37. How to Accept Feedback at Work and School: 9 Tips

Episode 37

Feedback has a purpose. Whether we receive feedback at school or at work, the goal of feedback is to make us better.

But the reality is that accepting feedback can be really hard, especially if you perceive the feedback as criticism.

In this episode, you learn 9 practical tips for accepting feedback at work and school so that:

• the feedback serves a purpose

• you remain emotionally regulated in the moment

• you ensure you understand the feedback

• you know how to implement the feedback in a way that's productive

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  The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)

  37 How to Accept Feeback

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  [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to episode 37 of the learn and work smarter podcast. 37 weeks going strong. And I hope that you're finding these episodes as helpful as I hope you do, because I sure as heck am having so much fun recording and putting these out each week. Today, we're talking about accepting feedback at school and work.

  
  Specifically, we're going to talk about some strategies for accepting negative feedback at work and in school, because let's be real- accepting negative feedback is a little harder than accepting positive feedback, obviously. 

  Now, when I use the word feedback in this episode, it could also mean constructive criticism. 

  And specifically, I'm talking about the formal feedback that we get at work from a boss or a manager, or the feedback that you would get at school from a teacher or an academic advisor, because really, all of us receive some kind of feedback all day long in [00:01:00] one form or another. Right? And this is informal and spontaneous. And it's just part of being a human in a human filled world. 

  But the strategies I share today are to help you find ways to listen, to, to process, and to ultimately apply the feedback you get from people who are in a qualified position to give you the formal feedback in the first place. 

  Now the truth is that this is called the learn and work smarter podcast. 

  
  And obviously the tips and strategies and systems we talk about here are intended to help you, you know, learn and work smarter at school and in a professional setting. But the cool thing is that almost all of the things that we talk about here - the skills and the mindsets- can often be helpful in your personal lives. 

  So who knows, maybe some of the tips that we talk about today, you will be able to bring into some other contexts in which you are in the position of receiving feedback outside of school and work. 

  I have nine tips for you today. And I don't want this [00:02:00] episode to be nine hours long. And so let's get started. 

  ​I'm going to start by stating the obvious. 

  
  Most of us are in positions where feedback is the entire point. All right. We want to be better at our actual jobs, yes? Is that not the ultimate goal? We'll then, so our bosses and our managers are there to push us to be better at our jobs. And they do that through feedback. 

  We want to be better students and experts in our fields, yes? Is that not the entire point? Well, so our teachers and our academic advisors are there to push us to be better [00:03:00] students so that we learn the things better and they do that through feedback. 

  I'm starting with this because if you are of the mindset that you don't need feedback and you have it all figured out and there's no room for improvement, then you, my friend are missing the entire point. I close out every single episode of the learn and work smarter podcast with the words never stop learning. Why do I do that? 

  
  Of all the words in the universe, why that? Because learning is where the fulfillment and the growth and the magic live. 

  So, if you think that you are not one for feedback, this episode is especially for you, or if you know that feedback is valuable, but it's just always been really challenging for you to accept that feedback, then this episode is also for you. 

  Now, a funny story: I feel really qualified to say this because I am a recovered feedback rejecter, yes. You can go and ask my mom about all of my report cards from kindergarten through probably grade five in [00:04:00] which I scored like the lowest score possible on accepts constructive criticism. So there you have it. 

  
  Okay. I have I hope come a long way, and that is why I am here sharing these tips with you today. All right. 

  Tip number one is to ask yourself, Is this someone whose job is, is to provide me feedback. 

  It is really important to start with this tip because not everybody is qualified to give us feedback in a professional or academic setting in a way that is going to move us forward toward our goals. 

  I'm oversimplifying this, but if you're, let's say taking, um, a college English course, you probably wouldn't take writing advice from your advanced mathematics professor. 

  Right? If you work in sales, You probably wouldn't take, you know, to heart the sales advice that you get from your unemployed brother-in-law. Right? 

  Because not all advice is worth taking and the place to start is by asking yourself, is the person giving me this feedback the [00:05:00] right person for this kind of feedback? 

  And if not, then you let that advice go in one ear and out the other ear. And you move on in your Merry way. I know it is easier said than done, but that is the goal. 

  However, if the feedback is coming from a person whose job it is, is to make you better at your job, whether for school or for work, then the feedback is something you want to take seriously. 

  In the professional setting, this could be maybe your manager or your boss or anybody with more experience than you. 

  In the academic setting this would be a teacher or an academic advisor or maybe even a student who has, you know, been there, done that and has lessons to share. That could be valuable. 

  Now another tip for accepting feedback, number two, which can be hard for many of us, is to focus on the message and not on the delivery. 

