Being critiqued can be hard. Especially if we take on all feedback thrown at us as one more point of improvement on our endless growth to do list. We all have that person in our lives who we want to please. Whether it is ourselves, our mothers, our fathers, our lovers. We push our boundaries to get better. We exit our comfort zones to grow. We are sometimes perfectionists, or passionate, or type A, or we just f***ing care. We really truly deeply care. So we want to get better. We want to know we’re progressing. We want to be high performers. It can be so difficult to see the feedback forest for all the constructive criticism trees. What can we do?
A few years ago I realised the perfectionist in me was taking on all the feedback too closely. Every critique I ever received was ALL the things in myself I needed to change, to fix, to improve. Everything needed fixing! I was overwhelmed. I wasn’t always able to cope. I couldn’t rationalise what I had heard into my own path forward. At times I was paralysed. That’s when I started re-framing feedback that came my way. I began imagining myself as a feedback prism and using all my self-care abilities and human centred way of viewing the world to look at feedback in a new way.
- Imagine that all the feedback you get comes to you as a single stream of white light.
- You are a self reflecting prism. Your job is to split the feedback up into its constituent streams of light.
- Choose to examine and tackle the feedback in the order that works for you. You can’t and don’t need to fix everything at once.
“I am a feedback prism. Critique me please.”
Thinking about the future & ethnography 
Nice succinct post Alicia. It made me think how I might better provide more constructive feedback to my team members as well. 😀👍🏻
Colour temperature is warmer at the red end of the spectrum, and cooler at the violet end. You could always organise the feedback in ROYGBIV order, relating to how “hot” the feedback was. I also think it is very important to add the “I choose to ignore this” end of the spectrum – like Roger Bannister did 🙂
Totally right MR. Needs an I can ignore thoa column… I left the colour off this drawing but I think version 2.0 will incluse include some of your amazing ideas.