As soon as you get feedback, do you find you’re in a reactive cycle? Instead of taking it as something to put into place, you’re thinking about what it says about you.
Maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was.
Maybe I screwed this up.
Maybe they don’t trust me anymore.
So you might replay it, analyze what your performance for the next 24 hours, or beat yourself up. For many Asian American women, this reaction isn’t random.
We grew up trying to avoid disappointing people, respecting authority as the final word, and working hard to be good enough. But being harder on yourself isn’t making you a better leader. It’s making it harder to actually see yourself accurately.
In this episode, I talk about why feedback can trigger such a strong reaction, how self-appreciation changes your relationship with feedback, and why you need to be able to see your blind spots without making them mean something is wrong with you.
Because leadership requires being able to see what’s not working without losing sight of what’s already working.
If you’re ready to uncover the blind spots keeping you from being seen as the leader you are, apply for an Asian Authority Audit here.
“If you want to be an effective leader, you truly have to know your blind spots….. And until you are open and willing to receive feedback, you’re not going to be able to address them.” Nicole Tsong
“This is where we set ourselves up for disappointment – when we think other people should tell us how well we’re doing.” Nicole Tsong
“When you’re in a place where you’re being really hard on yourself, it’s very difficult to take on feedback….When we keep going down that pattern, it creates a pressure bubble that is so intense, this is how we burn out.” Nicole Tsong
“The better you get at appreciating yourself and really starting to create and foster a sense of appreciation within you, the more you actually can personally expand and grow.” Nicole Tsong
“If you want to be an effective leader, you truly have to know your blind spots. The thing about blind spots is they are blind to you.” Nicole Tsong
“The more you can become friends with feedback and start to take feedback to start to grow, this is how you evolve and expand.” Nicole Tsong
“When you can start to appreciate yourself, you can say, wow, I did a really good job getting myself set up for this particular meeting.” Nicole Tsong
“When we put in a deposit of appreciation into our own personal bank accounts, this is when it starts to compound and expand.” Nicole Tsong
“It all comes from this one tiny, tiny thing that you’re going to do… and the more you can get into that kind of energy, that’s when everything shifts around your leadership, around the authority that you carry.” Nicole Tsong
TRANSCRIPT
EP 148 Why feedback makes you so reactive
NICOLE TSONG
Hello friends. Welcome back to the School of Self-Worth. I am your host, Nicole Tsong. Today’s topic is something that can hit super hard, and that’s receiving feedback. And there’s a reason it makes us so reactive, which is what we’re going to get into today. I’m going to dive into the heart of it – what exactly is going on, and why feedback is so critical to elevating your leadership and your authority. So if feedback makes you reactive, this episode is definitely for you.
And if you are an Asian American leader who wants to move from being the reliable executor to leading with authority, DM me “shift” @NicoleTsong on Instagram. I’ve got something over there for you. Okay friends, let’s get into it.
Welcome to the School of Self-Worth, a podcast for ambitious women who know they are worthy of an astoundingly great life. Join us weekly as we get on the right side of your intuition, redefine success, and reclaim your self-worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong, an award-winning journalist who left it all behind to become a bestselling author of three books and a work-life balance expert, helping ambitious women unlock their intuition and step into a life of fulfillment and radical joy. Every single week, I bring you diverse and meaningful conversations with successful women from all walks of life who share insight about what it takes to be brave, joyful, and authentic every day. Every episode is thoughtfully designed to leave you feeling empowered with tangible tips and advice that will lead you to your next breakthrough.
So you probably know in theory that getting feedback is useful. It’s helpful. It’s how you grow. It’s crucial to being part of the corporate world. And yet it’s something that you really struggle with. If that’s the situation for you – if you can just feel yourself getting emotional, even if you’ve been a leader for many years and you actually give feedback but have a really hard time being on the receiving end – there’s something going on that is so essential and important for Asian American women to understand. Because we already are not in those leadership positions. We are already not making it to that top-tier C-suite all the time. And I want you to be the person who gets there.
This is going to make a really big difference in terms of your impact and your ability to rise higher in your job.
So it really starts back – and we’re going to backtrack – to what it was like for you growing up. Asian cultural conditioning plays a lot into how you deal with feedback. First, we know this, and it’s essential to remember: Asian cultural conditioning relies on growing up with the idea that the collective is more important than the individual.
How does this look in practice? Your parents probably put a lot of pressure on you to do certain things because it made the family look good. And you didn’t want to bring shame onto your family. You might even have done things you didn’t want to do, acquiesced, just because it helped the family look good.
And this is why, when you got into college, the name of your college – that sticker – was so important on the back of the car for your family. It was something you took a lot of pride in because it made everybody look good.
On the flip side, when you did something that didn’t look good for the family, that might have been a time when you were criticized very heavily. You might even have been criticized for things that weren’t really things to be critical of. Like if you came home with an A and your parents were like, “Where’s the A+?” That can happen in a lot of Asian families.
So you start to get this feeling and sense that anything you do that doesn’t hit the bar your parents set brings up shame. And anything that gives you the sense you’re not hitting the bar can backtrack you to that experience of shame. So when your boss is telling you, “This is going on, I’d like you to improve this, we want to see this next from you,” that feeling of shame can come up. It makes you reactive, and it makes it hard to execute the feedback they’re giving you.
Because this goes back to when you were younger – you didn’t want to disappoint your parents. You didn’t want to disappoint your broader family members. You didn’t want to bring shame into the world that mattered.
But we’re in the United States, and in the West, the individual is king, queen, the top. Whatever you do individually reflects on you. It doesn’t reflect on anybody else. So there’s a lot more emphasis on your individual ability to take feedback, grow, expand.
This is where it gets interesting. If you want to be an effective leader, you truly have to know your blind spots. The thing about blind spots is they are blind to you. You don’t know what they are. And until you are open and willing to receive feedback, you’re not going to be able to address them.
I talk about this so much with my clients. This is why coaches, mentors, and teachers are essential for us to start seeing the things we don’t understand about ourselves. You might even have realized in this conversation that the feeling of shame you had as a kid comes up when your boss gives you feedback. And your boss might be a really great boss who’s giving it to you purely out of goodwill and wants you to grow – and you still have that feeling of shame.
It’s important to understand and recognize these things happening in the back of your mind. They’re subconscious, but they come up in adult environments where you’re expected to show up a certain way to be a leader. The more you can become friends with feedback and take feedback to grow, the more you evolve and expand.
The other thing to understand about criticism and feedback is that when you’re in a place where you’re being really hard on yourself, it’s very difficult to take on feedback. You might think you’ve spent your whole life being hard on yourself and that’s how you pushed yourself to succeed. But when we keep going down that pattern, it creates a pressure bubble that is so intense. This is how we burn out. This is how we get super pissed off. We have anger. And this is how we make it harder to evolve.
I used to think I had to be hard on myself to grow because that was the only way I knew. But your job is to start understanding that you have to change some of that internal programming. When you change that programming of high pressure and negative thoughts about yourself, that’s actually going to help you expand faster.
The fastest way to do this is something you probably never did growing up. You probably didn’t learn this with your family. And if your parents criticized you for not bringing home an A+, you definitely didn’t grow up in a culture of appreciation.
I’m not even talking about a culture of love. I grew up in a family that didn’t say “I love you” until I was in college – because I started it. Your parents probably expressed love in different ways. Being hard on you might have been their way of expressing love. Or they expressed love through high expectations or cooking meals. That’s a big expression of love. Cutting up fruit for you. Doing things for you. But they didn’t say, “You’re doing well. I’m proud of you.”
