Taking Feedback Personally is Holding You Back
How to use one of the core principles of leadership (and life) — "It's Not About You" — to help you navigate feedback more effectively, reducing stress and wasted energy.
It was happening again.
Eliza’s hands were sweating, her jaw was clenched. She could feel her eyes starting to water.
Her boss, Andrew, was giving her feedback about how an employee she had exited tore her management and leadership style down in their exit interview.
“I know you were trying to do the right thing, but she took it badly. She thought your feedback was harsh and unforgiving,” Andrew shared with some concern on his face.
“I just don’t know what else I could have done. I shared with you my approach the entire way. I think I was being fair and clear as we discussed,” Eliza huffed in exasperation, throwing up her hands. Her tears were dangerously close to bursting.
“You know what, I trust you. I just had to share the feedback. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off to decompress, and then we can talk about your plans to replace her when you’re ready,” Andy said patiently and with care.
Eliza appreciated Andy’s transparency and thoughtfulness, but she was furious. Not with him, and not even with the employee who gave a negative exit interview.
She was furious with herself.
Why did she always take feedback so personally?
Years of therapy and coaching would take the edge off temporarily, but then the fear and disappointment would come raging back when another piece of feedback came her way.
She had begun to give up and fear that she wasn’t cut out for leadership.
Eliza didn’t see other leaders struggling with feedback the way she did.
In executive team meetings, her peers prided themselves on open debate. But when it was her idea being discussed, each challenge felt less like an intellectual exercise and more like a personal attack.
Even when she was having one-on-one conversations with her direct reports, when anyone gave feedback about her decisions or behaviors, she would immediately feel herself start to freeze up.
The world would start to slow down, and Eliza found that she wasn’t able to process what was happening around her anymore. The feedback would just start to play louder and louder in her head, while her inner judge would start to berate her:
“You screwed up again.”
“You’re just not measuring up.”
“Look, another person sees your flaws.”
“You’re not the leader you think you are.”
The worst part wasn’t struggling with this inner narrative. It was that she had stopped showing up in the conversation.
So wrapped up in her inner battle, Eliza would forget to be present with the person or people directly in front of her. Her silence and her unconscious body language (stiff arms and shoulders, tight facial features, little eye contact) unintentionally conveyed that she wasn’t open to hearing more.
Eliza wasn’t trying to ignore or disengage. It was just a long-formed response to protect herself and avoid showing the pain and fear she felt. She had actually improved her response over time, but it still wasn’t reflecting how she really wanted to show up.
As she became more senior, Eliza felt more fear about how she was going to navigate her feedback response, which made it even harder for her to react well.
How you receive feedback is a high-stakes opportunity to build trust.
Empathetic, caring leaders know how important receiving feedback is.
When feedback is free-flowing, you get information faster, your team member growth accelerates, and the team overall identifies opportunities and solutions more effectively. All of this builds trust.
When you don’t receive feedback well, you shut down channels of communication and create silos of information that limit learning and collaboration.
However, if you struggle with receiving feedback, reminding yourself that the stakes are high is not going to make the process any easier.
There is an alternative.
You first need to understand why you are not receiving the feedback well.
The root of most people’s challenges in receiving feedback well is that they think the feedback is an indictment of them as a person.
In short, they take it personally.
This isn’t surprising because feedback is usually based on your behaviors and attributes. Perhaps you are late to meetings, or you don’t create enough space for others to speak. Or maybe you set up surprise meetings and last-minute changes that create unnecessary stress.
If you received feedback on any of the above, it would be natural to feel like the person sharing it was judging you. And perhaps they are. But that’s not a reason to receive feedback poorly.
What if the person sharing feedback is doing so for the exact opposite reason than you think?
People generally don’t share feedback if they think it’s a lost cause.
They certainly don’t share feedback with someone they don’t trust or think is incompetent and unable to make change happen.
When you take feedback personally, you are forgetting the first rule of leadership, “It’s not about you.”
