This is my fourth day as a professor and UT is already sending someone to evaluate my teaching performance.

My reaction? I was pleasantly surprised. The University seems to take teaching excellence seriously and has a program—independent of student evaluations and the usual performance evaluations done by your boss—squarely focused on giving feedback to teachers on how to improve as teachers in the classroom.

Given how many questions I’ve gotten from students this week about grades, and now I am being graded, I felt like putting together some thoughts about the emotional dimension of feedback.

The Bad of Feedback

When I first find out that someone is going to give me feedback, I flinch.

My flinch isn’t externally visible. My face and body are typically frozen, totally neutral. Inside my body, I feel like I’m tightening up, my core, my torso, like the person I’m talking to is about to punch me in the gut.

It is not a good feeling.

And I am getting ready for a blow—a blow to my self-esteem. Whatever things I think are good about myself, there’s a chance that this person doesn’t think they’re true, which means they aren’t true, which means I’m a bad person. That’s the typical narrative, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

Getting positive feedback is just as difficult, if not more difficult, for a lot of people. In a way, the negative feedback is easy because when someone criticizes us in a way that’s consistent with the negative self-beliefs that we already have about ourselves, our reaction is just, “yeah, I already knew that.”

But the praise? Many of us are bad at taking that. It’s especially hard to receive praise regarding the things we really care about. If throwing a good party isn’t really something I care about, it’s easy to take a compliment about that. But if being a kind person is very important to me, and someone says, “that was a really kind thing you did for that person,” I’ll feel the same internal flinch—the narrative on the inside is “well you didn’t see all the ways I already failed to be kind to so many people even since this morning.”

The Good of Feedback

As difficult as it can be to receive—positive or negative—we all understand that feedback is important, and even essential, to improvement.

That’s why, all things considered, I prefer to receive more feedback rather than less. Caring about the outcome also influences our attitude towards feedback. That’s why my dominant feeling about finding out that I am going to be evaluated was positive. I was a colossal screwup at UT as a student. It’s important to me, now that I’ve gotten a second chance at this university, that this time around I am not a screwup and in fact I am great at what I am doing. I really want to be good. I will take whatever avenue is necessary in order to be good.

And in a way, I see people that have the opportunity to receive continual feedback as quite lucky. Digital marketers and investment finance people get continual feedback every day from the market. If you are in one of these fields, you know every day if your campaigns or your trades are working or not. In fact, the best traders I know have a daily regimen of reviewing their performance, identifying what worked and what didn’t, and thinking about what they can improve the next day. Those who take that process seriously improve more quickly than those who don’t.

The Ugly (Absence) of Feedback

Not getting any feedback at all is the worst.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Abdullah, a guy who had been laid off and sent out 200 job applications—with one interview. I’m imagining Abdullah almost screaming into the ether, and he can’t even tell if anyone is listening. To me it’s a feeling of isolation, of being alone.

I don’t have much to say here other than working on something where you get no feedback at all is going to lead to you wasting a lot of time. The feedback doesn’t need to come from a person, but it needs to be there. For example, you may begin a regimen of running regularly, and if you keep a timer, in a few weeks you should at least know if you are getting faster or not.

Fortunately, most things in life give us the chance to obtain some feedback, and not only that, the reality is that getting feedback never ends. When I was student at UT, I got feedback in the form of grades. As a finance professional I got feedback in the form of performance reviews and my monthly P&L. As a professor I have a colleague sitting in on my class, etc., etc.

If I’m going to get feedback my entire life, whether I want it or not, I might as well get used to it.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Noticing

How do I feel about the prospect of receiving feedback?

When I am in a conversation where someone is criticizing or praising me, do I notice any reactions in my body? Do I tense up or tighten? Does my pulse increase? Do I sweat?

2)      Inquiry

Do I find it harder to take positive or negative feedback?

If I find it difficult to take praise and compliments sometimes, what are the areas where it’s hardest to take a compliment? What might that mean about what really matters to me, and what I want to be valued for?

3)      Action

When I receive feedback, do I act on it in a tangible way?

UT’s teaching evaluation process has quite an interesting technique built in. When my colleague comes in to evaluate my class and make suggestions, I am required to take her suggestions and write my own memo about what I think about her suggestions. Not necessarily that I pledge to do them. Just that I have my own opinions and I express them on paper.

My guess is that in a psychology experiment somewhere, someone figured out that people are more likely to act on feedback when they write down their own reactions to the feedback, rather than just passively listen to it. I’ll bet you that in ten years this will be standard practice in corporate performance reviews.

As this week’s action step, I invite you to physically write down a few paragraphs about the last important feedback someone gave you and what you thought or felt about it. Then see if you are naturally inclined to change your behavior after going through the exercise.