Two Kinds of Feedback
…and only one of them changes your work
A few years ago someone sent me notes on a story I’d been working on, and I didn’t look at them again for days.
The notes weren’t unfair (if anything, they were really kind). Maybe the problem was that I’d had something like fifteen minutes between clients, and I rushed reading through them before going into a session with someone else’s anxiety to hold instead of my own. Did the session fine, by the way…
What had actually been said wasn’t much, something along the lines of a character’s choice in one chapter didn’t feel earned, and it was buried among several comments that were really useful and a couple that were even outright complimentary. But what I read when I didn’t really take the time was something closer to, “You don’t understand people as well as you think you do”. Which is a strange thing to hear about a fictional choice made by an imaginary person.
This wasn’t the first time something like that happened, and it probably won’t be the last. I remember rehearsals where the MD said one sentence to me, and that’s the only one I can still recite word for word over two decades later. I don’t really remember much else from that rehearsal, just that one line (and also stuff like where I was standing when I heard it, or what that person was wearing, or…).
What’s Actually Happening In There?
The first thing your brain does with feedback isn’t necessarily understanding it on a deep level, but rather checking whether you’re “under threat”, and that happens before the words have even finished landing fully. We have decent research showing that the brain processes social rejection through some of the same circuitry it uses for physical pain, and it does it fast, well ahead of anything you’d call conscious thought.
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Back to this week’s article: By the time you’ve actually parsed what someone said about your work in a way that’s useful, your nervous system has already decided how dangerous it is.
And it gets worse the more the work matters to you. If you’ve fused who you are with what you create, a note or comment on the work isn’t just a note or comment on the work. It’s about you. Your nervous system can’t really distinguish between those, not in the split-second where it’s making the call.
So yes, some feedback changes the work because you file it as something you can act on. But some feedback only changes how you feel about yourself and it seemingly gives you nothing you can use.
Those two things sound identical in the moment, and it’s not the sender who makes that distinction, it’s you (albeit subconsciously). So the skill is learning to bring it to the surface and recognising it.
I mentioned the useful split between what’s sometimes called self-as-concept (or content) and self-as-context in acceptance and commitment work before. Concept is the story about who you are (“not talented enough”, “the writer who doesn’t understand people”, “the singer who can’t be trusted with XYZ”). Context is the part of you that’s actually doing the noticing and watching the story happen or the narrative develop rather than being in the midst of it at all times.
Many creatives live almost entirely in the concept. Which makes sense because our work tends to be intimate and it can feel like it costs us something every time we put it out. But it also means every bit of feedback can rewrite the whole story of who you are instead of just telling you something about one (1!) choice you’ve made, or one (1!) thing that did t go quite according to plan.
This isn’t a case for “just develop thicker skin”. I don’t think thicker skin is what most of us actually want, and I’m also fairly sure it doesn’t work. Numb isn’t the same as resilient, numb just means you’ve stopped letting anything in.
What you’re actually after is a pause before you react. Slowing down if you will, enough space between the moment something lands and the moment you decide what it supposedly means about you. Because only then you’ll be able to ask a question that’s actually useful:
Can and should this change how work, or did it just change how I feel?
It’s a work in progress for many of us; I still don’t always get there fast either. But I know the difference now, which I didn’t always in the past, and that’s something useful to build on…
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