Why We Find Receiving Feedback So Difficult and How To Get Better At Receiving Feedback (2022)

Have you ever received feedback either at home or at work?

Of course, you have, in fact, we are almost always receiving feedback in some form or another, from family members, friends, colleagues, and bosses.

And yet, isn’t it strange that in most organisations the focus is nearly always on developing the leader to be better at giving feedback? However, research says that it doesn’t matter how good the feedback giver is in their delivery – if we are unable to receive the feedback, rationalise and make sense of it – we are never going to move forward.

It's a complex and multi-faceted dilemma.

Feedback is only as good as the person’s ability to receive it.

If you read my book review of Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well – Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, then you will have a little background to the foundations of this article, as a lot of thoughts shared are based on the findings in this excellent book.

Let’s take a look at this from the following perspectives:

1.     Nature

2.     Personality

3.     Mindset

Nature – what your baseline is at any given time can have a huge impact on how you receive feedback.  If generally, you are happy and content with life, challenging feedback may know you a little but your ability to work through it quickly is evident.

If you are in an unhappy time, that same feedback can have or do longer-term damage to confidence and self-esteem.

Some of these baselines are natural; they are present from birth.  Some people are just more sensitive than others.

If one uses the personality theory of Carl Jung, a Psychologist, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality assessment tool, whether you have a preference for Thinking or Feeling will affect the way you handle feedback.

People who tend to make their decisions with a ‘thinking’ preference are practical, straightforward, and factual, and people with a ‘feeling’ preference are more values-based and tend to make their decisions based on personal values and will always consider how their decision affects others before making the decision.

But there is another fundamental difference to consider here and that is the kind of feedback thinking vs feeling people like to receive.  People with a preference for thinking will usually want to receive feedback from people they perceive to be best qualified to give the feedback, otherwise, they are likely to dismiss the feedback and usually after they have completed a task.  In contrast, people with a preference for feeling prefer to receive feedback from the people they have made a difference to and prefer to receive the feedback throughout a task or project.

This also plays an important part in how quickly you go back to your baseline.

Also keep in mind that as humans, we are hardwired to protect ourselves from danger, and although we are no longer protecting ourselves from saber-toothed tigers – our chemical responses are still there and this is the reason we often dwell on the one criticism buried among hundreds of compliments.

So it comes back to how quickly we recover from knockbacks and how we internalise challenging feedback.

Carol Dweck, Standford Psychologist, wrote Mindset in 2006 and it details the difference between a growth and a fixed mindset.

Dweck concluded that people with a fixed mindset have a fixed level of intelligence and can avoid challenges, get defensive or give up easily, see effort as fruitless, ignore feedback, and can feel threatened by the success of others.

On the other hand, people with a growth mindset tend to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, see effort as a path to mastery, learn from feedback, and find lessons and inspiration in the success of others.

So, it’s no wonder giving feedback is so difficult to do, however skilled you are at it because so much depends on the receiver of the feedback.

And to leave you with one final thought, it doesn’t matter if you are ‘thinking’ or ‘feeling’ in personality or whether you currently consider yourself to have a fixed or a growth mindset because what we all have is an innate ability to change and grow, we just need to want it and to find others who can support us to change and improve.

Reference and thanks to:

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well – Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen

Mindset - Carol Dweck