Feedback

I was having a good vacation, a great one, in fact. In case you thought I'll be on a hedonic treadmill where happiness boost doesn't last long, let me tell you my way of overcoming that "happiness set point."

I returned to work and came upon a gift right next to my workplace. That is a new public library where I can continue diving into the everlasting pleasure of bookshelves. One of my recent discoveries is the book Thanks for the Feedback.

Let's define feedback first, shall we? To quote the authors: It's what your spouse has been complaining about your same character flaws for years (although I might think of that less as my wife "giving me feedback," to be honest). It's what your bum knee is trying to tell you about your diminishing spryness. (A confession: I've just sprained my right knee during my holiday).

And history is replete with googolplex of feedback not that well received. Something is wrong, we might think. The enlightenment came after I read about the aureate insights of push and pull. As the two authors Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen rightly points out at the beginning chapter, pushing harder rarely opens the door to genuine learning. Their focus is not to teach managers (or your spouse, for that matter) how to give feedback. The focus - and my learning objective - is on feedback receiver. The real leverage is creating pull. It's about how I can learn to recognize my resistance to feedback. It's about how to seek out negative feedback, which can feel less like a "gift of learning" and more like a colonoscopy. Uneasy but worthwhile, I believe.