Feedback isn’t really about you. It’s about how your behaviors impact others.
Remember, few people, if any, ever think about anyone other than themselves. They are worried about how someone else’s behaviors affect their work or ability to succeed.
Your role as a leader is to help your team contribute effectively to the organization’s mission. So people are coming to you because they believe you can do something about the feedback. They perceive that you have power and influence.
And you do.
But you also have to remember that you simply occupy your role temporarily, similar to an actor in a play. You are more than your title and your job.
When you receive feedback as a personal judgment, you are forgetting that the person sharing their thoughts is only doing so in relation to your responsibilities in your role. They aren’t critiquing you as a person.
Truly strategic leaders start to see themselves as resources just like they view any other resource in the organization. They are a member of the talent pool that should be deployed, coached, and supported optimally.
When there’s feedback about a resource, unless it’s catastrophic or reflects a long-term negative pattern, no one gets fired or removed. It’s simply information that guides how to develop that person so that they can perform even more effectively.
If you reframe the feedback you receive as signals to be interpreted, you start to see it as less about you. You can create more emotional distance while enabling more cognitive rigor to more deeply understand the feedback and decide what to do next.
Just like gathering datapoints on any initiative or part of your business, feedback is just another datapoint to inform your decision-making, even when the topic is you.
One note of caution as you take this approach.
Not all feedback is created equal.
As a leader, your job isn’t to respond to every piece of feedback, but instead, have the ability to listen actively and discern if the feedback is valid and worthy of addressing.
Some feedback is an emotional response that the other individual is having that may not be related to your interaction at all.
For example, Eliza’s former direct report’s feedback to Eliza’s boss was unhelpful.
Her direct report was hurt because Eliza delivered critical feedback on how she wasn’t meeting expectations.
Eliza’s delivery was clear, respectful and specific, offering detailed examples of her behavior and the impact.
Eliza wasn’t the problem.
Eliza’s direct report let her fear and anger guide her response. She chose not to take responsibility for her performance challenges and instead, blamed Eliza.
This was a clear example of feedback that was not a reflection of a gap in leadership or performance on the manager’s part. You can only do that if you stop thinking about feedback that is directed at you as about you personally.
While this feedback wasn’t something that Eliza should take to heart, it did represent an opportunity for Eliza.
If Eliza had a healthier response to feedback, she might have paused and more quickly realized (1) the feedback was about her in job and not a personal attack, and (2) that the feedback wasn’t relevant, allowing her to not dwell on it and move on to something more strategic and valuable as a topic.
I don’t share this example to berate or belittle Eliza. I have been Eliza in the past and sometimes still grapple with my old patterns which are similar to hers.
I share the example because I want you to know the impact of not addressing how you receive feedback and how it wastes your time and limits your leadership.
Now let’s talk about how you can handle feedback differently in the future.
5 Steps to Receive Feedback Effectively
1. Prepare yourself to receive the feedback
If you are someone who defaults to personalizing feedback and it more often hurts than helps to hear it, try to flip your story.
Instead of saying to yourself: “They are sharing this feedback with me because they think I’m terrible at what I do”?
You say, “They are sharing this feedback with me because they think I’m great at what I do and can improve it.”
Take it a step further, you might even shift the narrative to: “They respect my responsibility in my role, and that’s why they are coming to me because they believe I can make this better.”
By following this method, you are creating psychological safety for yourself. You are making it feel less dangerous to receive feedback and as a result, you’ll be better able to take it in.
2. Clarify your intention
If you keep your larger objectives in mind, it’s much easier to be thoughtful and strategic in your response.
Here are some examples of what your intention might be:
Make the other person feel heard
Strengthen the trust between you and the other person
Understand how you can improve as a leader
Model a healthy response to feedback as a way to create a culture that fosters productive dialogue
As you engage with the other person, keep your intention(s) front and center, especially if you feel swept up by fear or other negative thoughts.
