Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.
Well, hello, everybody. How is it going? I'm so happy to be here with you today. This is episode number 68 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. And I am talking today about something that I talk about a lot in my day-to-day life. I lead workshops on this. I do a lot of one-on-one coaching, group coaching, training, all kinds of ways that I focus on this topic, and I'm bringing it up today because I've been seeing it lately really take the wind out of people.
So, our topic today is feedback and how to take feedback and criticism gracefully. The reason that I'm bringing this up today is because I am seeing this with one-on-one clients with personal relationships, with sort of group coaching, where people are really grappling with pieces of criticism or feedback that they've gotten, whether they know a person or not.
And while I've talked about this on the podcast before, I've sort of covered some of the fundamentals. It's about how to have sort of a curiosity mindset about feedback and how we can look at pieces of feedback to just try to find any value in anything that anyone says. We can look past the delivery and the tone and just try to find any kind of strain of truth that might be useful to us.
I've talked about these different skills. And if you're curious about these things, I'm happy to share more, reach out to me. If feedback is something that you struggle with and you want to work on, reach out to me, please. Thanks. But today I kind of want to give us a refresh and a new four step process to help guide you through taking any feedback gracefully and putting you back in the driver's seat.
So, you don't feel like it's this tidal wave washing over you. What I have seen recently in different sort of spaces in friend and family relationships where people will receive either a piece of criticism that's really directly offered, or someone is constantly just sort of going sideways, as my husband would say in a conversation, just sharing things that are not complimentary and that are slightly critical all the time, right?
In personal relationships, I've had people come to coaching to really talk about that and break that down and break down how painful that is. I've also had people coming into coaching, either in groups or individual coaching to talk about in social situations, how they feel criticized and critiqued, or in places where they're in a pandemic position of leadership, or they're in a position of contribution in a community or a group, they feel criticized.
They feel, or they actually do get pieces of feedback that are critical feedback. And lastly, I've been coaching people and been in conversation with people who are getting feedback that they're reading in online spaces.
That has really knocked the wind out of them has really knocked them off their path and taken away their motivation and their power. I don't know if you like, this is how I think about it. If you're watching a movie, a cartoon or a, or a live action movie, and there's a fight scene. I just saw the movie Dune, the second one in the series.
And so, there was a lot of like battle action in that movie. And so, if you think of like two opponents that are, you know, in, they're practicing martial arts, or they're in some kind of a duel or some kind of a battle, right? We've all seen something like this in a movie. And you think of how they both have momentum and focus.
And then maybe one of the two people swipes their opponent's feet out from underneath them. And that person then falls to the ground and loses their focus, loses their momentum, maybe loses, you know, if they're fighting with a weapon, whatever that weapon is. I'm not a big fight scene person, but this is just what really comes up, keeps coming to mind for me.
When I hear this feedback conversation and the experience people are having, the person falls down and maybe even gets the wind knocked out of them. They just completely have to start over again. That is what it reminds me of, these conversations that I'm having where someone receives words. That are critical of them, and it completely knocks them out.
It knocks them off their path. They lose their momentum. They lose their power. So that I keep seeing it over and over again. And I've coached a couple of people on it that said it was really helpful. So, I wanted to give you these tools. So, whether you are in an arena where you're leading publicly, and you read reviews of yourself online or your business online.
Or your art or your music, or whether you hear someone talking about you in a social situation in a community you're a part of, or whether you're just perceiving the way that people think about you, or whether this is in personal relationships where you're receiving critical feedback of you. All of these spaces are places that today's content applies to.
We give feedback so much power. And I'm going to remind you something I've said on the podcast before, that all of the sort of, research around positive community environments, whether that's work or any, or relationships or anything else says that we should have an 80, 20 ratios for feedback. We should be giving and receiving positive feedback 80 percent of the time and constructive feedback only 20 percent of the time.
So really let that sink in. Is that your experience? Are you getting people telling you how awesome you are 80 percent of the time and only 20 percent of the time? Is it critical? Because that's what it should be. And the way that I like to think about this is it's like a bank account. In order to be in the black, you need to continuously have deposits happening into your account.
That positive feedback, those constructive, wonderful, sort of reaffirming pieces of Insight and perspective and feedback that we get from other people that needs to be happening 80 percent of the time in order for us to be able to, in a really healthy way, metabolize that 20 percent that is critical feedback.
And unfortunately, it really doesn't balance out like that often enough. And so, what I like to do in my relationships is if I feel like I'm not getting enough positive feedback, I literally ask for it. And I'll do that in a way that doesn't feel weird or, you know, victim me, I'll say, hey, you know, I'm noticing we're really focusing on what's hard and what's not working between us.
