I was listening to a manager receiving feedback from one of his
team. Each time he heard a piece of feedback he either said
“That’s right” if it aligned with what he believed about himself,
or he said nothing if it did not. His response indicated that he did
not accept that everyone’s perception is their truth and he was
not at that time open to learning from other people’s
perceptions. Gradually his team stopped giving him feedback.
He became distanced from what he needed to know in order to
run the business.
The second belief is that what we recognize in others is true about
ourselves. An extension of this is that the characteristics in others
that touch us emotionally are a pointer toward those things being
characteristics that we don’t want or like to accept in ourselves.
My husband gets frustrated when he is behind a driver that he
considers to be dawdling on the road. Just this week he found
himself behind several drivers who were proceeding very slowly
and holding him up. He commented in exasperation that he
would never do that. Later that day he was getting some money
from a cash machine and as I approached I noticed there was a
lady behind him also waiting to use the machine. He had been
totally unaware of this person and had been dawdling in using
the machine and getting information about his account. When I
pointed out that someone had been waiting for some time, he
was horrified to feel he had been holding them up in a similar
way to how he had been held up by other drivers.
I certainly don’t always want to own the traits I see in other
people. I am like my husband in the above example in that I
prefer to dissociate myself from the characteristics I don’t like
in others. Yet I do know that it is typically those traits that are
my “blind spot” and this is where some of the most powerful
learning lies for me. If we can recognize a trait in others, then
we have that structure in our thinking. This does not mean that
we would behave in exactly the same way (my husband was
dawdling by the cash machine rather than dawdling in the car),
but whatever structure we have in our thinking we have the
capability of enacting in some way. How many of us, although
condemning of violence in the world around us, are capable of
GIVING AND RECEIVING FEEDBACK 339