How To Take Negative Feedback

If ever you’ve felt the crushing blow of disappointing or angering someone, you know that the interaction doesn’t end when the moment ends. The feeling can loom over you for a long time, lower your motivation, and impact your mood. Additionally, when this happens in a team setting, it can shake up communication and cause tension.

Negative feedback doesn’t only pertain to an internal team, a client for example might have a bone to pick with you. In this situation especially, how you react must be well thought out, emotions must be detached, and the situation will require careful analysis.

Now no matter the situation, there are always two ends, the receiver of negative feedback and the one giving it. For the one giving the feedback, answer the following: Is your emotional state in check? Is this feedback necessary? Who does this concern?

For the one receiving the feedback: What have I done to provoke this? What stakes does this person hold in the situation? Is my emotion in check? How can I prevent the situation from escalating?

This is a very complex dynamic, especially depending on the severity of the situation, a lot can be at stake. This is why taking inventory is crucial, analyzing the situation from both ends allows you to gain perspective and distance. It is critical to deal with these situations as you need to resolve the conflict. Not dealing with it is a whole other issue, without getting into how to avoid it. 

With that being said, here are some things to consider:

Cool Off Period

Time should be taken to step back from the negative, consider it from the opposing perspectives and look at what you are going to do to prevent future negatives. It could be an hour, the rest of the day, just enough time to step back to compose yourself and your thoughts. This kind of ownership says a lot about your character and will demonstrate that you want to be better.

This is not to be mistaken with procrastinating the issue, you are simply taking time to collect yourselves. A cool-off period will also allow a leader who may not be in a good headspace to consider their actions. Ultimately, you are working towards a civil conversation with this person.  

Clarification

The negative feedback can also be vague, when the recipient doesn’t know how to act on it, the feedback is useless. Ask questions about the feedback you’ve received, it’s one thing to look at it from your end, the critic, however, should have clearly defined areas that need improvement. You can begin to open the line of communication back up by doing so. 

Don’t Attach To The Negative

When receiving negative feedback, it hurts our ego initially, yet we need to realize that the feedback is not personal. Someone else's opinion of you or something you’ve done does not reflect who you are as a person. Don’t let feedback hinder your confidence or derail your progression. 

Conclusion

Being able to see the positivity in a negative situation is a very difficult thing to do and it’s only natural to feel down. It’s important here to reflect, take ownership of the role you’ve played in the situation and avoid the victim's mentality.

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Working In The Empty Office: Guide To Self-Reliance

From the time we are young, we learn that our actions have consequences, both good and bad. In school, if an assignment is not done, the teacher threatens to call your parents, whereas if you do well on a test, you are praised. This instills an understanding of what is expected of us. This principle is not only relevant when we are young— it remains influential over us as we enter adulthood. Once you’re older, there is now the added consideration of responsibilities like a family, job, mortgage, etc. 

These stages, however, are not a dead end, there is no cap on how much you can have or achieve, and there is no 9-5 trap so long as you don’t look at it that way. Although the pressure of providing, performing, and still expecting to have windows of freedom might cloud your perspective on what you are capable of. There may be something else you know you want and deserve.

When working for someone else, you can get so caught up in the responsibilities they give you that you forget about the things you need to enjoy your life. Yet it is keeping up with these responsibilities to yourself that build you to be better.

You never want to be complacent. Just because your career may be in a spot that is putting food on the table does not mean you should limit your skills to that. If in the back of your mind, you know you’re deserving of more, it is because your other boss is talking. That boss is you, and not tending to your needs will have consequences beyond anything anyone else could deliver. 

To rely on yourself, you’re going to have to be able to work while nobody’s staying on top of you or cares what happens but you. Recognizing that managing this can be difficult, here are some ways to get started:

Identify Your Ideal

Where do you see yourself in a year? 5 years? 10 years? Most people underestimate how much they can get done in just one year. If you avoid distractions as much as possible, keep your eye on the next target, and commit, you can set yourself up for success. This starts with visualization, imagining every day exactly what you’re out to get and moving the pawn a little bit every day. 

Talk About It

Although you may not want to sound braggy talking about everything you’re going to do, tell people you trust about what you want. In doing so, you will begin to see different perspectives. The same method applies to writing down concepts to understand them better. Affirming goals in your mind creates a sense of realness. You’re telling yourself “this is the standard, we’re not settling for less”.

