Why is Negative Feedback so Hard to Take?

Hey, everybody, Dr. Robyn McKay here, and welcome to this week's episode of Mindset Rx. It's your place to be, if you are an emotionally intelligent leader and you're ready to set the tone for a positive, productive, and purposeful week, month, year, life, legacy, however you wanna think about that. And I have to tell you, I'm broadcasting for the first time from my new office, my husband and I moved just a few miles down the road, but to a much more peaceful location. Most days today we have some maintenance people and electrical people outside, so hopefully, it'll be a quiet broadcast for us today but I also appreciate your grace and your understanding as we are still under construction here at Robyn McKay headquarters. So I'm so glad that you're here, if you're watching live, say hello in the comments, I'd love to see who's here with me, if you're watching the recording on LinkedIn live or you're listening to our podcast, I'd love to hear from you as well, so be sure to drop a line in the comments and let us know that you're here with us. So today's topic, 'Why is negative feedback so hard to take sometimes?'

And I'm gonna get to that in a minute, before I do, I just wanted to share with you that tonight is our next executive women's roundtable for women leaders, and we are clearing the decks from 2021 and getting ready to set the tone for our legacy moving forward into 2022 and beyond. This goes beyond goal setting and it's... I don't know, if you've been around for a while, you might have heard me talk about SMART goals and how they really have never worked for me, and they usually don't work for my clients either. So I have a different way of doing that, and it starts by reflecting on this past year and savoring our wins and letting go and forgiving our losses our defeats, our challenges or struggles and so on. So if you've been thinking about getting a ticket and you haven't done so yet, we will drop the link to the tickets in the show notes along with a 50% off promo code. So you can join us, you are a high level woman leader, and usually it's tech, healthcare, and other high-performing fields, including entrepreneurship and the law, finance, FinTech, and so on. And you're looking for a new way to set your goals, maybe your old way of goal setting isn't working anymore, is not working as well.

Certainly, we're at a very different time in the world, and different times call for different technologies, different practices, different perspectives, and the best way that I know to do that is what I'm gonna be sharing tonight on the executive roundtable for women leaders. We're talking about the future of women in leadership. So I wanna invite you to that, if that's up your alley, again, we'll drop the link in the show notes so you can join us, there's still time. Oh, and by the way, if you aren't able to join us live, that's cool, just go ahead and register yourself and we will send you the recording. The recording promises to be just as potent as the live session, and one of the women who attends these regularly said, "It's always fruitful. It's always fruitful to attend." So that's your invitation today, and now let's just go ahead and give ourselves an opportunity to come into the present moment. Breathing in love and grace, breathing out everything that doesn't serve you, putting aside everything else, just for the next 15 minutes or so. Maybe closing out all of the other screens you've got open on your computer, and just coming into a place of quietude for yourself.

When I do this, I always notice my hips on my chair, and I kind of feel my hips just drop in, and I notice my feet on the ground, and I notice my shoulders and I maybe pull them up and drop them down so that we don't walk around with our shoulders up around our ears. Up around our knees, that would be a feat. Alright. So let's go ahead and breathe in and out again, and we're gonna start with this content today, and let me just give you a little bit of background on this. I was talking with a woman who's worked with me periodically for the past 10 years or so, actually, she is a physician, she's somebody who is well-known in her field, and she told me recently, she's had a hard time with receiving feedback. And we talked about that because it's not just the feedback that we receive in our jobs, in our careers, in our... Whatever it is, a 360 review, an annual review, a semi-annual review, whatever it is.

Or just like bad press in social media or talking about something or somebody behind the water cooler, if you will, the virtual water cooler at this point. But when I was reflecting on what she was sharing with me, I thought this would be a great conversation for us to learn more about when it comes to receiving feedback and frankly also giving feedback, because the fact of the matter is most people aren't comfortable with either, giving or receiving feedback. Positive or negative, by the way. And so I'd love to hear from you in the comments. If you are real comfortable with feedback or if you're not. What's your experience receiving feedback? I think this is an important part of the conversation as well.

But for the most part, especially if you're a high achiever, especially if you're somebody who's a go-getter, who is somebody who's a perfectionist, who wants to get everything right all the time, it can be, and I'm not exaggerating here, it can be actually soul-crushing to receive feedback that's less than stellar. And even the problem with receiving stellar feedback is that oftentimes, we don't believe it, we don't integrate it, and it sits out there somewhere. But it's certainly something not that you would internalize, not that you would bring into your heart and be able to adopt a sense of spiritual pride about it, a sense of personal pride about it, not egoic pride, but just a sense of satisfaction about a job well done.

So a couple of things I wanna share with you about feedback. One is, it comes out of Neuroscience, Gottman, John Gottman at the Gottman Center has developed a way to test, to be able to assess if couples are gonna be together even like five years after he sees them in his lab, his relationship lab. And he can tell by the ratio of positive to negative comments, positive to negative looks if you're giving your partner the side-eye most of the time, chances are pretty good, the closer that that ratio of positive to negative gets to 1:1, the less likely you are to be together. The optimal dose, actually, of positive to negative feedback or positive to negative interactions is 5:1, five positive interactions for every one negative interactions. And that bears out in the neuroscience as well, in fact, it takes the brain five positive comments to recover from a negative one. So there's actually a felt sense in the physical body of negative feedback, even though you're not literally being punched in the face, even though you're not literally being knifed in the back, it can feel that way.

So I wanna just affirm that first of all, because one of the things that we have to do as emotionally intelligent leaders better now than ever before, and we have to bring this forward into the future is an acknowledgement and an encircling of our emotional experiences at work and everywhere else too. The common thread that I see in most organizations is that there's a tendency to downplay emotions, to ignore emotions, to pretend like that they're not important, and usually that starts with people who frankly aren't comfortable with their own emotions, much less somebody else's. So I really, truly believe that as emotionally intelligent leaders, it's our responsibility to protect and preserve emotions in the workplace, all emotions. Of course, we don't want people losing their marbles. Of course, we don't want them popping off at work, if you will, but we do want the opportunity to honor and acknowledge emotions, and that's gonna shift the perspective. It's gonna shift how leadership is done in organizations as we develop comfort and compassion for our own emotions and the emotions of other people.

So that's my editorialising on that topic of emotions in the workplace, but emotions are a normal part of being human, they're the one... It's the one facet of ourselves as humans that differentiate us from almost every other species on the planet. We have access to our emotions, some of us aren't really good at managing our emotions, some of us aren't very good at reading emotions, ourselves' or others'. Some of us aren't very good, a lot of us aren't very good at expressing our emotions, we've got a lot of work as humans to do around our emotional maturity, let's just put it that way. But the sooner we do that, the easier it's going to be to receive and to give feedback. So all of this to say because of our discomfort with emotions, because it takes five positive comments, five positive interactions to make up for every one negative interaction, what that means basically is that we take on this negative feedback and we internalize it. Negative feedback is, for me, and for a lot of my clients, it's like a million times easier to integrate negative feedback to see what's wrong with me than what's right with me, and maybe that's the case for you too.

When we internalize the negative feedback, we make it about ourselves. We could experience deep levels of shame, deep levels of embarrassment, and most people are gonna go out of their way to avoid experiencing shame or embarrassment. I mean, doesn't that make sense? Of course, and negative feedback is an opportunity to highlight something that you've done wrong, something that you've made a mistake on, and of course, it's going to press the shame button or at the very least the embarrassment button. So where does this originate because it didn't originate in the last feedback session you had with your team member or with your boss, did it? Of course not. This originates... We've already covered neuroscience, let's go kind of psychodynamic. Let's go back into childhood. It originates when we're little kids. Think about the first time you got something wrong, think about the first time that you were embarrassed because you didn't do the right thing, or ashamed because of something that you'd chosen to do.

See, these are the things that we carry around with us even as adults, and until and unless that part of our souls, that part of our psychology is healed and transformed, we're gonna continue to be triggered by events in our present as adults who are supposed to be mature, professional, but you sit somebody down in a feedback meeting, and you can guarantee that 35-year-old, that 45-year-old, that 60-year-old is not showing up. I mean, physically they are, but emotionally, it's gonna be a little kid, the little kid who you used to be. And this might snag something inside of you as I share that. But those micro-traumas and actually the major traumas that we experience as children as young people earlier in our careers, continue to bubble up in the present moment. There's nothing wrong with that bubbling up, in fact, I believe it's an opportunity for healing, for transformation when something like that bubbles up, but most people don't because most people don't have the experience and the knowledge that I do, excuse me, that I do on how to manage it, how to make it better, how to transform it.

And so instead, because they don't have the tools and the technologies to be able to do that yet, they're gonna tuck to the side, they're gonna cross their arms, throw their inner temper tantrum, make up reasons for why it's not true. And maybe it's not true, maybe the feedback isn't true, maybe there are exceptions. But all of that defensiveness that you might experience yourself or you might have experienced as you have given feedback to other people, all of that is childhood woundedness that comes forward. And if we can look at that as an opportunity to heal rather than an opportunity to shame or embarrass, that's greater than. But if we can have compassion for that person and make it about not them personally, not that they're a bad person, but that there's some room for improvement here, but it comes with the ability to be able to just acknowledge people's experience of it, including your own.

I don't like to give feedback either, and I'm a psychologist, I give feedback all the time, but I still... There's part of me that's like, "Oof. This is gonna be a rough one." But thankfully, I have the tools and the technologies, and I teach my clients the same to be able to work with the energetics of the situation, not to necessarily heal, or certainly not to do therapy in the moment, but just an acknowledgement of emotions is such an important piece of the feedback process. And I get it, nobody wants to talk about emotions, everybody's got them, but nobody wants to talk about them.

