Receiving Feedback: Assume

Episode Transcript

The Receiving Feedback Assume card states, “Assuming the giver wants to help can prepare you to listen. If you assume a threat is coming, you may default to defensiveness, which can make learning difficult.” And the card invites you to practice what’s called adjust the dials, which you can do by dialing down your defenses and dialing up your readiness to learn by thinking, “This person is trying to help me improve.”

Let’s dig into this one. So have you ever stepped into a feedback conversation thinking, “This person doesn’t care about my growth,” or, “This person’s only giving me feedback because they feel they have to, not because they have anything valuable to share”? Or maybe even, “This person is out to get me, so here we go.”

If you have, you’re in good company. Most of us have carried one of those stances into a conversation at some point. And to be fair, situations in life and at work can sometimes justify them. But here’s the problem: most of the time, those stances aren’t all that helpful because they allow even great feedback to be discarded. And here’s the key part: we’ve sort of already discarded the feedback giver before they’ve said a word. It’s like the verdict came first, so the evidence never had a chance.

Think about what that costs us. One key to wringing every last drop out of feedback experiences is making sure we’re in the best position to actually receive them. And often that means putting ourselves in the right frame of mind before and during the conversation, even if the feedback is delivered in a clumsy way, even if it’s delivered poorly, even if it comes from a person maybe we’ve had past struggles with, but who may have a unique glimpse into our performance that nobody else has. That last one is worth reflecting on for a moment. Sometimes the person you’d least prefer to hear from is the one who has watched you most closely. Their vantage point doesn’t disappear just because the relationship is complicated.

So the practice here is simple to describe and genuinely hard to do. As the conversation begins, try to recognize and then adjust the dials. Dial down the defenses, dial up the readiness to learn, and anchor it with the one thought from this card: “This person’s trying to help me improve.” You may not be certain that’s true, and holding onto that uncertainty is important, but this phrase can help counterbalance what may be a negative assumption, thereby putting you onto more neutral ground. And being on that more neutral ground, rather than heightened with negativity, can change your physiology, your listening, and what you’re able to take away.

That’s card 04 of the Receiving Feedback suit. In your next feedback conversation, notice where your dials are set before anyone speaks. You may find the assumption you walk in with does more to determine what you get out of it than anything the giver says.