Triggered

Hey there, welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.

How do you go with giving and receiving feedback? Does it feel a bit like reflux? (Where something from the recent past comes back to leave a bad taste in your mouth?) You and so many others it seems! And yet feedback is our best data point to close the loop on moving forward as a leader. In his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith challenges the premise of feedback with what he calls the ‘feed forward’ loop

What’s the most valuable piece of feedback you’ve ever received?

(Write it down)

Consider: who in your circle gives you harsh feedback and how do you deal with it?

Practice: asking for feedback from someone who may not otherwise offer it.

Decide to: take a feedforward approach with conversations this week.

Trigger happy feedback.

There are three things that get in the way of hearing honest feedback: truth triggers, relationship triggers, and identity triggers. Truth triggers happen when we write feedback off as wrong or unfair and become defensive. Relationship triggers see us question the person giving the feedback, or the relationship itself. Identity triggers mean something about the feedback causes us to question ourselves, to think of ourselves as a ‘failure’, and interpret that we should no longer try. These are often the most problematic triggers. The double feedback loop below allows us to feedforward by going right back to the why of what we do. As well as the why of how we take feedback.

Being a leader will always attract criticism. Leading change will attract criticism from those whose power you are disrupting. Being hungry for change means building our appetite for feedback, friends!

Love your Mondays