How to use others' feedback to learn and grow | Sheila Heen | TEDxAmoskeagMillyardWomen

fifteen years ago my colleagues at the Harvard negotiation project and I wrote a book called difficult conversations and I spent the last couple of decades traveling around the world helping people and organizations with some of their most challenging conversations now the first thing that we do when we work with any group is that we say well what are your toughest conversations what would you like some help with and together we make a list that we can draw from throughout the day now over the years we started to notice a pattern which is that feedback showed up on that list a lot to put a finer point on it and feedback was on that list 100% of the time it didn't matter what continent we were on it didn't matter what industry we're in it didn't even matter why they brought us in people and organizations all over the world struggle with feedback now for the first ten years we did what I think everybody does which is that we taught givers how to give more skillfully more clearly more often how many of you have ever been to a session on how to give feedback did it help okay please say yes because I do some of that work but your reaction echoes my own experience which was it helps I mean there's a lot you can learn but it wasn't solving the problem and then one day it occurred to us you know what in any exchange of feedback between giver and receiver it's the receiver who's in charge I mean it's the receiver who decides what they're going to let in what since they're going to make of it and whether and how they choose to change I mean maybe we've been going about this totally backwards maybe the key is learning how to take in the blizzard of feedback that we come in contact with every day because by the way I'm not just talking about performance reviews and other kinds of judgment and evaluation grades finding out how you measure up or stack up you know your marriage proposal accepted rejected I mean that's the month those kind of judgments are the most emotional kind of feedback but I'm also just talking about many suggestions for you the little helpful parenting tips from your in-laws right and I'm also talking about the look in my third graders eyes when she spots me in the audience and those little nitpicky criticisms from my husband which i think of the blesses feedback and more is just John being annoying I mean feedback is really our relationship with the world and it's the world's relationship with us I mean what if we could actually see receiving feedback as a skill and we could get better at learning from feedback taking charge of it and driving our own learning so we don't have to wait around for good givers to show up because I don't know about you I have some good givers wonderful mentors but mostly my life is populated by everybody else right people who are terrible at doing it don't have time for it who are difficult themselves what if we could draw learning out of even off-base unfair poorly delivered feedback what would happen now what's interesting is that we looked around said ok what what's out there about why it's so hard to receive feedback and what to do about it and really there wasn't much but what there was was some research suggesting that if we could get better at this it would make a huge difference there were big rewards what the research shows is that people who go out and solicit negative feedback and by that what they mean is they're not just fishing for compliments they're looking for what they can improve those people report higher work satisfaction they adapt more quickly in new roles and they get higher performance reviews we suggest that if you get better at handling everybody's feedback for you it doesn't just change you it changes how other people see you and experience you now let me ask you this what I invite you to think about a piece of coaching or suggestion or advice that you've received in your life that you've rejected you didn't take it I want to ask you why didn't you take it just think about that for a moment I mean maybe it was just wrong it was bad advice maybe you didn't trust the person giving it to you maybe you were actually unaware you cared about their opinion which was unsolicited maybe it was confusing or you weren't even sure how and whether you could change in that way maybe it was just too upsetting let me say right now there are hundred people in this room there are probably a hundred reasons you didn't take the feedback and you know what those are fantastic reasons to turn away feedback maybe I want to say right now that getting better at receiving feedback does not obligate you to take the feedback in fact there are reasons why often we need boundaries because other people's views of us can undermine our sense of self sometimes but the problem actually is that we usually decide too soon as human beings we are incredibly good at something that we call wrong spot when feedback is incoming I'm scanning it because I need to figure out what's wrong with it who gave it to me what they're suggesting why they're probably giving it to me where they gave it to me really at my grandmother's funeral seriously because if I can find something wrong with it Wow I can set it aside relax and go on with my life if it's right I have to keep worrying about it so we're incredibly incentive to decide right away whether the feedback is right or wrong now the fact that you have a triggered reaction isn't the end of the story it's actually the beginning because here's the problem you are always going to be able to find something wrong with your feedback I promise 90% of it might be wrong but that last 10% might be just what you need to grow as we looked at the hundreds and in fact thousands of reasons and reactions that we had to feedback we found that actually they boiled down really to three and so there are three kinds of triggered reactions that human beings have all over the world - the feedback