How to Use Others’ Feedback to Learn And Grow: Sheila Heen (Transcript)

I mean, it’s the receiver who decides what they’re going to let in, what sense they’re going to make of it, and whether and how they choose to change.

I mean, maybe we’ve been going about this totally backwards. Maybe the key is learning how to take in the blizzard of feedback that we come in contact with every day.

Because, by the way, I’m not just talking about performance reviews and other kinds of judgment and evaluation, grades, finding out how you measure up or stack up, you know your marriage proposal accepted, rejected. I mean, those kind of judgments are the most emotional kind of feedback.

But I’m also just talking about everybody’s suggestions for you, the little helpful parenting tips from your in-laws, right. And I’m also talking about the look in my third grader’s eyes when she spots me in the audience, and those little nitpicky criticisms from my husband, which I think of it less as feedback and more as just John being annoying, right?

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I mean, feedback is really our relationship with the world and it’s the world’s relationship with us. I mean, what if we could actually see receiving feedback as a skill and we could get better at learning from feedback, taking charge of it, and driving our own learning, so we don’t have to wait around for good givers to show up?

Because I don’t know about you, I have some good givers, wonderful mentors, but mostly my life is populated by everybody else, right? People who are terrible at doing it, don’t have time for it, who are difficult themselves.

What if we could draw learning out of even off-base unfair poorly delivered feedback? What would happen?

Now what’s interesting is that we looked around, said, OK, what’s out there about why it’s so hard to receive feedback and what to do about it? And really there wasn’t much.

But what there was, was some research suggesting that if we could get better at this, it would make a huge difference. There were big rewards.

What the research shows is that people who go out and solicit negative feedback… and by that, what they mean is they’re not just fishing for compliments; they’re looking for what they can improve. Those people report higher work satisfaction. They adapt more quickly in new roles, and they get higher performance reviews.

We suggest that if you get better at handling everybody’s feedback for you, it doesn’t just change you. It changes how other people see you and experience you.

Now let me ask you this: I invite you to think about a piece of coaching or suggestion or advice that you’ve received in your life that you’ve rejected, you didn’t take it. I want to ask you: why didn’t you take it? Just think about that for a moment.

I mean, maybe it was just wrong; it was bad advice. Maybe you didn’t trust the person giving it to you. Maybe you were actually unaware you cared about their opinion which was unsolicited.

Maybe it was confusing or you weren’t even sure how and whether you could change in that way. Maybe it was just too upsetting.

Let me say right now: there are 100 people in this room. There are probably a hundred reasons you didn’t take the feedback. And you know what, those are fantastic reasons to turn away feedback; maybe.

I want to say right now that getting better at receiving feedback does not obligate you to take the feedback. In fact, there are reasons why often we need boundaries, because other people’s views of us can undermine our sense of self sometimes.

But the problem actually is that we usually decide too soon. As human beings, we are incredibly good at something that we call wrong spot. When feedback is incoming, I’m scanning it, because I need to figure out what’s wrong with it: who gave it to me? What they’re suggesting; why they’re probably giving it to me; where they gave it to me… really at my grandmother’s funeral, seriously.

Because if I can find something wrong with it, wow, I can set it aside, relax, and go on with my life. If it’s right, I have to keep worrying about it.

So we’re incredibly incented to decide right away whether the feedback is right or wrong.

Now the fact that you have a triggered reaction isn’t the end of the story; it’s actually the beginning. Because here’s the problem: you are always going to be able to find something wrong with your feedback. I promise. 90% of it might be wrong, but that last 10% might be just what you need to grow.

As we looked at the hundreds and, in fact, thousands of reasons and reactions that we had to feedback, we found that actually they boiled down really to three.

And so there are three kinds of triggered reactions that human beings have all over the world to the feedback that they get.

The first is what we call Truth Triggers. This has everything to do with… well. is the feedback correct? Is it accurate? Is the advice good advice?

Truth Triggers are tricky to figure out what’s true, partly because of what we call the challenge to see. The challenge to see what in the world the giver is trying to tell you and the challenge to see yourself accurately, because we all have blind spots. Actually I don’t have blind spots but I know that you guys all have blind spots, right? I mean this is the nature of blind spots.

The second kind of trigger is what we call Relationship Triggers. All feedback lives in the relationship between giver and receiver, and often we have a bigger reaction to who’s giving it to us than what they’re saying.

Conquering this trigger has to do with the challenge of we: to separate the who from the what and to deal with each on its own merits.

