Can I take critical feedback?

Dear EQuipped Leaders,

How are you today?

What’s a high for today?

What’s a low?

Are these check-in’s changing for you at all?

For me, I’m noticing my pathways to what I’m thinking and feeling are clearing a bit. It’s taking me a little less time to get to myself and see what’s going on for me. I’m lying a lot less to others and myself about how I’m really doing. It feels nice to be able to be honest. And I find just owning how I feel to myself or saying it out loud to others is incredibly regulating for me. I don’t have to fix it. Just gotta feel it.

That might actually be my mantra for this season: Feel it, Don’t fix it.

On that note, let’s talk about feedback, and our shadow self, and growing self-awareness.

Feedback.

What do you feel when you read that word?

It hits me in my gut. I’m scared of it. Intimidated by it. I’m also curious about it.

My relationship to feedback has changed quite a bit over the years. As a student, I was hypervigilant about making all A’s in every class even through grad school. Terrified of messing up and getting in trouble as a young kid and then terrified of losing my scholarship as a college and grad student. As a teacher, I remember fearing feedback with true terror as well. I’d get sick to my stomach before every classroom observation. And then obsess afterwards over the slightest negative comment. I thought if I made the smallest misstep in my classroom that I would be fired. I knew intellectually that that wasn’t true, but it felt true. For me, the stakes for feedback were so high. Too high, I now know because I had no healthy self-esteem or internal security. I was totally dependent on outside approval, and I chased it with the destructive devotion of an addict.

That’s dark. And true.

So cut to now. I’m 35, in my kitchen with my 5 year-old-son, and he offers me a piece of critical feedback.

He had spilled a glass of milk earlier that day, and I could tell by his reaction that I had made a mean, shaming face at him. I tried to pivot by saying, “It’s okay to make mistakes!” But it was clear that the discord between my words and my face upset him. So later that day in the kitchen, I apologized. I got down on my knees, and I asked him if I had made a mean face at him when he spilled his milk.

“Yes, you did.”

“Yeah, I know. I wanted to say sorry. It really is okay to make mistakes and spill milk. And while I know I tell you ‘it’s okay to make mistakes’ a lot, I haven’t always done a good job of teaching you that.”

He looked at me, and then he delivered one of the hardest pieces of feedback I’ve ever received:

“Yeah, I think you’ve been teaching me to be angry with myself.”

Oww. Gut punch. Geez that landed so hard. It was so true and so hard to face. I took a deep breath, and I did something I’m really proud of. I took it. I took the hit.

“Yeah, you’re right. I have been teaching you that. And now I’m trying to learn how to be kind to myself. Thank you for telling me.”

My son skipped off happily, lighter and unburdened. And I sat stunned in silence. It was such a weird feeling. A mix of deep, bone deep sadness at the truth of his statement. A grief of facing how I learned to be angry with myself and the generations before me of people who sabatoged themselves too. But I was able to hold onto myself through the wave of sadness, knowing that I couldn’t offer my son what I didn’t have yet. And while it hurts to know I’ve been unconsciously teaching him to be self-destructive, I couldn’t have done it any differently before now.

AND at the same time, I had this mix of deep pride. My son felt safe telling me this. He didn’t have to carry this truth by himself. I could take it. I could take the emotional punch in the gut. I’m sturdy enough to hold space for the truth of his experience even when it’s unflattering and deeply painful to me.

I’ve come a long way. And I can have compassion for all these parts of myself, the young first grader gripping her pencil a little too tightly, trying so hard to be perfect. The college student only taking classes she knows she can ace because it would be too risky to try something outside her comfort zone. The teacher pouring over student reviews and admin observation notes, hoping to find something to make her feel okay about herself. I don’t blame these parts of myself. They were all doing they’re best with what they’d been given.

But without facing hard truths. I can’t grow. If I can’t bear telling people the truth about me or hearing other people’s experience of me, I’ll stay stuck. To grow my self awareness I have to do both:

AND I now know that I can’t fake healthy self-esteem. I can’t pretend I’m able to take critical feedback when in reality I’m too fragile to handle it. I have to get to a point where I can hold onto myself and my own goodness no matter what I learn about myself. I have to practice what I preach and re-teach myself that it actually IS okay to make mistakes.

A few days ago, I asked my son to meet me in the kitchen. I poured a glass of milk into a glass, and then I poured the whole thing onto the floor in between of us. And I said slowly and deliberately, “It’s okay to make mistakes.”

He rolled his eyes and goes, “Mo-o-om” like a teenager. But that doesn’t matter because it was really for me. For all of those versions of myself who have been holding their breath and gripping life too tightly. It’s okay to make mistakes.

Feel it. Don’t fix it.

Better EQuipped Together, Elizabeth