that they yet the first is what we call truth triggers this has everything to do with well is the feedback correct is it accurate is the advice good advice truth triggers are tricky to figure out what's true partly because of what we call the challenge to see the challenge to see what in the world the givers trying to tell you and the challenges see yourself accurately because we all have blind spots actually I don't have blind spots but I know that you guys all have blind spots right I mean this is the nature of blind spots the second kind of triggers what we call relationship triggers all feedback lives in the relationship between giver and receiver and often we have a bigger reaction to who's giving it to us than what they're saying conquering this trigger has to do with the challenge of we to separate the who from the what and to deal with each on its own merits the third kind of trigger is what we call identity triggers this is everything to do with your emotional reaction to the feedback and the story you tell about what it says about who you are what the research suggests is that individual sensitivity to feedback by which I mean how far you swing emotionally in the wake of feedback and how long it takes you to recover individuals can vary by up to 3,000 percent yeah let me say a little bit about what we've learned about this Third identity trigger and this picture captures it for me many of you probably know this is mckayla maroney in American gymnasts coming into the London Olympics in 2012 she was widely regarded as the very best vaulter in the world for good reason she had won gold at the last five world competitions and she had won by such a margin that there was no question among commentators obviously Mikayla's got the gold the only question is who's going to take the silver and who's going to take the bronze she fell on her second vault ending a 33 vault hitting streak despite this she scored so highly she still took the silver and this is a picture of her on the medal stand receiving the silver now for those of you who are familiar with the research on Olympic athletes and medalists gold silver bronze whose happiest gold hello they want a gold okay is not a trick question but who's next happiest bronze why what's this story the silver medalist tells about what just happened oh I just lost gold what's the story the bronze medalist tells yes no I meddled now this reminds me of two things number one the story you tell about the feedback you get has a huge impact on how you feel about it and number two for high achievers like Mikayla I think it's when we let ourselves down it's the judgments and feedback we have for ourselves that can often be hardest to deal with this picture went viral and became a meme with the headline Mikayla is not impressed suggesting she wasn't impressed with her fellow competitors but I look at this and I suspect she's upset with herself now psychologists like Marty Seligman estimate that our reactions to events in our lives are based about 50 percent on genetic inherited wiring factors just the way you're built emotionally about 40 percent based on the story you tell about what happens and only 10 percent based on the actual circumstances of your life now who knows whether these are exactly the right numbers but it does suggest that in that fifty percent and forty percent there is a lot of play to manage identity triggers more effectively let me say a little bit about the wiring piece we took a look at three strands of research the first is what I'm going to call baseline in the literature this is sometimes called set point the idea here is that each of us lives at a some set point or baseline degree of happiness or contentment in our life so individual events will knock you off your baseline in one direction or another but you're going to gravitate back toward that baseline now this is based partly on looking at lottery winners in the UK about a year after they won the lottery they're about as happy or unhappy as they before they won also people with spinal cord injuries who become paraplegics about a year year and a half later they're about as happy or unhappy as they were before now let's imagine that the scale is one to ten I mean there are people who live their lives at nine right do you know these people like they're unbelievably excited thrilled about everything in their life it really does not matter if it's big like we got the account or small like that was an amazing cup of coffee they're really kind of annoying they show up a lot in the resilience research right because nothing can get them down others of us live at two or three always just discontent little restless seeing the glass half empty now why does this matter for feedback it matters because if you live at a lower setpoint it affects how you take in positive feedback it means that the volume is turned down it doesn't give you the same emotional bounce that it gives other people so if you're someone who says I just don't get why people care about appreciation or positive feedback what's the big deal it could be because they just live at a higher baseline than you do the other two factors are swing how far do you get knocked off your baseline by feedback in one direction or another and then sustained or recovery how long does it take you to come back and this is what I was talking about when I talking about differences being up to 3,000 percent even inside your own family certainly inside your work team we're all giving and receiving feedback to each other right now imagine you and I are on the same team we get some negative feedback from the client you're devastated I think it's not that big a deal this leads me to tell you like okay like you need to not take it so personally like you're kind of overreacting to this you just got to get a thicker skin if you're going to be in this business does this help you no because now actually I'm just giving you feedback about how you get how you take feedback right which is