#52: Flirting with feedback.

I’m dying inside but it’s fine.

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Sunrise in NOLA, where I’m currently visiting Kendall.

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Last week at work, I got eviscerated.

When I looked down to see how bad the damage was — if my guts were bleeding all over the floor — I realized that I was the one wielding the knife.

No one else.

Yep, the words came out of someone else’s mouth, but I was the one who transformed them into a blade and fricasseed myself. Self-inflicted wound all the way. WTF?

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We live in a feedback-first society.

Rate your Amazon transaction, your Uber driver, your experience at the repair shop! Stay on the line for a one-minute survey! Fill out this comment card! 

You’d think with all this practice in the feedback cycle, we’d be awesome at receiving feedback too. Not so.

We can dish it out. But we can’t take it. 

Just like talking about the hard things (death, anyone?), receiving feedback initiates our fight-or-flight instincts. When we hear it, it feels like we’ve done something wrong and are going to get shunned by our tribe. It’s only a matter of time until we’re wandering the savannah without food or water, trying to stay upwind of the pride of lions on the horizon. 

This instinctive emotional response stops us in our tracks, covering our ears with the noise-canceling headphones of embarrassment, shame, or anger, driving us into the echo chamber of our own mind. Then we do a flaily dance in our brain, either punching back — “they're so wrong!” — or slinking away to lick our wounds and ruminate on how truly awful we are. 

In either case, we completely miss the point of the feedback: to help us get better.

For example, if I heard, “you interrupt too much in meetings”, I’d automatically think, “oh, they think I am a terrible person” and start my descent into a sympathetic nervous system self-flagellation. When in reality, they just think I interrupt too much in meetings!

And they’re probably not the only person who thinks that. They’re just the one brave enough to let me know.

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I want to be a champion of feedback. 

I’m already a champion of self-help. On the level of logic, the only difference between this and feedback is the source.

So in theory, I could take feedback from others with the same enthusiasm I consume Brené Brown’s podcast — applying it like a surgical scalpel to cut out the boneheaded things I do so I can forge ahead as a better team member, better leader, better mom. But logic is a sandcastle compared to the ocean of emotions. One shame wave and my best intentions are a soggy, formless lump, if anything is left at all.

You’d think after seven years of grief, feedback wouldn’t even be a pinprick to my thick widow skin. I certainly had hoped so… 

We expect our evolution in life to be linear: the more we go through, the stronger we are; the more tragedy we face, the less we sweat the small stuff; the greater the obstacles we’ve overcome, the more even-keeled we can remain.

Sometimes, but not all the time.

Yes, we’ve mostly learned how to “ride the waves” of our emotions. But even the best surfer falls off their board from time to time. Sooner or later, we will be sucked into a whirlpool of emotion that makes it hard to breathe. In that moment, instead of berating ourselves for yet another “mistake”, how quickly can we pivot our reaction?

When receiving feedback specifically, how soon can we shake off the defensiveness? Drop the knife aimed at our own innards? Laugh and relax, even while our cheeks burn with shame?

The problem isn’t that we lost our balance and ended up soaked. That was inevitable. The problem is that we have no compassion for ourselves when we do.

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No feeling is final, as Rilke says.

So how can we let the shame flow through and out of us without unilaterally appointing ourselves as our own judge, jury, and executioner for being human and fallible? 

We’ve challenged our emotional reactions at TL before — consoling when we want to run away, allowing ourselves to grieve when we want to avoid, stepping out of our comfort zone when we want to lock down, freeing our physical reactions when we want to disconnect and bypass. I’ve even posited that we use melodramatic movies and books to experience and thus release pent-up emotions. 

And yet this topic is harder for me. Because while grief is a bitch and fear is a doozy, shame is a double-edged sword. No other emotion causes us to turn the knife on ourselves in quite the same way.

But I think it also teaches us compassion and acceptance like no other emotion can:

• How to not run away from a simple conversation.

• How to breathe into the discomfort when you want to both attack your feedback-giver and yourself.

• How to sit in the hard stuff of life without numbing, avoiding, or any of the other ways we make ourselves and our lives less vibrant.

If we can do this, think of what else we can do.

Embracing feedback,

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Considering upgrading to help myself and my editor Leona dedicate more time to The Luminist and support our current non-profit of choice: Experience Camps for grieving kids.

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If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

• #22: The resilience experiment. If you can learn from “failure” without self-judgment, you can be resilient.

• #24: Skin in the game. Relying on our senses to get us out of our head and into our lives.

• #29: Learning from laughter to trust my tears. When we feel, we heal.

• #33: It’s okay to be afraid. Allowing fear to live, but not to rule.

• #49: How to console when you’d rather run away. A new way of relating with our discomfort around death and grief.