Selfalot

Daily Quote: “Once you embrace unpleasant news, not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren’t defeated by it. You’re learning from it.” Bill Gates

Have you ever played a game as a child where you had to find something and all the other participants would call out whether you were hot or cold? If you were hot then you were getting closer and with cold you were searching further away from what you wanted to find. This was particularly great fun over Easter when looking for the last chocolate bunnies.

Feedback is exactly the same. You get clues that tell you whether you are hot or cold. These clues may be presented by a person or by a thing. In either case the feedback is giving you advice as to whether you are hot or cold in your quest towards your goal.

One of the worst ways to respond to feedback is to cave in and quit. When you were a child and wanted that last chocolate Easter bunny you weren’t about to give in until that bunny was found, preferably by yourself.

You didn’t give up because you really wanted that chocolate. As you get older you are more reluctant to hear that hot and cold feedback. You give up before you find that chocolate treat. You quit when the search gets too hard or you have far too many ‘cold’ calls.

What has most often changed is our perception of the feedback. When we were kids the calls for hot and cold were fun, part of a game. We didn’t mind if we got a cold call. It was just information which we used to try and steer ourselves closer to our chocolate.

As we get older we think of these calls as being critcism. We think because somebody tells us that we are going in the wrong direction that they are telling us that we are bad, incompetent, useless, stupid and many more negative destroyers of self-confidence.

Yet it is just information that we are receiving. We are being told that we are going the wrong way. We are not being told that we are stupid. Yet we take it as that. We reject it as information and take it on ourselves to consider it negative and damaging to our self worth.

Stop taking feedback personally and rather consider it to be information designed to help you adjust your path and find the right way forward.

Another destructive way of reacting to feedback is to get angry at the person giving us the feedback. We think it is the other person’s fault that we are not getting it. And we get angry.

If we are trying to learn a new sport such as golf and the coach constantly tells us that our swing is wrong, what would be the reaction? Do we take it on board that our swing is in fact wrong and we see the effect of it in that we take so many shots to get to the green, or do we get angry at the coach for constantly criticising us?

What would help your golf game more? To get mad at the pro who is trying to teach you or to listen to him or her and try to improve your swing? One would think that this is a no brainer of a question. Yet how often do we get mad at people who give us feedback?

When receiving feedback, don’t take it personally, take the feedback as providing you with information to help you along your way. Also don’t get angry at the person providing you with feedback. Rather take it on board and be thankful for the directions you are receiving.