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

by Douglas Stone

Feedback includes any information you get about yourself. In the broadest sense, it’s how we learn about ourselves from our experiences and from other people—how we learn from life.

In the realm of executive coaching, "coaching" is sometimes used as a term of art to describe a facilitative approach to learning, where the coachee sets the agenda. We include this, but use the word more generally to include mentoring or any other feedback that is intended to help someone grow.

It is said that all advice is autobiographical, and this, in part, is what is meant. We interpret what we see based on our own life experiences, assumptions, preferences, priorities, and implicit rules about how things work and how one should be.

I understand your life through the lens of my life; my advice for you is based on me.

we don’t realize there are two separate topics, and so both get lost as we each hear the other person through the filter of our own topic.

So the switchtrack dynamic has four steps: we get feedback; we experience a relationship trigger; we change the topic to how we feel; and, step four, we talk past each other. To get better at managing our impulse to switchtrack, we have to get better at understanding the relationship triggers that create these impulses. Below, 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.

once we disqualify the giver, we reject the substance of the feedback without a second thought. Based on the who, we discard the what.

The first type of relationship trigger derives from what we think about the feedback giver. The second type comes from how we feel treated by them.

“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.”

Accidental adversaries are created by two things: role confusion and role clarity.

mesolimbic pathway—sometimes called the “reward pathway” or “pleasure center”—which

Others’ views of you are input, not imprint.

Give up simple identity labels and cultivate complexity;

Move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

They are simple because they are “all or nothing.”

All-or-nothing identities present us with this choice: Either we can exaggerate the feedback, or we can deny it.

You will make mistakes, you have complex intentions, and you have contributed to the problem.

You’ve been complicated all along.

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.

No matter what growing you have to do, and regardless of how right (or not) the feedback may be, if the person giving you the feedback is not listening to you and doesn’t care about its impact on you, something is wrong.

“mirror neuron response,”

Better: “I agree that there are things I’ve contributed to this. I’d also like to step back to look at the bigger picture together, because I think there are a number of other inputs that are important for us to understand if we’re going to change things.”

Process Moves: Diagnose, Describe, Propose

Positions are what people say they want or demand. Interests are the underlying “needs, desires, fears, and concerns” that the stated position intends to satisfy.