Processing Feedback: Emotion

Episode Transcript

The Processing Feedback Emotion card states, “Defensiveness can be a map pointing to something you want to protect. Rather than suppress the feeling, try exploring it to find the roots and values underneath.” And the card invites you to practice the label, which you can do by naming the feeling and completing this sentence: “I’m feeling emotion about this feedback because I’m afraid it means X about me.”

Let’s spend some real time with this one. So as an ethical leadership professor, I often teach and write about how emotion and the discomfort it can elicit is not something to avoid, but is data to be understood. And yet many of us have built the opposite habit. A tinge of emotional discomfort arrives, fear, anxiety, agitation, sadness, you name it, and we do whatever we can to turn away from it. Having a snack, scrolling on social media, turning the channel. We all have our own kind of menu of avoidant strategies, and most of us know our menu pretty well.

Now, to be fair, that approach isn’t always wrong. There are emotional states we aren’t yet ready for or don’t yet have the resources to deal with, and turning away can be what we genuinely need in that moment. But here’s the trap: avoidance can also become an infinite pattern. Year after year, the turning away becomes our default, and the emotion we keep running from keeps arriving, because running from it is precisely what keeps it unresolved. We run, it returns, we run again, and we just continue the cycle infinitely. If our avoidance strategy is something harmful to our body or mind, that harm builds up.

But life is a curriculum, and these states are part of it. So often, if we can turn toward the emotion, feel it, feel what it’s like to feel it, name it, ask questions about where it comes from, the way we would with a friend, we gain a better understanding of it and of who we are. And many people find, as I have and countless others have, that the intensity of the emotion actually dissipates when we stop fleeing it, that it returns less and less, and that the cycle we’ve been in gets disrupted with what is usually a far healthier pattern.

If that sounds backwards, consider the research from all sorts of domains. To name just one, there’s the pioneering work of mindfulness-based stress reduction by Jon Kabat-Zinn, which found that patients dealing with tremendous pain in many cases actually experience less pain and less mental suffering about their pain when they consciously directed attention toward the unpleasant sensation rather than scrambling to avoid it. It’s counterintuitive, and it’s at the very heart of this card.

So how does this apply to feedback? When challenging feedback stirs something in you, defensiveness, a sting, a knot, anything discomforting, that feeling is a map and may be pointing to something you want to protect, something fragile. The label helps you read the map. “I’m feeling emotion about this feedback because I’m afraid it means X about me.” That sentence does something powerful. It moves the emotion from a fog you’re inside of to an object you can now examine. And underneath the fear, you’ll often find some kind of value. You’re afraid the feedback means you’re careless because you deeply value craftsmanship, for example. The emotion was guarding something worth knowing about yourself.

That’s card 06 of the Processing Feedback suit. The next time feedback stirs discomfort, see if you can pause before reaching for your favorite avoidance strategy, and if possible, try to understand what that avoidance strategy even is. Turn toward it, even briefly. Name it. You may find the feeling loses some intensity in the naming, and also that it leaves behind a clearer picture of what you care about most.