  Not every person who's qualified to give you feedback [00:06:00] has taken lessons in how to provide feedback. I know. Ridiculous right. 

  Perhaps that's a topic for a future episode, like how to give feedback, but for now, you've got to realize that everybody is just a human. 

  And even if the person giving you feedback is educated and experienced and professional and a good person, they might not have mastered the art of providing evaluations and feedback in a way that's direct and tactful and effective. And you can't control this. 

  You cannot control the skills of your hiring manager or your boss or your teacher. 

  Right. But what you can control is what you can focus on. 

  Are you going to focus on their tone and maybe the words that they use that you felt were too harsh? Are you going to let that go and just focus on the feedback itself? The message and the lesson the person is trying to share with you? 

  The lesson and the message that the person is trying to share with you regardless of their delivery. 

  Okay. [00:07:00] That's where the value is- in the lesson in the actual feedback and not in their tone or word choice, or even in their body language. 

  Now I know that this can be really, really hard. And I have been on the receiving end of feedback, that has been delivered aggressively. And honestly abusively. And if I'm being honest, extreme delivery like that clouds every possible message. And I'm not saying you should ever tolerate verbally abuse, no matter how qualified or high up on the hierarchy that person is. If you're ever in that situation, which I was before, walk away and keep going. All right. 

  But if the delivery and the tone and the language is just maybe more direct or harsh than you would personally like, and if you are highly sensitive, like I am, then your job really is to let that delivery go. To try not to take it personally, and to just focus on the message itself. 

  Now this next tip number three will be easier if you can master the skill of focusing [00:08:00] on the message and not the delivery, cause tip three is to remain neutral. 

  When we are in the position of receiving constructive criticism or feedback, that's anything other than, wow, you're the best student or worker I've ever seen in the world, right? The whole experience will be better if you listen. If we don't interrupt, and if we remain neutral and emotionally regulated. 

  When we are hearing somebody criticize our performance or give us the feedback that we disagree with, it is super common and normal to become defensive. I know this, and I'm not saying it's easy to remain neutral in this situation, but the goal is to remain emotionally regulated in the moment. 

  Okay. You can have your time for processing and letting your feelings erupt and be as big as they want to be as they need to be, okay, once the [00:09:00] feedback situation is over and you've walked away, right? 

  But in the moment, the goal is to let down your defenses and hear what this person is saying. 

  If they are making a point that you disagree with, we want to try to avoid trying to think of our rebuttal the entire time that they're talking, because this means we're not actually hearing them. 

  Instead the goal is to listen with curiosity and open-mindedness to what the other person is saying without planning our response. 

  Again, ignore the delivery. And focus on the message. 

  Focus on the feedback itself. And when they are done, it is okay to take a beat and to process what they said. 

  Even if you don't particularly like awkward silences, it's okay to have them as you think. And then you respond after you've thought of something reasonable to say. 

  It is perfectly fine to disagree with somebody's feedback. 

  And I'm not saying that, you know, we need to [00:10:00] accept all the feedback that anybody gives us, even if they're qualified. But it is certainly our jobs to listen to it. Because if we don't listen to it from a point of neutrality and emotional regulation, we will never get to the point where we can ask ourselves "gee, You know, is this feedback that might actually work out for me once my emotions have calmed down, right?" 

  We won't be able to get to that point because we never actually heard what the person was saying because we were too emotionally dysregulated to hear. 

  I've worked with professional clients over the years who have used some of their sessions with me to debrief, like an annual annual review that they've had at work, and the people who've had the most negative experience and the hardest time processing, uh, these, you know, this feedback are the clients who became dysregulated in the moment. Okay. 

  You know, sometimes they come and they tell me that, you know, they shut down altogether or they essentially didn't even hear what the other person had to [00:11:00] say. 

  Others have walked away or quite literally hung up on the evaluator. And while I understand all of these responses, it is never going to lead to getting better. And remember what I said at the top of this episode: the entire point of accepting feedback is to get better at whatever it is that you're trying to get better at work school, whatever it is. 

  And moving on to another tip. Tip four is to summarize what the person said. I teach summarization strategies inside SchoolHabits University inside the annotating module, because summarize a summarization is an essential skill to be able to understand what someone is saying. Because if we cannot summarize it, it means we don't understand it. 

  Okay. And if our north star here is to get better at what we're trying to do, then we actually do want to understand the feedback that was some that someone's giving us. Right? 

  I'm not saying we have to agree with it or that we have to accept it and [00:12:00] integrate it, but we definitely have to understand it. 

  That is like step one. Because listen, what if we don't understand it but it's actually really awesome feedback. Well, then that stinks because we'll never get to the point of implementing that feedback in our work or in our academic life, because we literally like, didn't get it. 

