Chapter 7

There Are No Failures in Life — Just Feedback

The title of this chapter is one of the most helpful phrases I have ever heard. Many of us go to the Pit when we receive feedback that we don’t like. Throughout my many years of studying human behavior, I have found that the only time people really stretch themselves beyond their current level is when they receive feedback on what they’re not doing right.

Professional Pit People don’t know how to handle feedback. They interpret constructive criticism as a personal attack, which sends them spiraling deeper into their Pit. What kind of feedback do we like? Positive feedback, of course, such as “Gosh, you’re gorgeous!” And what sort of feedback do we hate? We hate the negative stuff, such as “I wouldn’t date you for practice!” Now, I’m being playful here, but there’s truth at the core of this joke. As a society, we’ve become conditioned to want only the positive feedback. We tend to perceive anything negative as unhelpful, yet the reality is often quite the opposite.

Positive feedback is wonderful, and we all need to become much more generous at giving positive feedback. However, positive feedback only reinforces what we already know about ourselves. It’s only when we’re shown the gaps that we’re able to grow.

Let’s say your business goes broke. Did you fail? No! You just got some feedback on how not to run a business next time!

Let’s say you got the worst possible exam results. Did you fail? No, of course not! Again, you just got some feedback that you should have studied harder!

I’m being a bit playful here, and I know we’re talking about serious topics. But it’s true that we never fail. Life just gives us feedback on a regular basis. Adopting this outlook is a healthier and more empowering way to handle the results life serves us. Rather than shrinking into the pain of “failing,” this is a way of perceiving the situation as an opportunity to grow.

If we perceive our results as failure instead of feedback, we can feel sorry for ourselves, and often we’ll sink into our Pit. If we accept that every result we get in life is simply feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, each situation will present us with a learning opportunity, and we’ll stay out of the Pit.

Sometimes a negative result or certain events can bring on reactions like shock, sadness, grief, anger, despair, denial, humiliation, resentment, and so on. As I mentioned in chapter 5, feeling these emotions is important, and experiencing them is not the same as going into the Pit.

However, when we get stuck in these emotions and we don’t move on, we are in danger of becoming a permanent Pit Person. We keep replaying the event as if it’s happening again, over and over, so we run the risk of becoming habitually sad, resentful, angry, or whatever our emotional reaction may be. Looking at these experiences as nothing more than feedback frees us to move through the emotions so that we can find and learn the valuable lessons that come from the events and situations of our life.

If we don’t perceive it as feedback, we can easily become consumed by our reaction. We can also become quite defensive when hearing feedback we don’t like. It’s not unusual for some people to “shoot the messenger”; they attack or persecute the person who has been courageous enough to speak up to help them grow. Have you ever asked someone for feedback and then wished you hadn’t, because their comments were so accurate — and painful? I happen to have a great example.

It was a couple of years after my divorce, and I was feeling very positive about where we all were at in our life. The boys and I were settled in our new home, and we were happy, so I was doing a bit of contemplation. After watching an Oprah show in which a son commented on how his mother had just loved her life and this was the greatest lesson he had learned from her, I wondered what it was like for my children to have to hang out with me every day. So I thought I would ask Harison, who was twelve at the time.

Now, if you ask someone a question, make sure you’ve got enough honesty and courage to hear the answer! I said, “Honey, how would you describe Mommy? You know, how do you see me? If you had to say ‘Mommy is … ,’ what would you say?”

His reply was immediate: “Oh, sad.”

I was shocked. “Sorry?” I questioned.

He repeated, with absolute confidence, “I see you as being sad.”

I was stunned, because the last thing I felt was sad. So I proceeded to thank him for his honesty and explained that I thought it was interesting he perceived me as sad, as I was actually very happy. “What is it that I do that makes you think I’m sad, sweetheart?” I asked.

He replied so beautifully and clearly, “Oh, Mom, it’s just that you keep going around saying how tired you are all the time. Like when you come home from work, you say how tired you are and how hard you work and that you travel all the time, so I just thought if you’re working so hard and you’re tired all the time, you must be sad.”

How cool is that for feedback? I couldn’t believe it. I reassured Harison that I was very happy with my life and that I wasn’t tired or sad. I have my sad and tired moments, I explained, but I’m not sad and tired all the time. Harison was right — that was my tape that I had been playing for years — a tape I had learned from my mother. It was so unconscious I wasn’t even aware of it until he mentioned it! Yes, I get tired, but I think we can get so addicted to these repetitive tapes that we don’t stop to assess whether they’re still appropriate. From that wonderful moment of exceptionally honest feedback, I was able to let go of a tired and worn-out tape that was no longer relevant.

How often do we continue with old habits and patterns from the past that no longer serve us? We tend not to question whether our responses and dialogue are appropriate anymore.

There’s a wonderful story about a man who notices that his wife cuts the ends off the ham before she bakes it. He asks, “Honey, why did you do that?”

“I do it because my mother always does it that way,” she replies.

He decides to ask his mother-in-law the same question. “Mom, why do you cut the ends off the ham before you bake it?”

“I do it because my mother has always done it,” she says.

So the husband goes to his grandmother-in-law and asks, “Grandma, why do you cut the ends off the ham before you bake it?”

“Oh, sweetheart, it’s because my baking dish is too small!”

