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

by Douglas Stone

The other feedback profile includes people who are chronically immune to acknowledging their role in problems. When they get feedback or suffer failure, they are quick to point to everyone who hindered their efforts or must be biased against them: It was the finance folks, the new IT system, the neighbors, that squirrel over there. You might think this stance would be relaxing; after all, feedback simply bounces off you and nothing is ever your fault. 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.

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. It is sometimes hard to send both of those messages in the same conversation. They are consistent and logical, but to the person giving you feedback, they can sound contradictory. So think about whether the giver will be able to hear both messages in one conversation, and if not, start by taking responsibility, and once that’s settled in, circle back and talk about your observations about the system and your requests of them.

feedback giver may not be ready or able to acknowledge their contribution to the problem. They may still be stuck in thinking this feedback party is all about you. If that’s the case, there’s still something you can do. Rather than trying to force them to admit to and take responsibility for their part in the problem, describe how they could get a better reaction from you. You’re asking them to change, but you’re casting it (legitimately) in service of helping you change.

To understand the feedback you get, take three steps back: One Step Back: You + Me intersections. Are differences between us creating the friction? Two Steps Back: Role clashes. Is this partly a result of the roles we play in the organization or the family? Three Steps Back: Big picture. Are processes, policies, physical environment, or other players reinforcing the problem? Looking at systems: Reduces judgment Enhances accountability Uncovers root causes Look for patterns in your feedback. Is this a You + Everybody intersection? Take responsibility for your part.

Feedback can be threatening because it prompts questions about the most challenging relationship you have: your relationship with yourself. Are you a good person? Do you deserve your own respect? Can you live with yourself? Forgive yourself? Interestingly, not everyone reacts to feedback and identity threats in the same way and to the same degree, or takes the same amount of time to recover.

Happiness is believed to be one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality. 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.3 Famously, studies of lottery winners have shown that a year after claiming their prize, winners are approximately as happy (or unhappy) as they were prior to the windfall.4

Bad is stronger than good. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt elaborates: “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.”8 This observation sheds light on an eternal riddle about feedback: Why do we dwell on the one criticism buried amid four hundred compliments?

Inoculate Yourself Against the Worst Your footprint will show up strongest when the feedback is toughest. If you’re about to get some news—perhaps you’re awaiting word from colleges or funders or the Nobel Prize Committee—a useful way to manage your own tendencies is to imagine that the news is bad. Think through in advance the worst that could happen, try it on emotionally, and reason through the possible consequences. If that sounds like advice to be pessimistic, it’s actually the opposite. It is a reminder that whatever the outcome, you’ll be able to manage.

Notice What’s Happening During the feedback conversation itself, periodically check in on yourself and slow things down. Self-observation awakens your left prefrontal cortex—which is where the pleasures associated with learning are located.

As you get better at slowing things down and noticing what’s going on in your mind and body, you can begin to sort through your reactions. You’ll get better at distinguishing your emotions from the story you tell about the feedback, and distinguishing both of these from what the feedback giver actually said. Whether you do this sorting during the conversation or on reflection afterward, “separating the strands” is crucial to winding back the distortions that creep into your interpretation of the feedback. It’s like separating the soundtrack from the scene when watching a movie. You are pulling apart the different threads so that you can see each element more clearly, and observe how each is affecting the other. 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?

As we try to make sense of the world, there are a number of rules about the way the world works that we normally (if unconsciously) follow. They’re like laws of physics for stories. For example, we know: 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.

Feedback Containment Chart What is this about? What isn’t this about? Whether this person still loves me. Whether I’m lovable, whether I’ll find love. Whether I’m as productive as I might be on the publications front. Whether I’m a good clinician, a smart colleague, a valued team member. Whether my first YouTube video was as good as I wanted it to be. Whether I will ever make a video that gets positive response. Whether I’m patient with the kids in the evenings. Whether my kids know I love them, and whether I’m patient much of the time.

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.

Try looking back on your life from the vantage point of ten or twenty or forty years from now. Ask yourself how significant today’s events are likely to seem in the grand scheme of things. You might still find the current feedback challenging or the news regrettable, but in your final days, you’re much more likely to regret the time you spent fretting. Today feels big right now, but from the perspective of many days hence, it will look pretty small.

It’s been said that comedy is tragedy plus time. The sooner you adopt that viewpoint, the better. Humor—even or especially gallows humor—offers a release from the emotional tension of a miserable moment, inviting you to see yourself and your life as an amusing play, with the usual array of hapless characters and interesting plot twists. If you can see humor in the situation, it means you’re succeeding in gaining perspective. 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. You have to align yourself with the world and to let go of trying to align the world to you.

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. Others’ views of you may be incomplete, outdated, unfair, and based on absolutely nothing. Or most annoying, they may be claiming something about you that is actually true only about them.

When someone levels an unfair attack at you or has spent a lifetime withholding approval, compassion is not the first response that comes to mind. And yet empathy can have a profound effect on how we see another person and hear their feedback. When your dad yet again fails to register any appreciation for an accomplishment that means a lot to you, remind yourself what his dad must have been like. Better still, think about your dad as the wounded little boy he must have been, and give that little boy a hug.

So don’t dismiss others’ views of you, but don’t accept them wholesale either. Their views are input, not imprint.

Before we can decide what we think of the feedback we get, we need to remove the distortions: Be prepared, be mindful — recognize your feedback footprint. Separate the strands — of feeling / story / feedback. Contain the story — what is this about and what isn’t it about? Change your vantage point — to another, to the future, to the comedy. Accept that you can’t control how others see you. Don’t buy their story about you wholesale. Others’ views of you are input, not imprint. Reach out to supportive mirrors who can help you see yourself with compassion and balance.