  So after your professor or your manager is giving you feedback, it can be helpful to say like, okay, let, just, let me make sure I understand you correctly. And then to summarize or maybe even paraphrase what they said. 

  Not only does this strategy ensure that you're understanding the feedback, but it can also help keep the conversation neutral.

  Taking a few minutes to objectively summarize something that someone else said can put a pause in between how you interpreted what they said and a potential knee jerk reaction to that interpretation. Alright. 

  Another helpful strategy you can try in the moment, or maybe even later on when you're trying to process [00:13:00] that feedback, is to focus on the big picture. 

  Like, what is your larger goal here? If you are a working professional, let's say in marketing, then I would assume that your larger goal is to get better at honing your message and copywriting and getting your message in front of the right audience. 

  And if you're given feedback, maybe about a project that you worked on or your overall job performance and work habits, then that feedback has the potential to make you a better copywriter or a better marketer. 

  All right. And then you want to take that feedback cause that aligns with your, your bigger goal. Instead, what a lot of people do is they just like flat out reject the feedback cause it doesn't make them feel good. And I get this. Like I truly get this, but is the larger goal to feel good temporarily in the moment? Or is the larger goal to get better at your job in the longterm? Hmm? [00:14:00] 

  Tip six is to respond and not react. 

  Now, this is kind of related to my tip about staying neutral, but it's a little bit different. It's why it's its own tip. Right? 

  So a reaction and a response are different. A reaction stems from emotion. It's often quick and it's impulsive and it's knee jerk. And it comes usually from a defensive place of wanting to protect yourself, your work, your reputation, or the idea you have of yourself. 

  On the other hand, a response is thoughtful. 

  It's intentional. It does not come from emotion. It comes from logic. 

  And if you're in a conversation with a professor or a mentor, or maybe a boss, and they're giving you feedback that perhaps you don't agree with, it is okay to contribute a response of some kind in that conversation. 

  You kind of have to read the room, but usually it's okay. But it's important that you are responding and not reacting because when we respond, we increase our chances of remaining [00:15:00] emotionally regulated. 

  So, for example, if you're a student and you submitted a rough draft of a chapter of your thesis to your thesis adviser and your thesis advisor's feedback was to essentially scratch the whole thing and start again. Okay. 

  An ineffective reaction would be to say no way. There's no way I'm doing that. I worked so hard on this. I'm not throwing it all away. Like no way. But a response could look something like, okay, I'm hearing that you think I went in a totally wrong direction with this chapter. And you think it would be better if I, you know, did something else? Do you think there's any parts of this chapter that I could salvage for another chapter? Um, is there anything I could add to what I wrote here that could potentially bring it back on track? 

  You see that to response and it actually helps move the conversation forward in a way that could be productive. 

  And I kind of just wrapped tip number seven into that example I just gave, but the next tip tip seven [00:16:00] is to ask questions. 

  In most cases, when we're receiving feedback from someone, it is a conversation and it's not a one-way street. And a good way to remaining Erie. I'm trying out again, a good way to remain emotionally regulated in control and curious and productive is to respond to that feedback with questions. 

  Our questions should come from a place of curiosity and we should genuinely care about the answers. For example, let's use my hypothetical example of writing a college thesis. You could ask the professor, what about this chapter salvageable? What about this chapter do you think needs the most work if we were to try to work with it and you know, not start completely over? Could you help me understand what it is that you're looking for more specifically? The other thing too, is if you, if you don't understand the feedback, there's no way for you to do anything with it. 

  Right. And I mentioned this when I was [00:17:00] talking about summarizing maybe what your boss or your mentor or your teacher is telling you as a way to understand it. Well, asking questions serves the same purpose. 

  Even something super simple like "I'm not sure I totally understand what you're saying. Could you please rephrase that so that I'm totally clear?" 

  There is nothing wrong with letting someone know, Hey. I hear you. And I want to understand what you're saying, because I value your feedback. I just need a little more clarity.

  Okay. I have two tips left. One is from me in one is from a good friend of mine. 

  
  Okay. Tip number eight is to process the feedback and figure out how you're going to apply it. 

  I've said this a few times already, but we don't have to take every single word of feedback we ever get. Even if it's from a person in a position to give that kind of constructive [00:18:00] criticism. 

  Okay. Ultimately, that is your choice whether you're going to implement that feedback or not. If they're giving you good suggestions and advice that would actually lead to an improved product or performance or experience, then yeah, you're probably going to want to take that advice to heart and apply it going forward. But at the end of the day, That is your choice, I suppose. 

  Right? 