We all have opportunities to grow from feedback — if we’re open to them. For example, I was working with someone at a recent event. He was a lovely person, very helpful, and eager to assist. At the same time, I noticed that nearly all of his communication had a negative tone, which became quite exhausting after a while, so I decided to share this with him. I explained that even though I found him personally to be very positive, his dialogue was quite negative; it was just the way he phrased things. He looked at me in shock and said quite harshly, “No one has ever, ever called me negative before!”

I said, “You’re not negative; it’s just your dialogue. I don’t see you as negative at all, but your dialogue can be very much that way. You use terms like ‘That won’t work.’ ‘This can’t happen.’ ‘They’ll never say yes.’ ‘Don’t do that.’ I find it quite challenging to stay positive and upbeat when we’re communicating.”

Please understand, it was hard for me to say this to him — no one wants to say anything that might offend — but I was being affected by his negative dialogue. I waited for him to become defensive, but surprisingly, he appreciated and accepted my feedback. He just looked at me, and it was like wow! The penny had dropped.

What I loved most about him was that he didn’t let his Pitman (also known as ego) get in the way of his growth. He stopped, paid attention to the feedback, and then was honest enough to take it on board as truth for him. Something obviously resonated, because in every communication we had after that, he made a conscious effort to use more empowering dialogue. He would start to say, “Don’t — ” but then catch himself and reword it in a positive frame. He took responsibility for his communication and welcomed feedback to enhance his life. What a great teacher he is for us all! I learned a lot from him and his reaction, and I hope you have too.

Bring It In!

Accepting feedback may seem easy as a concept, but when we’re sensitive to the feedback, it can be challenging to welcome it in the moment. One evening, I decided to make my boys a new dish for dinner — tuna Mornay. I was assured by some of the moms at school that the boys would love it, and I proudly placed the new meal in front of them.

Harison took a mouthful and screwed up his face. He poked out his tongue and scraped off the tuna Mornay with the back of his knife. “This is disgusting!” he complained, with his tongue still poking out.

I said, “I just spent all afternoon preparing this for you, so don’t be so ungrateful!”

Using his fingers as quotation marks, he replied, “It’s just ‘feedback,’ Mom!” We all burst into laughter as I realized I had again received a learning opportunity about my son’s tastes!

It’s all in the delivery, isn’t it? Respectful feedback means that we’ve stopped and thought about how the receiver of the feedback is going to take that information. We’ve considered the outcome that we want. If the outcome we want is wounded staff, or wounded partners, or wounded children, or wounded friends, then we can go ahead, fire those caustic bullets, and spray our anger and inability to control our tempers under the guise of “helping.” We may not have great relationships in the end, but it’s OK — we can use that lame excuse “I was just being honest.” That’s not honesty. That’s brutal frankness, and it’s cruel. If we stop for a moment and consider how to word our feedback, it will probably be better received. If we genuinely want to help the receivers, they will more than likely sense this. When people feel our true intention, our words may sting a little, but they will know that we had their best interests at heart.

How did you react the last time you received feedback from someone? Did you think about it much? Did you tell anyone about it? In the initial stages of receiving feedback, we tend to be too emotional to properly digest all the lessons.

Have you ever called someone close to you immediately after receiving feedback, in order to badger him or her into listening to your complaints about the “unfairness” of the feedback you received?

“You won’t believe what Stacey said about me!”

“I was only ten minutes late for the meeting, and you should have heard him!”

“I’m only a day late with my assignment! What’s her problem?”

“She’s just jealous!”

Because we’re in a hyperemotional state, the so-called “support” we receive after making such comments can be counterproductive. It can be difficult for us to be logical and to truly comprehend what’s being said. We react by going into a self-protective mode.

One of the ways I handle feedback that really stings is to pretend that there is nothing and no one outside of me that I can blame for how I feel. This way, I can really “sit” in the situation and look at my part in it objectively. I “bring it in” and ask, “How did I contribute to this result? What was my part in it? What did I do or not do to create this? What is the lesson for me?” When I do this, I find my lessons so much faster, and the sting of the feedback is replaced with a gratitude for the new wisdom. Pitman, of course, hates this path, and he will be there all the while, coaxing us back to the Pit, where our sensibility is replaced with the highly charged reaction of revenge, blame, justification, or pity.

When we put everything outside of ourselves and make other people and situations responsible for how we feel, we completely give up the gift of self-awareness. Our greatest achievement and key to peace is to allow our feelings to come through — to rise within us, regardless of the pain, and to accept them with love — all of them, even the ones we may have been taught to judge. They are all clues to uncovering the mystery of “us.” By owning all of our emotions we can look inside of ourselves, bring personal responsibility into our being, and ultimately completely own our life. When we learn to bring it in, we are then able to let our pain out, and the healing begins.

I also use this technique with my boys and with my team. We have all learned to bring it in when we find ourselves in that tempting place of making someone or something else responsible for our situation and our feelings. It would be great if we could immediately go to this reflective place, but sometimes our highly charged reaction needs time to dissipate. Only when we have time to calm down are we able to bring it in and see the powerful learning opportunities available to us from the experience. We can then begin to accept a part of us that we may have denied. That’s why it is so powerful to create a gap between the stimulus and the response we give it — the bigger the gap, the more rational we’re likely to be.

If you want to get maximum benefit from the feedback you receive, simply follow these two key steps:

So the next time you receive feedback, remember to smile and say, “Thank you.” Then wait twenty-four hours and bring it in.