Being Receptive To Feedback

I’m curious to know how much you agree with this statement: Ideas are improved by having more perspectives. This is top of mind for me right now because I’ve been making a lot of decisions in my life recently and have been asking other people for feedback. We all know that you can only see the world through your own set of eyes, and those eyes miss things that others see. What I want to highlight though is that this idea of receiving feedback is easy in theory but more difficult in practice.

Our minds are designed to assimilate information into our current belief system. This is the most efficient thing our brain can do with the least amount of energy required. What that means is when someone provides feedback that might be different than what you already believe, your brain will try to rationalize its way into proving it wrong or insignificant. This is obviously problematic because if the brain works to reject new information then hearing different perspectives won’t make the same lasting impression. This often goes so far as to influence your behavior where you act dismissive, defensive, or even confrontational when you hear new perspectives.

The way around this, though, is to make this process more conscious. When you hear someone say something, tell them “Thank you for sharing your perspective”. Ideally this will trigger in you that you’re receiving feedback right now that is valuable and that there might be some default processing happening. What you can do is override that subconscious processing with your conscious awareness, bringing attention to how that information is meant to serve you.

To bring this concept into your life today I want to explore this about yourself: How receptive are you to feedback?

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