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

by Douglas Stone

Humor forces your brain to shift into a different emotional state. It taps that positive left side of your prefrontal cortex, where amusement lives. When you think something is funny, you are helping to disrupt the panic and anxiety that are taking hold, and to calm down those upsetting signals.

So understandably, we care how others see us. But at the end of the day, we have to accept the fact that how others see us is something we can’t control.

Speaking of little boys, when yours gets off the bus crying because a kid called him stupid, don’t tell him he’s not. That’s just asking him to choose between your story and the mean kid’s story. Help him find his own story in which to stand. Help him think through the actual evidence, what might be going on with the other kid, and what is actually true. If he can see for himself that he’s not stupid, then he’ll see that someone else’s saying so doesn’t make it so.

Their views are input, not imprint.

In fact, we often learn the most from the feedback that in the moment is the most distressing.

sellout. We can even be triggered by information that isn’t about us. The girl you used to work the register with at KFC was named head of NASA and your nursery school nemesis just announced he’s taking his company public. You feel happy enough for them, yet somehow worse about yourself. Because identity stories are influenced by how we are doing relative to those around us, our peers become the yardsticks we use to gauge how we measure up.2

Our ability to metabolize challenging feedback is driven by the particular way we tell our identity story.

We can’t control the feedback life throws at us, but we can make some specific shifts in assumptions that can improve our ability to take it in, stay balanced, and learn from it.

The feedback is the headline in our identity story, and all the other things we know about ourselves get shoved to the back page. And in this way, the feedback gets exaggerated.

All-or-nothing identities present us with this choice: Either we can exaggerate the feedback, or we can deny it. And often, we end up toggling between the two.

So the simple labels are too black-and-white to be the whole story about who you are. You are someone who cares deeply about being trustworthy or fair or responsible, and there are a thousand examples of your being each of these. And some examples of your falling short. That’s reality.

come along with stardust and wand-waving solutions. It was complicated, and your feelings about it complicated. You were trying to figure things out for your mom, and also trying to support your father. You wanted your mother to be surrounded by love, but you also wanted her to be safe and taken care of. You were trying to figure out how to do right for each of your parents in the face of a hundred unknowns.

In Difficult Conversations we offered three things to accept about yourself, and we include them here: You will make mistakes, you have complex intentions, and you have contributed to the problem. Accepting these is a lifelong project, but working on them makes hard feedback easier to take in.

Accepting the fact that you will make mistakes takes some of the pressure off. Any given mistake may still have the capacity to shock and dismay you, and the degree to which it highlights your blockheadedness is unfortunate.

Mixed in with our positive intentions are less noble ones—we can be self-promoting, vengeful, shallow, vain, greedy. We get tired and cut corners. We try not to lie, but forgive ourselves for occasionally landing just shy of the full truth.

done or failed to do things that got us into this mess. If we are going to learn from the experience and address the problem, we have to look at the whole picture. Which means we’ve got to close down the no-feedback club. Just because we have feedback for them (“Send the right documents”) doesn’t mean they don’t have feedback for us (“Don’t tell me ‘the attachments look good’ if you haven’t even looked at them”).

Accepting imperfection is not just a good idea, it’s the only choice.

Do you consider your traits and abilities fixed and finished? Or are they always evolving and capable of growth?

In contrast, the kids who persisted thought this: These new harder puzzles are helping me get better at doing puzzles. This is fun! The reason some kids kept trying had nothing to do with their interest in or aptitude for puzzles. It came from each child’s mindset. The kids who stopped assumed their puzzle-solving skill was a fixed trait.

People do get better when they apply themselves, and people apply themselves when they believe they can get better. This is true whether we are excruciatingly bad at something or preternaturally good.

These all grow with attention and improve with coaching.

Dweck reports that those with growth mindsets are “amazingly accurate” in gauging their current abilities, while people with fixed mindsets are “terrible” at estimating their own proficiencies.7

It’s not who you are, but something you did. Growth identity folks aren’t thrown by the contradiction and are motivated to seek accurate information in order to adjust and learn.

evaluation, but they were also hungry for coaching—how they could do better the next time. And indeed, when retested, the growth-mindset students outperformed their fixed counterparts.

We’re better off extolling their effort if we’re hoping to encourage them to take on new challenges.

Or perhaps it’s that working hard is a trait they feel confident they can replicate; whatever happens with that next puzzle, their hard-working-ness could shine. But the bottom line is that by focusing on a trait that emphasized the learning process, these kids were just as willing to take risks and take on a challenge.

You’re overpermissive? A bad parent? Now imagine that the feedback was intended as coaching—something you might learn from. In

some effort you can hear most feedback either way. Second, if you’re successful in hearing it as coaching, you’ll notice that your identity reaction is diminished or gone.

There are enough real challenges in life. You don’t need to create imaginary ones.

But the core of what Lisa is trying to communicate is coaching. Her goal is not for her mother to feel judged, but for her mother to learn about Lisa’s views and feelings.

it’s helpful to break evaluation itself down into three constituent parts: assessment, consequences, and judgment.

Assessment ranks you. It tells you where you stand. At the track meet your

Consequences can be certain or speculative, immediate or down the road.

Judgment is the story givers and receivers tell about the assessment and its consequences. You

Others’ judgments? You may find certain judgments illuminating; other judgments you’ll rightly dismiss. It’s one person’s interpretation, and you’ve got your own interpretation, thank you very much.

In every situation in life, there’s the situation itself, and then there’s how you handle it. Even when you get an F for the situation itself, you can still earn an A+ for how you deal with it. There are two pieces of good

And second, in the long term, the second score is often more important than the first.

getting a good second score part of your identity: I don’t always succeed, but I take an honest shot at figuring out what there is to learn from the failure. I’m actually pretty good at that.

Sort for coaching. Hear coaching as coaching, and find the coaching in evaluation.

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.

1. I MAY NOT TAKE YOUR ADVICE The first is the softest: I’m willing to listen. I’ll consider your input. But I may not end up taking it.

Don’t say to your mother-in-law: “Which florist should we use?” Be more precise: “We’re thinking about several different florists. Are there any you’d add to our list?”

A warning is a good-faith attempt to explain possible legitimate consequences (“If you’re late to dinner, the spaghetti will be cold”), whereas the purpose of a threat is to manufacture consequences that will induce fear (“If you’re late to dinner, I will throw the spaghetti at you”). These are warnings:

But the other person is giving you information about real consequences so that you can make informed choices.

Regardless of anything else, is the feedback giver listening to you and working hard to understand how you see things and how you feel? And once they know, do they care? Are they willing to modify how they share their feedback, requests, and advice based on how it affects you?

Psychologists tell us that the most addictive reward pattern is called “intermittent reinforcement.” Video games and gambling use this approach. We win just often enough to keep us playing.

The biggest mistake we make when trying to create boundaries is that we assume other people understand what’s going on with

Human emotions don’t necessarily cancel each other out. I can love spending time with you and still be anxious that you’re coming. I can genuinely appreciate your mentoring and decide not to take your advice. I can be sad that I’m hurting you and proud of myself for doing the right thing.

Using “and” to describe our feelings isn’t just about word choice. It gets at a deeper truth about our thoughts and feelings: They are often complex and sometimes confused.

Fill in your reasoning and be willing to field questions to make it a two-way conversation. It’s your boundary, but the conversation belongs to both of you.