And I wonder if we can focus a little bit more on what is working and give each other some, like some backup, have each other's backs a little bit more and give, you know, talk about what we like about each other a little bit more because I'm feeling like we're in the red, you know, I'll say something like that.
So, I just want to normalize that it's not easy to feel good when you're getting a lot of critical feedback and that you can ask for more positive feedback and you can groom and prune your relationships so that the majority of the people that you choose to spend your time with are giving you positive feedback.
That is just what's good for the brain and what's good for the heart and what's good for the spirit, in my opinion. Okay? So, I just want to set that as our set point. And now let's talk about that 20 percent when you are receiving either verbally or through body language or through written word, online, whatever, critical feedback.
We give it so much power and the reason that we do is because it represents what people think about us. so much. And as I've talked about before, our lizard brain is terrified, I mean mortally terrified, of being criticized. We think we're going to die if people don't like us. That's how the brain is wired.
And while we may know that someone saying, you know, something that they don't like about us, isn't a threat to our life. It's not a saber tooth tiger, right? Our brain doesn't understand that our brain really does see social sort of like fallout as death. So, it's okay. It's normal to really not like criticism and negative feedback.
We have been trained, especially women, to be people pleasers. And so, when we get that negative feedback, we immediately want to fix it. We want to fix ourselves. We want to fix it for the other person. Maybe we want to disappear. Maybe we want to fawn and fix it. Like I said, we have many different responses, but most of us do have some form of defensive response.
When we get some critical feedback, if we're not conscious about it and actively aware of how we're receiving this feedback. So that's what I want to talk about today. What is feedback? Well, I've said before, perception is a creative process. A piece of feedback is just what somebody else's brain is doing.
And our brains do wacky, wacky stuff all day long. Our brains are giving us all kinds of subconscious, like really non relevant information. And sometimes people just say it out loud or write it. And they're not really even thinking about why they're saying it. They're not thinking about whether it's useful.
It's just coming out of them. So, when we receive a piece of feedback, we can just think about that as someone's internal dialogue sort of coming into a visible place. We're seeing this internal dialogue on the outside of the person's brain. These are all the thoughts that are running through this person's brain because of their lived experience, their, the way they see the world, and for some reason they offered a piece of it to us.
That's all it is. It's not true. It doesn't, I mean, it doesn't even have, we don't have to agree with it. We can look for some truth in it, but feedback is just somebody else's perception, and it can be a gift, right? To know how different people perceive us and the world around us. But what happens is when we get one of those pieces of information.
We get somebody else's thought that they've set out loud or written, it becomes a new thought in our mind that sometimes we can't get rid of again. So, when somebody says something that we can't unhear, it becomes a thought that sometimes repeats in our head. And we know that our thoughts create our feelings.
So, if it's a real negative thought, it's going to send us into a negative feeling state, which might kick us into a really low value cycle of thinking where we're either really defensive. We're beating ourselves up or we're beating somebody else up in our minds. We're just spinning with anxiety. We're trying, we're freaking out about trying to control the situation.
It can really be problematic. What I see is our mind spin on it. Some people can't sleep at night. I hear people that just stop working on their projects because they take one person's random viewpoint that happened to be set out loud of all the millions of thoughts that people are having. This one person said something out loud that was critical, and we make that the truth and that this bullet that just stops the train and we stop our projects and just decide that it's not worth it anymore because one person said something.
I also see it change our self-perception. So, somebody says something that we can't unhear. And then we just think about ourselves differently from then on out. And oftentimes we just quit. We quit things that are important to us. This podcast is about turning your ideas into real things. And I talked about that a moment ago in relation to stopping a project, but whatever it is, you want to change a habit.
You want to try something new. You want to become a leader in a community. If somebody says something that's critical, sometimes we just throw it all out and decide to quit breaks my heart. It breaks my heart. And so that's why I'm making this podcast today. So, let's just, just sort of reorient before I go through these four steps to actually deal with any piece of critical feedback, whether it's in person or online.
Just remember that fundamentally, the reason this is all happening is because we don't feel safe when someone is critical of us. We either, someone tells us something that's critical and we no longer feel safe. Or I hear a lot of people on the inverse side say they don't want to take any feedback unless they know that they feel safe with a person.
And they also don't want to give feedback to anybody that they don't feel a strong level of trust and safety with. So, all of how we feel about giving and receiving critical feedback to each other really revolves around safety. And what I want to give you today are four steps for you, for us to create our own safety.
Because safety really truly is the strongest, best and most secure when it comes from inside of ourselves. When we're looking for it outside, it can disappear anytime we learn how to create a feeling of safety for ourselves. Then it's permanent and it's always there for us to access. So here are the four steps.
