Issue No. 37

My article today was inspired by a conversation I had with my father a few weeks ago. I won the lottery being raised by someone with a relentless growth mindset, and somehow, despite all we have talked about over the years, we had not really covered the topic of feedback until recently. Much of what follows came from his observations, paraphrased through my own lens.
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Receiving feedback well is one of the most underrated skills in personal and professional growth. Most of us say we want to improve, but our ability to actually improve depends in large part on whether we can hear the truth about where we are today.

For anyone with an athletic or music background, the value of feedback is obvious. You do not become a great athlete or musician without correction. You practice, someone watches, they adjust you, and you try again. The goal is not to prove you are already perfect. The goal is to get better.

That mindset does not always transfer naturally to other areas of life. In business, leadership, parenting, marriage, or friendship, feedback can feel much more personal. A comment about something we did can start to feel like a judgment about who we are, and once that happens, it becomes much harder to stay curious.

Receiving feedback well requires both security and humility. We have to be grounded enough in who we are to believe feedback is not a threat, while remaining humble enough to believe we can still improve. We must believe we are highly valued, without valuing ourselves too highly.

When we can hold those two ideas together, feedback becomes something we are more willing to seek out. We can listen with more openness, sort through what is useful, and leave behind what is not.

Of course, not all feedback is healthy. Sometimes what gets presented as feedback is really criticism or judgment. A secure identity helps there too. It gives us the ability to receive correction when it is useful, while rejecting what is not.

All in all, the conversation was a good reminder from a wise dad: the people who keep growing are usually the ones who can keep listening.

‍— Jillian

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