Feedback notes

Why is feedback important?

Learning is soliciting, receiving, and integrating feedback.

Toddlers learn by receiving feedback. Run into walls, bump your head, get burned by something hot. Seek feedback from adults to see if they're doing well.
We're not that different from toddlers.

We sometimes don't behave appropriately in situations because of a long feedback loop.
Health and environment are such long feedback loops that we don't moderate our reactions quickly enough.
DBC wants to give lots of feedback in leadership, teammates, and programmer.

Become Feedback Ninja

Qualities of a feedback ninja:

• People love getting feedback from me.
• People love giving me feedback.
• I love getting feedback from other people.

Requires four skills:

• Soliciting feedback.
• Receiving feedback.
• Giving feedback.
• Integrating feedback.

Request vs Demand.

• Either one elicits very different responses.
• You must be able to say no to requests without feeling like you'll be punished for it.
• You also be must able to not emotionally punish someone else for saying no to your request.
• That's completely OK to say you're not ready to hear feedback or that you're not ready to give feedback.

Receiving feedback
Compass of shame.
We all fall somewhere on the diagram

Withdrawal

• Behavior
• When an emotionally stressful or difficult situation happens, you need to extricate yourself. 
• Walk out or leave the room.
• Need to be alone.
• Emotionally check out.
• Positives.
• Know they need to take things slow.
• To get away from the trigger.

Avoidance

• Behavior.
• Avoid shame by getting into something else.
• Sex, drugs, food, work, etc.
• Need to immediately get caught up in an activity.
• Positives
• They get a lot of things done.
• Funnest people to party with.

Attack self

• Behavior.
• If someone gives me negative feedback and believe it.
• Compound it.
• If someone calls me boring, then my mind will blow it out of proportion and think I'm terribly boring.
• Positives.
• Will never hurt others and can be very loving.
• May even defend others.

Attack others

• Behavior.
• Most socially unacceptable.
• Positives.
• They don't take crap from others.

These are strategies we learned to cope with stress when we were young.

Do not let the strategy own you.

• If your strategy is coming out when receiving feedback, don't compound the shame.
• Take the impulse, notice it, and choose not to completely give into it.
• In the middle of your coping mechanism coming out, just tell the person to hold on a sec and redo.

How to give good feedback

• Actionable
• Specific
• Kind

Actionable is something I can do something about.

• It's not advice.
• Don't critique things that there's nothing that can be done about it.

Specific is self-explanatory.

• Talk about one particular thing.

Kind is not the same as nice.

• Truth is kind.
• Be honest about the impact that person's actions have on you.

DON'TS

Don't give advice unless asked.

• You can point out a problem without needing to give a solution.
• Just because you point out a problem does not mean you have to give the solution right there.
• Giving advice robs opportunity of the person to receive and process that feedback.

Sh*t sandwich.

• If you're going to say something constructive or critical, you have to say two nice things, too.
• It's disrespectful to the person's ability to receive critical feedback.
• Dilutes your positive feedback because I know you'll fake it again.

Rate or compare.

• It aids this inner structure of positioning themselves externally to some other standard.
• "It's so much pairing with you than with that other person."
• "You explain things so much better than this other person."

Barriers to giving feedback

Fearlict.

• Maybe you pair with someone who is an "attack other". You can choose not to confront, but don't live life that way.
• DBC is a safe environment, so you can practice confronting.

Mistrusting our own seeing.

• You don't trust your own intuition.
• Trust your seeing.
• Speak your truth in kindness, accurately, specifically.
• No big deal if someone disagrees with it.

Our seeing doesn't matter.

• You might pair with someone who's better than you and then you shy away from giving feedback because you think you don't have anything worth to say to that better person.
• Speak up.

Integrating feedback

Making it useful to you.

• People will still give you messy feedback. 
• People's emotions might still leak through in the feedback like saying "You were mean." 
• Parse through most of what they say and understand where it's coming from.
• Integrate the feedback and take what's useful to you.