First, I just want to remind us that if we're getting a piece of feedback, it means usually that we're putting ourselves out there in some way. It means if you're getting a piece of feedback through an online review or through someone in a community where you're out and about, it means you're putting yourself out there and just give yourself a little pat on the back that you're trying.
You're trying in a relationship, you're trying in a community, you're trying to put your own ideas out there. If you get any feedback at all, that's a good thing. Feedback is data. And when companies get pieces of feedback, they don't take it personally. They say, okay, what do we need to change about our product?
But when we get a piece of feedback about ourselves, either because we're in a service industry or we're in a relationship, we make it about ourselves. I let people down. They don't like me. I didn't do a good enough job. So, what we want to do is first of all, just remind ourselves that feedback is just data.
It's just information and we don't have to know whether we agree or not in order to hear it. It's just data. We can decide what we think later in the moment. When we see a piece of feedback, we can just get curious to understand what the other person's experience is by listening. So here are four steps for you to follow.
Decide, do you want the feedback, or do you want to ignore it? So, for instance, if this person is sitting on the sidelines, not putting themselves out there, not in the arena, as Brene Brown would say, they don't get to have an opinion about us that we listen to. If we're out there with all of our courage and our heart and our love, trying to change the world or trying to change ourselves, trying to do good in the world.
And someone else is in the peanut gallery, just, you know, hiding behind a tree and shooting out criticisms. I just don't listen to it. If they're out there too, they are much more likely to earn my ear. But if there are a lot of people online that are just out there to criticize, and I don't, I don't want to hear it if they're not out there trying to put in their effort to number two, I want to just say this again, this is a second step.
If this feedback is coming because you put yourself out there because you're courageous because you did the thing that was scary. That means it's evidence. That you're being the person that you want to be, that's for me, what it is, it's evidence that I'm being the person I want to be doing the hard thing.
So, the second step is to celebrate. The first step is to decide, is this someone I, I think gets to have an opinion that I listened to or not? And the second one is, is this feedback coming because I put myself out there and if so, I'm, I'm going to give my, I'm going to celebrate, I'm going to have my own back.
Number three out of the four steps. If I do want to listen to this person's perspective. If it's not someone who's just trying to cut other people down in an online space or otherwise, and I decide I really want to understand what they think, if they've earned my ear, then it's time to just listen to the feedback as data about their perception.
What was this like for them? What exactly do they mean? This is when we can use our super active listening skills where it's not about us, it's about understanding what this person experienced. It's just a piece of data about them. And then the fourth step, and first, let me say that if this isn't a personal relationship, number three is so, so valuable.
This is the magic in relationships that allows you to listen without being defensive. Even when the person is talking about you, if you can listen just to understand what things are like for them and decide what you think about it later. It's so much easier to not get triggered, not get dysregulated.
And then our fourth step is to decide later whether we agree whether we see action to take or not. Was this person projecting? Were they working out some issue on me? And if so, I can love them and let it go. But if there is value to the feedback that they gave me. If there's something in there that I can learn from and grow from, if it will help me improve, then it's time to understand what do I want to, what do I want to do differently in the future?
Then it's time to say this feedback is a gift. I'm so glad I have it. I'm so grateful that this person took the time to share their observation with me. What a gift. This is going to help me grow and learn and improve, but we never use it against ourselves to beat ourselves up. All right. So, these four steps.
Number one, decide whether you're even going to listen, because there are a lot of voices out there. And if we let them in, sometimes it can be hard to get those voices back out again. So first decide whether this person has earned your ear, are you going to listen to their opinion? Do you want it in your head?
Number two, celebrate yourself. If you're getting feedback because you're in a relationship, because you're in a community, because you're putting your work out there, celebrate yourself. Good job. You're courageous. You're doing the thing. Third step. If you want to listen, if they've earned your ear, listen to the feedback as data.
What was this like for them? This is their perception based on their lived experience. Let's just try to learn what it is. It's not about you right now. It's just about understanding them, and the fourth step decide, is there something I can learn from this? Is there some way I can improve? And if so, this is a gift.
I can do something about it. What's my next iteration going to be? Ooh, I hope that's helpful for all of you. Please reach out and tell me your stories. Tell me how this lands. Get out there and put yourself into the world. The more feedback you get, the more evidence that you're getting, that you're a bad ass, that you're putting yourself out there.
You're breaking cycles. You're changing the world. No matter what kind of feedback you get, it's evidence that you are evolving and I'm here for it.
So that's what I've got for you this week, my friends, and I will see you next week.
Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.