The third kind of trigger is what we call Identity Triggers. This is everything to do with your emotional reaction to the feedback and the story you tell about what it says about who you are.

What the research suggests is that individual sensitivity to feedback, by which, I mean how far you swing emotionally in the wake of feedback and how long it takes you to recover… individuals can vary by up to 3,000%. Yeah!

Let me say a little bit about what we’ve learned about this third Identity Trigger and this picture captures it for me. Many of you probably know, this is McKayla Maroney, an American gymnast, coming into the London Olympics in 2012. She was widely regarded as the very best vaulter in the world, for good reason. She had won gold at the last five world competitions and she had won by such a margin that there was no question among commentators. Obviously, McKayla’sgot the gold; the only question is who’s going to take the silver and who’s going to take the bronze.

She fell on her second vault, ending a 33-vault hitting streak. Despite this, she scored so highly she still took the silver. And this is a picture of her on the medal stand receiving the silver.

Now for those of you who are familiar with the research on Olympic athletes and medalists… gold, silver, bronze, who’s happiest? Gold! Hello they won a gold. Okay, it’s not a trick question.

But who’s next happiest? Bronze! Why? What’s the story the silver medalist tells about what just happened? Oh, I just lost gold!

What’s the story the bronze medalist tells? Yes, I medalled.

Now this reminds me of two things. Number one, the story you tell about the feedback you get has a huge impact on how you feel about it.

And number two, for high achievers, like McKayla, I think it’s when we let ourselves down, it’s the judgments and feedback we have for ourselves that can often be hardest to deal with. This picture went viral and became a meme with the headline: McKayla is not impressed, suggesting she wasn’t impressed with her fellow competitors.

But I look at this and I suspect she’s upset with herself.

Now psychologists like Marty Seligman estimate that our reactions to events in our lives are based about 50% on genetic inherited wiring factors, just the way you’re built emotionally; about 40% based on the story you tell about what happens; and only 10% based on the actual circumstances of your life.

Now who knows whether these are exactly the right numbers but it does suggest that in that 50% and 40%, there is a lot of play to manage identity triggers more effectively.

Let me say a little bit about the wiring piece. We took a look at three strands of research. The first is what I’m going to call baseline. In the literature this is sometimes called setpoint. The idea here is that each of us lives at a some set point or baseline degree of happiness or contentment in our life.

So individual events will knock you off your baseline in one direction or another but you’re going to gravitate back toward that baseline.

Now this is based partly on looking at lottery winners in the UK. About a year after they won the lottery, they’re about as happy or unhappy as they before they won. Also people with spinal cord injuries who become paraplegics, about a year, year and a half later, they’re about as happy or unhappy as they were before.

Now let’s imagine that the scale is one to 10, I mean there are people who live their lives at nine, right? Do you know these people? Like they’re unbelievably excited, thrilled about everything in their life. It really does not matter if it’s big… like oh, we got the account or small, like that was an amazing cup of coffee. They’re really kind of annoying. They show up a lot in the resilience research, right, because nothing can get them down.

Others of us live at two or three… always just discontent, little restless, seeing the glass half empty. Now why does this matter for feedback? It matters because if you live at a lower setpoint, it affects how you take in positive feedback. It means that the volume is turned down; it doesn’t give you the same emotional bounce that it gives other people.

So if you’re someone who says I just don’t get why people care about appreciation or positive feedback, what’s the big deal? It could be because they just live at a higher baseline than you do.

The other two factors are swing… how far do you get knocked off your baseline by feedback in one direction or another? And then sustained or recovery, how long does it take you to come back? And this is what I was talking about when I talking about differences being up to 3,000%.

Even inside your own family, certainly inside your work team we’re all giving and receiving feedback to each other, right? Now imagine you and I are on the same team. We get some negative feedback from the client, you’re devastated. I think it’s not that big a deal.

This leads me to tell you like, okay, you need to not take it so personally, like you’re kind of overreacting to this; you just got to get a thicker skin if you’re going to be in this business. Does this help you? No, because now actually I’m just giving you feedback about how you take feedback, right, which is really not helping.

So understanding your profile can help you understand your own reaction. So by the way there are challenges that’s either end of this spectrum. If you are very sensitive to feedback, one piece of feedback can suddenly become everything, and now can become forever. The feedback becomes super-sized, and you can fall into what we call the Google bias.

