Last week was about learning to catch a baseball and feedback.  This week we will dive deeper into catching feedback by reflecting on putting feedback into perspective and responding. 

The other day I spoke with someone early in their career who had received some tough feedback.  I could see how they were extrapolating this one miss to mean so much more than that.  As I saw them spiraling a bit, I tried to offer them some perspective.  I explained that having a miss is a right of passage for all marketers.  I talked about how if you aren’t having these moments from time to time, it means you’re not challenging yourself.  I told him the story of how in my first internal role I was about 3 in when my boss told me I wouldn’t meet expectations if I continued down my current path, because my project management skills were horrible.  I shared how when this happened, I felt like crap for a couple of days, and doubted everything about myself.  Then, I dusted myself off, got to work to figure things out, and started improving.  I reassured him that while I may have felt at the time that this was a huge failure that would follow me forever, it didn’t.  No one ever talks about that miss or story.  It’s never been held against me, and I’ve went on to have what I consider to be a great career so far.  At the end of the day, receiving the feedback is only half the story.  The most important part of the story is how he’ll respond to this.  He can either let it kick his butt, or he can get up and get at it.

You probably see where this is going.  At some point in time, we’ve all received tough feedback.  When this happens, it’s easy to blow the feedback way out of proportion.  It’s easy to take feedback about one action or one miss and come to the conclusion that you’re a horrible failure of a person (or maybe I’m the only one who has ever thought that).  If you ever feel yourself sliding in this direction, I hope you pause for a moment to find some perspective.  EVERYONE gets their butt kicked sometimes and fails.  The feedback you receive is about missing on 1 project or 1 task and does NOT mean anything more than that.  It means you messed up on THAT THING.  It means you are human.  Welcome to the club 😉 It’s a beautiful messy place to be.  While tough feedback hurts, what matters most is how you respond.

The challenge: How will you keep feedback in perspective?  How will you respond?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry