Does less than extremely positive feedback make you feel attacked or threatened or a whole bunch of other words that aren’t warm and fuzzy? Embracing feedback is certainly something that happens as a part of the growing and maturing process.
Let me take you back to my first job. I was a Residence Hall Director at South Dakota State University straight out of college at the age of 21. I had a staff of 21, including a secretary, RAs and maintenance and janitorial staff. I was responsible for 375 college students, some of them older than I. Each year it was our practice as an institution to have we had all of the residents evaluate their hall director with a short questionnaire that they could fill out anonymously. Year one I probably only had spoken in person to 200 of them, and only about 50 of them knew me very well. But that didn’t stop them, when given a pen and a piece of paper that their name didn’t have to be written on, from writing all kinds of things about me.
I breezed through the 340 of them that marked Agree or Strongly Agree and set them aside. I did that because I really needed to focus on the 30 of them who wrote wrote some disagrees and a few comments, and I needed to read the 5 that wrote Strongly Disagree with lots of commentary at least 23 times each. I obsessed with figuring out who they were and trying to decide how to make them think I was awesome or at least pretty good like the 340 who said they did.
Isn’t that human nature? We focus on the negative and forget to see a balanced view.
Fast forward to now. I still don’t enjoy having it pointed out that I was less than awesome in any situation. But now I can listen, talk it through with a few people to see if the feedback is shared by others, and make a decision about how I will do it differently next time. That doesn’t mean that I always enjoy hearing it, but I have at least learned its value.
Proverbs 12:13 says: Fools are headstrong and do what they like; wise people take advice.
To some degree, with my personality, I will always be headstrong, but hopefully I will not take it to the extreme of being a fool. It’s my prayer that I can accept advice and move towards becoming better.
It is also my prayer that I can view people in my life …. my kids, my coworkers, and even my spouse as iron that will sharpen this iron will that God blessed me with in order that I may become more of the person He wants me to be.
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