How I Stopped Being Scary

TL;DR — Giving feedback is scary, so we’ll only receive quality feedback when we eliminate the things we’re doing that make it scary and show others that there is reward in the risk.

Shehryar Siddiqi
Sep 6, 2018 · 6 min read

Most of us go through life feeling like this penguin, which motivates us to understand who we are and how we’re progressing.

We love metrics — likes on our posts, steps on our Fitbit, milestones at work — signals that help us evaluate how we’re doing. But if we only focus on numbers, we miss out on knowing something really important: how we’re relating.

How we treat, understand, and relate with one another has never been more important as it is in today’s world. It’s also a requirement to succeed in our professional pursuits as we work with different personalities and try to achieve more with fewer resources and competing priorities.

Knowing how we can improve our relationships requires asking for feedback. The challenge is that giving feedback is scary and very few people will offer it to us unsolicited. We must do whatever it takes to help people feel comfortable with giving us feedback.

So how did I achieve that after years of finding surprises at my performance reviews, having people cut me out of their lives, and experiencing tepid growth early on in my career?

By creating emotional safety through a focus on building trust — i.e. people shouldn’t worry that there will be a consequence like being yelled at, feeling stupid, or worse, retaliation.

Our brain has a primal mechanism called the fight-or-flight response, which activates when it detects a threat and prepares us for defending ourselves. Past experiences have told us that giving people feedback leads to bad outcomes, thus our brain associates giving feedback with a threat. We have to help people reprogram their brains to trust that giving feedback will result in good things, shifting the act from risk to reward. Rewards ultimately incentivize us to continue doing something, and more often.

Ask for Feedback

  • Be proactive. The more you ask for feedback, the more opportunities you’ll have to make yourself seem approachable. Some people will proactively come to you, some will still wait until you ask.
  • Be specific. It’s not a bad thing to ask, “Do you have any feedback about my presentation?” Sometimes that works. But try asking for feedback on something specific such as, “I’m working on improving my public speaking skills. Was my pace OK?”
  • Sound upbeat. Be nonchalant; don’t sound or look tense. How you sound when you ask for feedback gives people an indicator as to how you’ll receive it.
  • Create a safe setting. If you don’t have a strong, psychologically safe relationship with someone, the right venue is important. I’ve found that sitting side-by-side outside on a sunny day or going for a walk helps both parties feel at ease. Regardless of place, sitting side-by-side, gives a sense of partnership vs. sitting across from each other feels more adversarial. If you meet regularly with someone, let’s say your boss or a stakeholder, consider putting a “recurring feedback space” item on your agenda. This is working well between me and my current boss.

In the past, I used to think, “OK, I ask for feedback a lot, so people should feel I’m approachable by now.” The problem? I wasn’t. After a while I realized it was because of how I reacted to feedback — being stoic, providing rebuttals/explanations, and sounding emotional.

Look, you’re not a terrible person if you feel emotional when getting seamingly negative feedback. You’re human. The reason you feel emotional is because of that fight-or-flight response (it’s a blessing and a curse, right?). In order to change that, you have to keep getting feedback and make a choice to slay that response. Each time, your brain will say, “OK, that wasn’t as bad as I thought. Next time, I won’t be so quick to turn on the defense systems. One day, I may never need to.”

This is part of what’s known as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a behavioral modification technique widely used by therapists. If you’re like me when I started, you may find that you have to fake it till you make it. No matter how emotional I felt when getting tough feedback, I did everything to make sure that the person giving me feedback felt comfortable.

Actual footage of me fighting my fight-or-flight response

Receive Feedback Really, Really, Well.

  • Help others feel safe. If someone sees you tensing up, your tone changing, or any other signal that tells them you don’t want to hear what they have to say, then their sense of safety will be lost. Instead, nod a lot, take notes on what they’re saying, smile when you agree with something, and make affirming sounds like “hmm yeah totally.” The goal here is to send a signal to their brain that helps calm their fight-or-flight response, thus allowing them the confidence to continue giving you feedback.
  • Understand, don’t contradict. You’ll undoubtedly receive feedback that you don’t agree with. That’s OK. What’s not OK is you immediately jumping to defend yourself, or worse, trying to turn the situation around on to the person giving you feedback. Take a quiet breath, keep your north star as, “I want quality feedback to get information I need to do X”, and sanity check to see if you have a blind spot. Ask clarifying questions like, “Can we talk through a few more examples to help me understand better? It’s OK though if you don’t have any.”
  • Disagree internally. Let’s say you really don’t agree with what they are saying and you’ve asked enough clarifying questions to know it’s not because you have a blind spot. This is where you have to do a quick risk/reward assessment. More on this below.

Recap — Decide on next steps

  • Show gratitude. At the end of the feedback, thank the individual for their feedback. Depending on your sense of the person’s comfort and the depth of the trust between you two, you may also want to thank them for having the courage to give it to you.
  • Recap. Demonstrate that you really listened and that you understand each other by recapping the feedback that was discussed.
  • Decide on next steps. Make a commitment to change something as a result of this conversation. If you’re in a situation where you disagree with what was said and you’ve determined that changing something is more of a risk than a reward, then just stop at gratitude. You may not agree with them, but they shouldn’t know that. In my opinion, it’s usually a good bet not to write people off and actively maintain an aura of approachability. Even if this is someone whom you don’t have any interest in pleasing, they may tell others and then you’ll have to start from the beginning again on making people feel safe. It’s also important to call out that feedback from one person doesn’t mean you have to apply a change to your relationships with everyone.
  • Partner. If applicable, ask if you can run ideas by them. This makes them feel part of the solution and most importantly, that their feedback is being acknowledged. People want a signal that this was worth their time and discomfort. At some point in the future, check-in with the feedback giver and let them know what you’ve been doing differently to address their feedback. Use it as an opportunity to keep the feedback loop going and ask if they’ve noticed changes.

My goal with this article wasn’t to address every situation imaginable; at the end of the day, we’re talking about how two or more humans relate with one another and humans are complex and nuanced. I hope that I’ve given you a starting point to help navigate your own unique situations.

With that said, please leave comments with your own successes and feel free to start a discussion and ask for feedback on particular situations you want help on.

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