Feedback Thoughts
Feedback can be good or disastrous, it all depends on how it's presented and the frame of mind of the receiver. As someone who grew up constantly criticized, I fear negative feedback pretty much above all. Mistakes were never tolerated in my house growing up. It was straight A's or disapproval and criticism. I had to clean house daily & my mother was not afraid of the white glove test (I'm 46, most college kids have probably never even heard of that!). In school, I was good at straight A's. I thrived on positive feedback & being basically a teacher's pet. Until I got to about middle school, that is. I learned to hide every paper and test that we got returned. I cringed with the teacher would use my paper as an example or call out the grades as they handed back papers. See, by then, the other kids had decided my good grades were something to ridicule me for. Can you just imagine the stress-if I didn't get straight A's I paid for it at home, if I did get them I paid for it at school.
Negative feedback can also be hard if it's coming from someone you respect, admire, or love. You don't want to disappoint the person giving the feedback and mistakes feel like disappointment. When my husband & I were very much newly-weds, he decided to teach me to ride the type of horses he trained. I'd ridden and showed horses for years & was pretty good at it, but nothing like the discipline he trained. When you're newlywed and in love, and already conditioned to dread mistakes & negative feedback, it's hard to hear from your new husband that you are making mistakes. I knew I was making them. I knew what I was learning was different & hard. I also knew he didn't expect me to be perfect right away. However, it didn't help my mindset or make it any easier to hear the negative feedback. It got so bad that most of my lessons would end in tears and even if I got positive feedback I'd think he was just trying to be nice to me. I still to this day dread showing because I feel like if I don't do well, it reflects badly on him as a trainer. I really try to never work or show a horse unless it's the practice horse, because no one expects you to do well on that so there's no stress.
"Why rejection hurts so much & what to do about it" really goes along with everything I've just written. I've never thought about it, but what the article says about being rejected by your tribe being basically a death sentence because people couldn't survive alone in a hunter-gather society makes the pain of rejection hard-wired into our brains. The article goes on to say that "the greatest damage caused by rejection is usually self-inflicted." I know for a fact that I'm guilty of doing this to myself each & every time I get negative feedback or rejections. I'm job-hunting right now & each rejection is like a kick to the gut for me. I know I'm good at what I do, but being rejected by potential employers still just plain hurts. Also the article talks about our need for social connection and how rejection can make us just want to be alone. I'm very bad about this. I'm an introvert by nature anyway so it's easy to lock myself in my house, but rejection makes it all the more likely I'll do that. I love being around friends or groups of people I have something in common with, but I have no problem locking myself away saying I need to be alone. It just takes getting out there to remind me.
"Silence the critical voices in your head" also plays very much into what I wrote above. I'm sure it has a lot to do with how I was raised again, but I learned early to be my biggest critic. I find it odd that the voices in our head are so quick to be critical, not encouraging. If, as the article says, we need five positive voices in our head for every negative voice there, it's going to get awfully noisy in my head because there are a ton of negative voices in there! But there really are some good points to the article, many of which I've heard before in various forms but they are still valid and good.
Negative feedback can also be hard if it's coming from someone you respect, admire, or love. You don't want to disappoint the person giving the feedback and mistakes feel like disappointment. When my husband & I were very much newly-weds, he decided to teach me to ride the type of horses he trained. I'd ridden and showed horses for years & was pretty good at it, but nothing like the discipline he trained. When you're newlywed and in love, and already conditioned to dread mistakes & negative feedback, it's hard to hear from your new husband that you are making mistakes. I knew I was making them. I knew what I was learning was different & hard. I also knew he didn't expect me to be perfect right away. However, it didn't help my mindset or make it any easier to hear the negative feedback. It got so bad that most of my lessons would end in tears and even if I got positive feedback I'd think he was just trying to be nice to me. I still to this day dread showing because I feel like if I don't do well, it reflects badly on him as a trainer. I really try to never work or show a horse unless it's the practice horse, because no one expects you to do well on that so there's no stress.
"Why rejection hurts so much & what to do about it" really goes along with everything I've just written. I've never thought about it, but what the article says about being rejected by your tribe being basically a death sentence because people couldn't survive alone in a hunter-gather society makes the pain of rejection hard-wired into our brains. The article goes on to say that "the greatest damage caused by rejection is usually self-inflicted." I know for a fact that I'm guilty of doing this to myself each & every time I get negative feedback or rejections. I'm job-hunting right now & each rejection is like a kick to the gut for me. I know I'm good at what I do, but being rejected by potential employers still just plain hurts. Also the article talks about our need for social connection and how rejection can make us just want to be alone. I'm very bad about this. I'm an introvert by nature anyway so it's easy to lock myself in my house, but rejection makes it all the more likely I'll do that. I love being around friends or groups of people I have something in common with, but I have no problem locking myself away saying I need to be alone. It just takes getting out there to remind me.
"Silence the critical voices in your head" also plays very much into what I wrote above. I'm sure it has a lot to do with how I was raised again, but I learned early to be my biggest critic. I find it odd that the voices in our head are so quick to be critical, not encouraging. If, as the article says, we need five positive voices in our head for every negative voice there, it's going to get awfully noisy in my head because there are a ton of negative voices in there! But there really are some good points to the article, many of which I've heard before in various forms but they are still valid and good.
(I allow myself to do things imperfectly from Feedback Cats because I need to remind myself of this daily)
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