It’s Just Information, Not Failure, Receiving Negative Feedback, and Yeah, You DO Mind!
Food for thought on knowing yourself.
Food for Thought is where I share some of the many nuggets of inspiration that prompt me to think about knowing ourselves, including knowing our yeses and nos. This weeks’s selection includes the benefit of giving feedback even when it’s ‘negative’, how we do mind about that thing we keep saying we don’t mind or are okay about, and why we need to check in with ourselves when we expect ourselves (or others) to keep up the appearance of a ‘good relationship’.
“Nothing is a failure. It’s just information about how the day progresses.” — Tiffany Han
How do you feel about all the things you don’t manage to do? My friend Tiffany recently taught her ‘Time Blocking for People Who Hate Time Blocking’ class where she shared how she’s found ways around her ADHD to manage and organise the things she needs and wants to do. In it, she really managed to capture a lot of the frustration and failure feelings many of us, neurodivergent or not, grapple with about our days. It’s so easy to shame ourselves about what we don’t manage to accomplish in our days but, as she said, it’s information, not failure. What a remarkable shift in perspective.
Since around age eighteen, which is, ahem, twenty-eight years ago (jaysus!), I’ve grappled with this sense that I’m not getting all the things done. Often I focused more on what I didn’t do than what I did, the latter of which was a lot. Growing up with a sense of not being ‘good enough’ and not doing enough combined with not having limits also meant that I learned to overestimate what I can do with my bandwidth and underestimate what my commitments take out of me.
In my book The Joy of Saying No, the first step to breaking the cycle of people pleasing is get to know your pleaser by observing your week and how you spend your yeses, nos and maybes. I’ve learned a lot about myself through compassionately observing my habits and the patterns of my days, including the equivalent of those bumps I keep experiencing. You know, like when you keep catching your leg on the same piece of furniture until you move it or become more mindful as you approach it! It also pays to notice how you feel as well as the difference between your intentions and what happens. What can you learn about your days and yourself?
Side note: I’ve done what feel like a gazillion ADHD quizzes (computer says no) and also read up about the ‘time blindness’ the youth 🤣 talk about on TikTok (also not me).
“Mostly though, I just felt grateful that she’d wanted to invest the time in making sure our relationship was clean and honest, rather than filled with unspoken resentments which would eat away at it.” —
talking about how to give (and receive) feedback.
I love Harriet’s honest and generous account of a recent experience where she received negative feedback, something that’s a source of trepidation for many of us, hence why we might avoid giving and receiving feedback full stop. It reminded me of when someone else said to me recently that they have over fifty conversations they’re avoiding but they keep their silence because they don’t know where to start and are afraid of hurting feelings and opening Pandora’s box. In the meantime, they’re deeply unhappy.
Without feedback, we can’t keep our relationships and interactions honest and resentment can build up. And yet we avoid it. We forget, of course, that our boundaries, silence, communication, choices, everything — it’s all ‘feedback’ anyway. But, back to the subject of communication and giving and receiving positive or negative feedback, we need to check in with ourselves and be honest about whether we value the opportunity to better our relationships and interactions. Would we rather they (or we) keep quiet and then one or both of us experience the cost of that?
Harriet’s experience is a reminder that you think you’re about to die of mortification when not only have you erred but someone gives you feedback about it, but you realise you and the relationship are better off for having had the experience. Where are you dodging giving (or receiving) feedback?
I’ve noticed that in a lot of my conversations with clients and the messages I receive from readers where they’re struggling with something, they often go out of their way to emphasise that they’re okay with something.
If you have to keep telling yourself and others that you’re ‘okay’ about someone doing something, that you ‘don’t mind’, I hate to break it to you, but you do. And that’s okay. It is! Keep it honest and you’ll stop ignoring, dismissing and overriding yourself in your quest to be a Good Girl/Guy and avoid looking a certain way.
As I explain on Baggage Reclaim, “Often, you’re technically okay with the thing you said you’re okay about but you’re not okay with other aspects of the situation.
For instance, let’s say you claim you’re okay with your partner being friends with somebody, but, behind the scenes, you’ve lost confidence in your relationship and feel increasingly anxious.
What is it about the situation you’re not okay with? Be specific.
It might be that you’re not okay with your partner being shady and deceptive about the friendship.”
Where do you keep saying that you don’t mind or that you’re okay with something? Are you really? What or who are you trying to avoid appearing like? E.g. jealous, possessive, not cool, incompetent, not a team player. How is your claiming you’re okay affecting you, and what do you need to say or do to evolve the situation and alleviate your discomfort?