  
  But my point is that the process of you knowing how to receive and accept feedback doesn't end in the moment that you get that feedback, like in the meeting or on the phone or whatever it is. The real magic is when you choose to do something with the lessons and the insights that have been shared with you.

  We all process things differently and some people might need more time to filter out the feedback that they want to take versus what they want to leave. But the whole point of performance evaluations and meeting with professors and things is to get better at something. 

  If we don't [00:19:00] apply the feedback, we won't get better. Now if the feedback was hard for you personally, I totally understand needing to take some time to let all of those feelings bubble up and come out loud in your own private space. 

  Maybe you held it together really tightly for the actual meeting, and then later on that day, it just hit you really hard. And then suddenly you're exhausted. Like I get that. Happens to me. That's totally normal. And it's perfectly fine to take some time to think and to sift through the advice that you got and just sort of work through it, whatever that looks like for you. 

  But even that moment needs to come to a close and then you will have to eventually make a choice about what you're going to do going forward, because if the feedback was harsh, all right, and you don't do anything with it, then all you get out of that entire experience was a boatload of tough feelings and no improvement to your work or your academics. 

  But if the feedback [00:20:00] was harsh and you actually implemented it, implemented it. Then that entire experience becomes more valuable. Because, yes, it came with tough feelings, but it also came with improvement to your work. Or your academics. Alright, the ninth and final tip comes from a very good friend of mine. 

  
  Yes. When I was drafting this episode and brainstorming ideas, I reached out to my board of directors. Which is a group of friends I have had since get this elementary school. I know it's amazing. And not only are these incredible humans who I love with my whole heart, but they're also wildly successful. Across a variety of fields. So this final tip comes from my friend, Brooke Gilmore, who is the manager of library, governance and engagement at the Harvard library. Yes. I told you my friends were smart. Okay. So I am going to read Brooke's advice, word for word, because it [00:21:00] is, it is absolutely perfect as she wrote it in a text message. 

  Okay. She says, this is more of a micro hack, but once you work with people long enough, you also learn that sometimes people just have things and it's not about you or the work. We all have our things that we insist are our way, and I try to give space for that without taking it on personally. Okay. I think that is absolutely brilliant advice that students and professionals can benefit from. Because it is so very true. 

  Sometimes we really do need to consider the person giving the feedback. And we need to consider the particulars and the nuances and the quirks of that person. And just accept that our boss or our manager or our professor or our mentor is bringing to the table their own experiences and history and preferences and perspectives. And of course their own experiences and history and preferences and perspectives [00:22:00] is going to influence the type of feedback they give us as well as how they deliver it to us. All right. 

  
  So let's say for example, that you've made what you consider a beautiful Google slides or PowerPoint presentation for your class or for your team. And before you present your slides, your boss gives you the feedback that the slides are too busy. And you have too many colors. Right. You can either get defensive and take that feedback personally. Or perhaps you could just be reminded that your boss likes. Things minimal. 

  Okay. In that case, it is your job to know that. And it's your job to remember that for the next time you are asked to make a presentation. Does it mean that your beautiful and colorful slides were bad? Or wrong? No. Not at all. But it means that they were not what your boss was looking for. And at the end of the day, [00:23:00] Your job is to give your boss or your teacher or your mentor or your advisor what they are looking for. Okay. My friends. 

  I honestly feel like this list could be a hundred tips long, but I'm going to leave it here. With a quick wrap-up. Um, or recap of all of the nine tips. All right. 

  Tip one is to ask yourself, is this someone whose job it is is to provide me feedback? Because remember not everybody's feedback is worth the same. 

  
  Tip two is to focus on the message and not on the delivery because not everybody went to how to provide feedback school. 

  Tip three is to remain neutral and emotionally regulated. Tip four is to summarize the feedback, to make sure that you fully understand it. 

  If you don't understand it, then you can't do anything with it. 

  
  Tip five is to focus on the big picture and the larger goal, which in most cases is to get better at the thing. Alright. [00:24:00] 

  Tip six is to respond and not to react. And this is connected to maintaining emotional regulation.

  Tip seven is to ask questions. 

  Tip eight is to process that feedback and figure out how you're going to apply it. 

  And then tip nine is to give a person what they want. 

  All right. If you have your own tips for accepting feedback, I would love to hear them. If you were watching this podcast on the learn and work smarter YouTube channel, then you can add them to the comments so that yes, I can read them, but other people can read them as well. Or you can send me a D M at I'm on Instagram. 

  I'm at @schoolhabits. All one word. 

  And one final reminder that you can find a transcript and links to everything that I mentioned at learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/37. As always thank you so much for listening and never stop [00:25:00] learning.