So we turn a blind eye to them, and it creates a disruption in the relationship between you and your team. And it seems like the higher up you go, the more advanced you get in your field in terms of being a leader, at director level, VP level, when you, by the time you're in the C-Suite, there's an expectation that you better have a thick skin. And you better not take things personally, and you better just be able to sit like Buddha and take it, whatever it is that comes at you. And if you can't, then there's judgement about you as a leader, when the clear and simple truth is that we are human and that we actually feel things deeply, and the vast majority of us, especially emotionally intelligent leaders, want to do things right. We want to make things better. We don't intentionally screw things up, we don't intentionally overlook, but there's not a lot of wiggle room, especially at the top for mistakes for being human right now. But I will say in the future, the trajectory that I'm seeing in the future is that more and more leaders are coming into their own as emotionally intelligent. They're coming into their own and understanding the emotional journey of being a leader. For right now though, the great challenge of a leader who's at the top is that it feels like nobody's got my back. I'm out here on my own and nobody's got my back. Nobody's gonna protect me. Nobody's gonna defend me. I just have to take it all myself.

And in fact, that's a lot of times, the belief of the people who report into you as well, isn't it? "She can take it. She's the leader. Of course she can. She can take it, she's a physician, of course she can. She's a psychologist, she can take it." And yet we're the ones who probably feel things most deeply. So feedback, especially negative feedback, can feel very isolating to the leader, can't it? It can feel very much like you're in a silo and that you have to suffer through this in silence, and you better just get over it and get on with it, except you can't because that little kid who lives inside of you. That part of your consciousness who got in trouble, got embarrassed, was ashamed by something simple when you were eight, continues to come forward during these times and it's a very vulnerable place to be. So it's important to have an advisor, an executive coach whose adept at emotions and can help you process through those things, to be able to see it from a new perspective and to be able to transmute the energetics of that feedback. Because, listen, if it were just feedback in a very clinical objective delivery, it would be one thing, you can take that, you can look at it, you can examine it, but feedback is very rarely delivered like that, isn't it? It's usually delivered by somebody who's nervous, anxious, angry, upset, frustrated.

So not only do you have to deal with the content of the feedback, you also have to deal with the emotion of how the feedback has been delivered to you. And I know you all can think of ways that that shows up for you. "I felt like a punch in the gut." Well, guess what, that is the spirit in which the feedback was intended. It may have been unconsciously intended that way, because most people aren't emotionally sophisticated enough to really intentionally say, "Okay, I'm gonna send this with a feeling of a punch in the gut." They're just not, and we don't generally do that as humans anyway. So we have to be able to separate the content of the feedback from the emotion of the delivery, and we also have to look at our own internal landscape and understand what is the origin of this feeling that I have when I receive feedback. I have my own stuff, trust me, like this isn't... I'm not immune to this at all, in fact, this is one of the reasons I'm talking about it, because I've struggled with that. And probably you have too. But I'm here to tell you that there is a different way of doing it. And that different way of doing it is really becoming adept at understanding and being able to transmute the emotion behind the feedback, yours and other people's, and that's part of being emotionally intelligent.

And I hear you asking, "How do I do that?" Well, those are things that I teach in my private coaching, I teach to my private clients, I teach to the new coaching program that I'm starting in the new year. But some simple things, and I'm not saying that you have to go do that in order to learn I'm just saying that's a really in-depth question to be able to answer. But I will say this, the first step in being able to really finesse negative feedback is to acknowledge that there's part of you who when you were a little kid was wounded by feedback, and maybe have just a little conversation with that part of yourself. It's okay, sweetheart, that's over. I love you. You did great, you made a mistake, I forgive you. And you can kind of feel that shift in your system even as you do that. But it does take focus and it does take intention to be able to do that, that's not something you can gloss over or do a cursory sweep through. It's deeper work than that. But as emotionally intelligent leaders, we have the capacity to do this deeper emotional work. And it is actually necessary in order to bring us to the new level of leadership. It's who you become in the process, and the more you heal yourself, the more you heal your own personal experiences, your own traumas.

And maybe those traumas don't even rise to the level of clinical diagnosis, maybe they're just micro-traumas that over time continue to wear you down, continue to put you in the position of wondering if you should be even sitting at this table, much less leading it. Those are the inner workings that have to be examined and transformed in order for you to really truly lead in the way that you're meant to lead. And we need you leading now more than ever, at full capacity, not cowering and tip-toeing and worrying about where the next truth bomb is gonna come from. Okay, so that is my two cents for today. If you got something out of this session today, I would love it, it would make my day if you would take a screenshot of it and share it on social media, tag me in it, so that we can say hello and I can say thank you and share it with your network. There's nothing like a grassroots movement in order to bring light to something that's as important as emotional intelligence and cultivating purpose and positivity and legacy and so on, all the things that we talk about here. Until next time, we have one more session, one more Mindset Rx session this year, then we're taking a little bit of a hiatus and we'll come back in 2022 with all new content, and my studio will be done and there probably won't be hammering in the background either. Until next time, I'm Dr. Robyn McKay, and I will see you soon.