objective,” we still have our story about what the consequences mean, and this is where distortions and assumptions creep in.

when in the grip of upsetting feedback, we often fail to distinguish between consequences that will happen and consequences that might happen.

Yet in the moment of receiving the bad news, the chances don’t feel small. So you worry about it as if it will happen. We all do this on occasion—as if we didn’t have enough to worry about already.

And that’s further compounded by our tendency to underestimate how resilient we are likely to be in the face of actual loss.

swimming. So when we think about the consequences of feedback, the goal is not to dismiss them or pretend they don’t matter. The goal is to right-size them, to develop a realistic and healthy sense of what might happen and respond in line with these reasonable possibilities. After all, our predictions about life are just predictions, and they are often just plain wrong.

comedy is tragedy plus time.

The ability to laugh at yourself is also an indicator that you are ready and able to take feedback. Laughing at yourself requires you to loosen your grip on your identity.