Imagine an ordinary moment. Someone tells you that you interrupted them. You start explaining that you meant no harm. That is true. Yet what they said has still not been addressed.
There is a contradiction here that interests me. We want to learn, but the first moment of learning can feel as though something is being taken away: our belief in our thoughtfulness, our competence or our good intentions. A defence begins, even though nobody has called a trial.
I wonder what would happen if feedback did not have to decide what kind of person I am. If, to begin with, it could simply tell me about one moment and how it felt to someone else.
Good intentions do not tell the whole story
I can mean well and still overlook someone. I can be capable and make a poor decision. Accepting both things at once asks more of me than admitting that nobody is perfect. It asks me to leave my own explanation unfinished for a moment.
That does not mean accepting every piece of feedback without question. Someone else's interpretation may be imprecise, unreasonable or just one perspective. I can ask what observations it rests on. But if I ask only to find a flaw, I am no longer really listening.
Perhaps the hardest sentence is: I do not recognise myself in that description, but I want to understand how you came to experience me that way. There is both a backbone and an open door in that response.
What will I do in the next moment?
Feedback can become a discussion about what happened and who was right. Life, meanwhile, continues in the next situation. Will I let the other person finish? Ask before interpreting? Notice my own impatience a little earlier?
A change can be that small. It does not require a grand story about a new me. Nor does a useful conversation necessarily feel good immediately. Sometimes a helpful thought needs a night before I can look at it without defending myself.
I would like to think that my worth does not have to be settled again in every conversation. Feedback might then bring more information and less threat.
And perhaps I would have some energy left to ask what I can learn, instead of spending all of it proving that there is nothing I need to learn.