Take Small Steps

Forget the end goal, focus on what you have before you, and deal with situations head-on. Even that thing that’s going to take less time and you’ll just get it done later… Nope, if it’s that easy, get it done right away. Don’t leave things on the back burner, you may forget about them and they’ll likely cause a fire. 

Keep Track

Some days will be more productive than others, it’s on the days where it feels slower or less exciting that you need to check back on your progress. Additionally, it will be beneficial to refer to your ideal to remember where you’re going. Everything is centred around this ultimate reality you’ve envisioned, the reason you’ve visualized it is because it’s real. You want to note any progress along the path to it no matter how big or small. This will also help in learning how to deal with the inevitable struggles. 

Conclusion

Great lives are not only for a select group of people, everyone has a chance to make something of themselves and experience the sweet taste of fulfillment. It will take sacrifice, it will not always be fun, and you will not always have people in your corner. The only thing that matters is that you commit to yourself, and outperform everyone in front of no one.

We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!

Overcoming Your Past: Self Limiting Beliefs

“I can’t do it” “It’s not going to be me” “Not even worth it” “What if it’s like last time” “They probably won't care” “Everybody’s out to get me”.

There are things we experience that give us lessons to carry long term, the impacts of these lessons are determined by how we look at them. If you worked in a job where you were undervalued, criticized, or faced a lot of negativity in general, it can put a glass ceiling over your self-belief. However, as Steve Harvey said, the ceiling is glass because you have to break through it. 

Not taking the time to own past experiences and put them in the past can inhibit your ability to see the good in new situations. For example, if you’ve experienced a harsh leader, it may impact your ability to trust or take feedback from future leaders. If you’ve worked with an unreliable partner, you may not trust people, avoid delegation, and try to do everything yourself. Gaining the ability to detach from your past starts with acknowledging its value in it. 

Considering the disadvantage you’d be put at having not experienced adversity, these situations tend to lead to long-term gratification, so long as you don’t let it derail you. This is the fundamental concept of success that is building a foundation of passion and vision which cannot be cracked from the outside. Eventually, individuals who reach a level of success look back and see that all the seemingly negative experiences were necessary to be successful. 

Acknowledging that this concept is easier said than done, here are some things to keep in mind:

There Is no Right Time

So often we can find ourselves in a position we know is not providing any form of benefit to us, in the back of our mind we have an idea of what we need to do. This is when the tendency to think of “starting tomorrow” or “someday” comes into play. Yet, without implementing any form of action, that “someday” starts to fade, and the current loop continues.

To combat this, reflect on your situation, find any form of action, no matter how significant and begin making progress. If you think about the way you take orders from an authority, imagine if you had that same level of accountability and dependency on yourself. 

You Are Not Your past

Things change, people change, the world constantly changes and so does the way we communicate and see things. It’s so easy to fixate on mistakes we’ve made which can challenge our confidence going into situations that require us to show some grit. 

Each day is a new opportunity to set a standard, set an example, and lead others on your team to be better. In your career, you’ll constantly be faced with challenges that will test your ability to keep going. As the company Under Armour famously tag line “The only way is through” which means you cannot let temporary challenges or adversity stop you from reaching your vision.

Build Relationships

The people around you can have more of an impact on your perspective and benefit your problem-solving ability than you can on your own. Yet, trust is the baseline to create a dynamic that is give and take. In the workplace, this can come from overseeing objectives as a collective, listening to others' points of view, as well as giving and receiving feedback. 

Testing the waters with your trust in others is how you will be able to decipher who is trustworthy and the competency of those around you. This will be beneficial when faced with pressing tasks where coordination within the team is essential. 

Conclusion

Author and former navy seal David Goggins developed a concept referred to as the 40% rule. The idea here is that people tend to put a cap on their ability to achieve, after reaching a certain point, they think “that’s it”. It is at this point that they’ve only reached 40% of their true capability. Why do they begin to doubt themselves then? A lack of belief, previous failures, outside criticism, and all meaningless noise used as a defence mechanism.

Don’t let that be you, find solutions, connect with people, take chances, push your boundaries, set goals regularly and commit to yourself. It is often the things that seem impossible or that will “take too long” that are the most rewarding.

We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!