Unlocking Coachability: Overcoming Emotional Barriers to Effective Feedback

What if your emotional reactions are the very things that block you from becoming more approachable and coachable? This episode uncovers the hidden mental blockages that hinder our ability to accept and process feedback effectively. We shed light on the RIAR syndrome (React, Interpret, Articulate, Reflect) and how it distorts our perception during critical moments of feedback, leading to emotional reactions and misinterpretations.

Join us as we share personal stories and practical strategies to identify and dismantle these mental blockages. Through vivid examples, you'll learn how emotional responses can cloud objectivity, affecting your interactions both at work and in personal life. Discover how to enhance your self-awareness, improve communication, and approach feedback with greater ease and objectivity. Tune in to unlock the secrets of better coachability and open the doors to personal and professional growth.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:36

So, when it comes to approachability and coachability, I want you to think about something called blockage. You know your heart has blockage. If your heart or your valves get blocked, what happens? You have a heart attack, you can't breathe, you struggle. You know, physically, I think we go through the same thing with mental blockages. We all have them. What do we do? We tend to blockages. We all have them. What do we do? We tend to block things, yeah, but and then we ask people for examples when we get feedback, well, give me an example. And then that's a situational piece of content that we can explain away. No, no, no, In that situation John misunderstood me. And so we have blockages and one of the toughest things to do, and we teach something called RIAR, r-i-a-r, the RIAR, and I call it the RIAR syndrome.

Speaker 1: 1:29

We react, we interpret, we articulate, we reflect. We rarely, on our own, get to a point of reflection. So if somebody gives me feedback and says, tim, I can't stand that shirt, my reaction is what a jerk, I spent a lot of money on this. The minute we have an emotional reaction, when we are not calm, and especially when we hear things we don't like what happens, we tend to do what we tend to interpret. We start to tell ourselves something like we tend to interpret. We start to tell ourselves something like he attacked me, this is a great looking shirt. And then we articulate, we start telling other people. I'll give the most common example when someone is called into the office and they get feedback from their boss, it happens in every workplace, virtually and non-virtually. When we're in person, fellow employees say what did the boss say? Now they're at a reactionary stage, they've interpreted, they feel a certain way. And when we hear things and we react emotionally, we lose objectivity. We subjectively start to narrate the story and then we articulate it to other people. Well, he said my report was late. But what he doesn't understand is you know, julie was equally as late. You hear people around you do stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 2:47

So think about the blockage that you might have. Where do you get in your own way? I'll tell you where I get in my own way. I'm very fast on my feet. I'm very skilled in coaching. Sometimes I need to slow down because I cut other people off and they're not as fast as me. And I do that sometimes not intentionally, and it doesn't matter if I don't do it intentionally, I do it at the expense of them and I create a perception of not wanting to listen to them. That's not my intent. That's the perception I leave with people. So what's your blockage?