This is something that can be learned. The challenge is to not expect it from other people. This is where we set ourselves up for disappointment – when we think other people should tell us how well we’re doing. And I love it when someone says something positive about me – of course. But the better you get at appreciating yourself, the more you personally expand and grow. And then it becomes easier to do that for other people.
If you’re leading a team, that would be the number one thing I’d want you to implement: a culture of appreciation. You might wonder if that’s effective. Yes, it is. It makes people want to work for you. It makes them feel connected. It makes them feel like they belong. It makes them feel celebrated. We have so much more capacity for growing, being excited about work, and being energized when we are appreciated.
And I wouldn’t limit this to work. This is important in marriage, partnerships, and parenting. And I don’t mean going crazy and giving medals out for everything. I’m talking about genuine gratitude, appreciation, acknowledgement for something difficult or hard.
So today’s practice is to start appreciating one tiny thing about yourself. It can be something about yourself or something you did. Literally, I like to think: I got up today and unloaded the dishwasher. I’m proud of myself for that. Good job, me. Because sometimes that’s a lot of effort.
One of my clients the other day cleared cobwebs in a room in her house. She said it was a huge deal. I asked if she told herself “good job” for that. She said no. I said, okay, now it’s time. She had been feeling time pressure, feeling like she wasn’t getting enough done. Anytime I hear that energy of “not enough,” I know appreciation is missing.
When you appreciate yourself – “I did a really good job getting myself set up for this meeting” – and if you have a boss who doesn’t appreciate you, your ability to receive their feedback is greater. You can handle the fact they may not give you something positive or affirming.
Let’s be the bosses who are positive, who appreciate our teams and say it out loud – and then go into what we’d like them to improve and grow.
Anything you do compounds. It’s like interest in the stock market. When you put in money, it compounds over time. That’s how the law of attraction works. When we put in a deposit of appreciation into our personal bank accounts, it compounds and expands. The more you do this, the more it expands.
All you have to do is one tiny thing. Say, “I unloaded the dishwasher today,” and let that compound. Tomorrow you’ll do it again.
The challenge is to keep this up until it becomes a habit. It takes roughly 60 days to make anything a habit. Your challenge is to commit to making this a habit. It will feel hard until it’s hardwired into your brain. But once it’s built in, it becomes automatic. And then the sky’s the limit. That’s when feedback becomes something you can handle. “Okay, that’s something I can improve. Not a big deal.”
The more you get into that energy, the more everything shifts – your leadership, your authority, how you walk into a room. You’re not afraid of what people will say. You know you can roll with it. You can handle it. You can answer, pivot, and elevate quickly. And it all comes from this one tiny thing you’re going to do.
Let me know how this landed. Let me know what you can appreciate about yourself. Share a screenshot of this podcast on Instagram, on your stories. Tell us your appreciation. I bet things will shift once you bring this practice in.
Commit to it. Tag me. Let me know how it goes.
And if you’re an Asian American leader who wants to know the exact blind spots keeping you from elevating to the next level in your leadership, I’ve got an Asian Authority Audit – a diagnosis where we look at exactly what is holding you back in your leadership and authority. Don’t wait. I’ve only got a couple of spots every month, so make sure you grab one in the show notes below.
For everyone who’s made it to the end of the podcast, thank you for being here. I am so grateful for you. Every single person who downloads and listens to this show makes a difference in my life and in the work I’m doing. I’m so happy to connect with you in this way. Please know that I see and acknowledge you as well.
Thank you so much for being here, and I’ll see you next time.
Thank you for tuning into today’s episode. Before you go, don’t forget – if you are a high-achieving woman who wants to uncover your biggest blind spots preventing fast intuitive decisions, I’ve got a 72-second assessment for you. DM me “quiz” on @NicoleTsong on Instagram.
And thank you for being here and listening. We read every note we get from you about how the podcast is making a difference in your life. Please know how much we appreciate each and every one of you.
Until next time, I’m Nicole Tsong, and this is the School of Self-Worth.
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