really not helping so understanding your profile can help you understand your own so by the way there are challenges that either end of this spectrum if you are very sensitive to feedback one piece of feedback can suddenly become everything and now can become forever the feedback becomes super-sized and you can fall into what we call the Google bias the Google biases as if you are googling everything that is wrong with me and by the way you get 1.2 million hits all of your past mistakes all of your failed relationships come rushing to the fore there are sponsored ads here from your father and your ex right and it seems that nothing you have ever done has been right then we call this the bias because your search results are they are driven by your search terms you're not googling things I'm handling relatively well if you were you get 8 million hits and you'd start to have a more balanced picture in the depths of the Google bias you cannot learn you're just too overwhelmed and you've got to not hide under the covers and hope the feedback goes away but dismantle those distortions so that you can see the feedback at actual size and learn from it now by the way being insensitive to feedback or perhaps I should say under sensitive although if you're under sense if you don't really care what I call you so it doesn't really matter has its own challenges I mean one thing that happens is that you don't even realize people are trying to give you feedback right they say you know Bill does it this way you're like good for Bill the other thing that can happen is even when you get it like you understand okay this is something you want me to work on I think I agree with it I'm totally going to work on that it may not stick in memory because memory is highly correlated with emotion and if you don't have an emotional reaction to the conversation you have the best intentions in the world but a week later you've forgotten about it six months later they say you know we talked about this you're like oh right we did didn't we sorry the third thing that can happen if you are under sensitive is that you can be too quickly dismissive of feedback and there's kind of an interesting pattern in how we do this people give you feedback that you're aloof or overbearing or intimidating you think well that's just not true because I know what's true is I'm just shy or outgoing or I have high standards both of these things by the way can be true we're describing ourselves as we know ourselves from the inside based on our good intentions but well-intentioned people have bad impacts on others all the time and this is still a problem that we probably need to address if you're a leader or a spouse particularly one who would rather not become an ex-spouse so I'm going to give you a tool that you can use that will help you lower the stakes identity wise please do not leave here and go out and say to your friends and colleagues so give me feedback for me Sheila said I'm supposed to ask you okay that is a terrible question if you were asked that question you're thinking feedback about what about your personality your parenting your pants I don't know what I'm supposed to talk about and like how honest exactly am I supposed to be instead ask a different question ask for one thing as what's one thing I'm doing or maybe that I'm failing to do that you think is getting in the way what's one thing I could change about how I run our weekly meeting that you think would be an improvement what's one thing I could change that would make a mad make a difference to you in our friendship notice I'm not asking is there anything you're assuming there's one thing because by the way if you don't know what you need to be working on as a leader or a parent you know who knows everybody else okay they have a list it's a secret list of all the things you do that drive them crazy they make it harder for them to do their job or be your child so when you ask them this they're gonna have an answer like that they have been carrying it around with them and by the way a couple days later they're going to come back with a second thing that they actually thought of that they wish they would have said so you might get one thing or two things but you get something specific and you get something that's worth considering and at least discussing look none of this is easy because whatever you're triggered reaction is to the feedback you get there's a truth at the core of this that we can't get around which is that feedback really sits at the junction of two core human needs on the one hand we do want to learn and grow I mean this is why people take up new hobbies in retirement it is the only thing that really explains the relationship between human beings and the game of golf right because that occasional good round fools us into thinking that we're getting better so feedback should be exhilarating but the problem is we bump into this second thing which is the need to be accepted and respected and loved the way we are now and the very fact of the feedback suggests that how we are now is maybe not a ok but the people around you closest to you one a few more upgrades to who you are and yet while this helps me explain my conflicted relationship with feedback that sometimes it's exhilarating it's a great source of joy it's also some of the most painful things in our lives and yet how many of you would say that some of the most important things you've learned in life have come from some of your most painful experiences so what's up with that why can't we have a pain-free human learning system there's part of me that wishes I could offer you that but in the meantime this work for me is about learning to understand and manage the pain to enrich our relationships and to get to the learning faster thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 678,666

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Education, Communication

Id: FQNbaKkYk_Q

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2015