Giving Feedback: Pause

Episode Transcript

The Giving Feedback Pause card states, “After giving feedback, invite the receiver’s perspective and create space for a response. Filling the silence can dilute the message and disrupt their ability to process.” And the card invites you to take the challenge. Deliver your core feedback message in three sentences or fewer. Ask, “What are your thoughts?” Then wait for their response.

Let’s start with a feeling you probably know. So you’re late for a meeting or you need to get somewhere, and a person has you cornered, talking and talking and talking. Every gap where you might escape gets filled before you can use it. You’re nodding, maybe glancing at the clock, calculating exit strategies as their mouth just keeps moving. And here’s the thing worth noticing about that person: often, the talking comes from anxiety. Silence may feel dangerous to them, so they keep producing words to hold it at bay.

That same mechanism shows up in feedback conversations, maybe more than anywhere else. A giver delivers their core message, clear, useful, done. Then the silence arrives. The receiver is sitting with it, processing, maybe feeling something, and the giver’s anxiety interprets that silence as a problem to fix, so they keep going. They rephrase the feedback. They soften it. They add a second example, then a third, then a, “But overall you’re doing great.” And then it all feels like a weird feedback sandwich, and then maybe they transition to a story about themselves. By the end, the message the receiver needed to hear is buried under a pile of nervous words, and neither person can quite locate it anymore. The card’s language is exact here: filling the silence dilutes the message and disrupts their ability to process. The receiver needed that silence. It was likely doing some work.

Now, for the opposite pattern, which I’d say is just as common. Some of us step into the feedback conversation wanting it over as fast as possible. It’s like we’ve cannonballed into a freezing cold swimming pool, and we’re scrambling to find a ladder out. So rather than mindfully communicating, pausing, offering space, letting the conversation unfold naturally, we’re antsy, itching for the exit. We might deliver the feedback and immediately pivot to a work task, weekend plans, anything with sort of warmer water. The receiver barely had time to hear the feedback, let alone respond to it, and the pivot teaches them something too. This topic makes the giver uncomfortable, so maybe don’t bring it back up.

Both patterns, the flutter and let’s call it the fleer, have the same cost, which is that the receiver never gets to be a participant. The challenge addresses both with one structure. Distill your core message to three sentences or fewer, which forces the clarity we covered on the limit and anchor cards. Ask, “What are your thoughts?” Which is a genuine invitation, and then wait. Actually wait. The silence may stretch five seconds, ten, longer. Let it. Something is happening in there.

That’s card 07 of the Giving Feedback suit. In your next feedback conversation, notice which pull you feel, the urge to keep talking or the urge to escape, then try the challenge anyway. What the receiver says after a real pause is often the most valuable part of the entire conversation, because it can determine where the conversation should go next.