3. Listen actively to understand
You will only be able to receive feedback well if you hear it first.
There are several elements to active listening, but starting with these 5 will help you make the biggest impact, especially if you are still learning how to not take feedback personally:
Focus your full attention: Put away distractions like your phone or browser tabs or applications if it’s on zoom. People know if you are present or not quite there.
Verify what you hear: Repeat back what the other person says without adding new language and confirm if you got it right. This will help you digest what they are saying and make them feel heard.
Stay curious and seek to understand: Ask open-ended questions and don’t hesitate to dig a bit deeper on details like:
More information on the examples they share
Why something matters to the other person
How the impact of your behaviors affects them.
Body language & eye contact: Keep your body relaxed and faced toward the other person. Keep your eyes on their eyes and face, except when you are taking notes.
Take notes: Writing things down is a sign that you treat what they are sharing with importance. Don’t hesitate to pause the conversation at the beginning to get a notebook and pen. Typing is ok as well, but be sure to tell the other person that all you’re doing is taking notes, or you risk them thinking you are answering emails or Slack messages.
Sometimes your questions and attentiveness might feel intense. Share in advance that you want to listen actively and explain what you’ll be seeking to do so that they don’t misread your level of interest as a threat. Too
4. Share appreciation for the person sharing
One of the easiest ways to remember that the conversation isn’t about you, even if the feedback is centered on your behaviors, is to thank the person sharing.
Receiving feedback can feel hard, but giving it is often way more difficult. The person sharing had to overcome their fear of hurting your feelings, damaging your relationship, and worries about not landing their message.
In short, the stakes are often higher for the person sharing.
You can recognize that level of effort and care by acknowledging the person for taking the time to come to you. They chose to invest in your relationship. Reward that investment.
Commit to reflecting on what they shared and following up if needed. Importantly, you don’t have to respond in the moment to the specific feedback or make any promises.
Especially if what they shared with you is complex or elicits an emotional response from you, you are much better off not responding in the moment and letting your emotions settle first to avoid either overreacting or overpromising.
5. Reflect and make a decision about relevance
After you receive the feedback, immediately schedule time to reflect in the next 24 hours on what you heard. Keep the cycle tight so that you don’t forget what was shared and can make a decision on what to do next, including nothing.
If you’re feeling unclear about how to process what was shared, or if the information was high-stakes, ask for help. Bring in a trusted colleague, boss, mentor, or someone else you can rely upon to help you make sense of what you heard.
Once you are clear about whether the feedback is relevance and/or worth addressing, now you can make a plan about what do to next.
Feedback isn’t rocket science, but responding well requires skill.
What we’re doing here is something both simple and profound.
You are transforming what might feel like a painful experience into one that feels productive and helpful. By making this shift, you are not only helping yourself, but your entire team.
The steps above might feel long and even overly complex. However, once you master your ability to receive feedback without taking it personally, these steps can start to collapse, and some of them will take less than a second to execute.
When you are still building your muscles around how you respond, you need to take it slower. Just like building muscles at the gym, you want to proceed with caution so that you don’t cause any damage you learn.
If you’ve got a voice in your head saying something like, “I’m too old for this. I should have learned this earlier. I don’t know that I can change my habits this late in the game,” do yourself a favor, don’t listen.
You’re never too old or too far down the path to learn new habits.
It’s never too late to make a change for the better.
Leaders who take feedback personally spend too much time suffering from it, and risk hurting their hard-won relationships they’ve built with the people on their team.
Once you can see that feedback directed at you is simply information that you get to take in, assess its relevance, and determine what is the best course of action, you are now able to reclaim your time, build stronger relationships, and make stronger decisions.
Your Turn
If you found this guide helpful, download my free Receiving Feedback Well Guide + Worksheet so that you can reference my tips on the go.
What have you found has helped you receive feedback more effectively? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
If this post resonated with you, share it with a friend or colleague who might benefit. You might even want to practice with them to strengthen how you both respond to feedback.
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