The Google bias is as if you are googling everything that is wrong with me. And by the way you get 1.2 million hits, all of your past mistakes, all of your failed relationships come rushing to the fore, there are sponsored ads here from your father and your ex, right? And it seems that nothing you have ever done has been right.

Then we call this the bias, because your search results are driven by your search terms. You’re not googling things I’m handling relatively well. If you were, you get 8 million hits and you’d start to have a more balanced picture.

In the depths of the Google bias, you cannot learn; you’re just too overwhelmed. And you’ve got to not hide under the covers and hope the feedback goes away. But dismantle those distortions so that you can see the feedback at actual size and learn from it.

Now by the way being insensitive to feedback, or perhaps I should say under-sensitive… although if you’re under-sensitive you don’t really care what I call you, so it doesn’t really matter… has its own challenges. I mean, one thing that happens is that you don’t even realize people are trying to give you feedback, right?

They say you know, Bill does it this way; you’re like good for Bill.

The other thing that can happen is even when you get it, like you understand, okay, this is something you want me to work on, I think I agree with it, I’m totally going to work on that. It may not stick in memory, because memory is highly correlated with emotion.

And if you don’t have an emotional reaction to the conversation, you have the best intentions in the world, but a week later you’ve forgotten about it.

Six months later, they say you know we talked about this. You’re like, oh right, we did. Didn’t we? Sorry.

The third thing that can happen if you are under sensitive is that you can be too quickly dismissive of feedback. And there’s kind of an interesting pattern in how we do this.

People give you feedback that you’re aloof or overbearing or intimidating; you think well that’s just not true, because I know what’s true is I’m just shy or outgoing, or I have high standards. Both of these things by the way can be true. We’re describing ourselves as we know ourselves from the inside based on our good intentions.

But well-intentioned people have bad impacts on others all the time. And this is still a problem that we probably need to address if you’re a leader or a spouse, particularly one who would rather not become an ex-spouse.

So I’m going to give you a tool that you can use that will help you lower the stakes, identity wise. Please do not leave here and go out and say to your friends and colleagues.

So do you have any feedback for me? Sheila said I’m supposed to ask you. Okay that is a terrible question. If you were asked that question, you’re thinking feedback about what, about your personality, your parenting, your pants, I don’t know what I’m supposed to talk about. And like how honest exactly am I supposed to be?

Instead ask a different question: ask for one thing. Ask what’s one thing I’m doing or maybe that I’m failing to do that you think is getting in the way. What’s one thing I could change about how I run our weekly meeting that you think would be an improvement? What’s one thing I could change that would make a difference to you in our friendship?

Notice I’m not asking: is there anything? You’re assuming there’s one thing, because by the way if you don’t know what you need to be working on as a leader or a parent, you know who knows, everybody else. Okay they have a list, it’s a secret list of all the things you do that drive them crazy. They make it harder for them to do their job or be your child.

So when you ask them this, they’re going to have an answer like that, they have been carrying it around with them. And by the way, a couple days later, they’re going to come back with a second thing that they actually thought of that they wish they would have said, so you might get one thing or two things.

But you get something specific and you get something that’s worth considering and at least discussing.

Look, none of this is easy, because whatever your triggered reaction is to the feedback you get, there’s a truth at the core of this that we can’t get around: which is that feedback really sits at the junction of two core human needs. On the one hand, we do want to learn and grow. I mean this is why people take up new hobbies in retirement.

It is the only thing that really explains the relationship between human beings and the game of golf, right, because that occasional good round fools us into thinking that we’re getting better. So feedback should be exhilarating, but the problem is we bump into this second thing… which is the need to be accepted and respected and loved the way we are now.

And the very fact of the feedback suggests that how we are now is maybe not a OK but the people around you closest to you want a few more upgrades to who you are.

And yet while this helps me explain my conflicted relationship with feedback, that sometimes it’s exhilarating, it’s a great source of joy. It’s also some of the most painful things in our lives.

And yet how many of you would say that some of the most important things you’ve learned in life have come from some of your most painful experiences? So what’s up with that? Why can’t we have a pain-free human learning system?

There’s part of me that wishes I could offer you that but in the meantime this work for me is about learning to understand and manage the pain, to enrich our relationships, and to get to the learning faster.

Thank you.

Resources for Further Reading:

Why We Are Wrong When We Think We Are Right: Chaehan So (Transcript)

Hacking Yourself: Dave Asprey (Full Transcript)

The Secret to Having Influence: Ron Carucci (Transcript)

1% Better Every Day: James Clear (Full Transcript)

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