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118 sats \ 5 replies \ @BTCFC 7 Jun \ on: How do you deal with negative feedback? Design
I used to be terrible at handling negative feedback. I would take it too personal, either by taking the feedback way to seriously, or my ego would get hurt and I would be more in a 'F you' mentality to the person who gave me the feedback. But lately, I've shifted my perspective from seeing feedback as either a learning experience or not instead of positive or negative.
For instance, I realized when the feedback I receive is kind of shallow or not well explained I would catch my ego say, "See! This person doesn't even know what they're talking about! He / she has no right to critique me!". So now, I either just let the negative feedback go, learning internally that such negative feedback triggers my ego so next time I'm not as easily effected, or I ask the person to explain further what he / she meant when they gave the feedback, and try and communicate to understand and learn externally from why the negative feedback was given.
In this way, I'm also not prone on just dishing out negative feedback or criticism out of initial reaction or emotion, but now make sure to give out feedback in a manner in which both parties, myself and the other, can have it be a learning experience and we can build off of the feedback.
Thus, the only way feedback can become one without any sort of learning experience, is if I take it as negative and then shut that feedback completely down without trying to take away something from it. Even if the negative feedback turns out to be completely rubbish, it can still serve to teach you something about yourself.
So much of how you handle feedback is related to "how much of an expert do you perceive yourself to be"
For example. Even though I dabble in programming, and can hack my way around most typical jobs, I do not consider myself a programmer. Or to say it another way: I consider myself a fairly average/poor programmer.
Thus, when I receive criticism on code I've written, I'm generally thankful and I study what they've pointed out to make my code better.
Likewise, with Chess, I don't view myself as really that good....so corrections and feedback doesn't really affect me emotionally.
However, there may be other topics that I consider myself to be competent/proficient , where I may bristle at criticism.
Thats why its important to try to maintain a "beginners mind" about such things.
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From your previous comments about Linux and hacker news and other technical matters, I assumed you are a software engineer!
Oh I love the phrase beginner’s mind n will be sure to remember it.
I think the challenge lies in that by volunteering to share, I m already presenting myself to be an expert (even though I’m still a novice at using Zoom haha), so I think balancing this dichotomy between expert persona n beginner’s mind will involve a lot of context switching
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Thank you for such a detailed explanation of your psyche! Detaching our ego from our work can sometimes be difficult. However, as you said, if we see it as a trigger n frame the feedback as a learning experience, there is most likely something we can learn from it.
The last line about negative feedback being rubbish made me LOL
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