Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. It is Mother's Day here in Thailand today. Think of the last piece of honest feedback that actually changed how you did something — not a compliment, the real kind, the kind that stung a little. Who said it to you?
And why did you listen to that sentence from them, when you would have waved it off from almost anyone else?
You might be sitting in a slow line at the post office right now. You are holding a package. You look at the clerk. The clerk points to a stamp on your envelope and says, "You forgot to write the city." The clerk is tired.
They are not doing this to make you feel stupid. They just want to get you out the door. You accept it. You take the stamp off.
You write the city. You move forward. Now imagine a different person. You are in a meeting at work.
You stand up and present a slide. You are done. A man in the back raises his hand and says, "This was a disaster. No one will understand this." You feel your stomach drop.
You want to argue. You want to defend yourself. You want to quit. You do not know what to do with that sentence.
Why did you listen to the clerk and not the man in the meeting? The clerk was not trying to hurt you. The man was. The clerk was not trying to look smarter than you.
The man was. It is not about the words. It is about the person saying them. This is the problem we have with feedback.
We treat it like a technical fix. We think we just need better grammar or better data. But that is wrong. We treat it like a test from a stranger.
We panic. We hide. We never change. We act on the feedback we trust.
We ignore the rest. The clerk did not know you, but you trusted them. The man in the meeting was a stranger. We cannot fix our lives with strangers.
We need to know the person is not trying to make themselves look better at our expense. We need to know the person loves us. This is what we are going to look at today. How to know when a comment is a helping hand and when it is just noise.
I think about this every time I get a review at work. I think about it when I stand in front of a classroom and read the questions my students have written on a piece of paper. Sartre, the French philosopher, sat in a café in Paris and watched a waiter who was doing his job too perfectly.
It bothered him for the rest of his life. The waiter was so afraid of doing it wrong that he treated his own life like a play, moving his hands like a marionette. Sartre called this bad faith. It is when we act as if we are just objects, like chairs or tables, and not free people who can make choices.
We do this when we treat criticism like a weapon. We look at a comment and we ask, "Is this person trying to hurt me? Are they trying to show how smart they are compared to me?" If we think they want to hurt us, we block it out. We get angry.
We defend ourselves. We stop listening. That is noise. It is not help.
It is just the sound of someone else wanting to feel important. But sometimes, when we look at the same comment, we see something else. We ask, "Is this person trying to help me?" We feel that they are not trying to humiliate us. We feel that they are not trying to build themselves up by tearing us down.
When we feel that safety, we stop fighting. We listen. I have a line I use when I talk to my students. I say this: "In my life, it's been my parents (especially my mother) who has always been the harshest critic, to whom I always listen precisely because I do not have any reasons to doubt her caring, honesty and love for me." I say this because it is true.
My mother can be very hard on me. She can see my faults more clearly than I can. But because I know she loves me, I do not hear her as an enemy. I hear her as a teacher.
I want to be good for her. I want to be the person she raised me to be. That is why I listen. My colleagues are the same.
When we are working together, we look at each other's work and we say, "This is wrong. You need to do it this way." If I thought they hated me, I would quit the job. I would never speak to them again. But because we are friends, I know they are telling me the truth so we can win.
They are telling me my weak points so I can cover them before the real battle. That is the test. The question is never about the words on the paper. The question is about the person holding the pen.
If you trust them, the noise goes away. The comment becomes a helping hand. You act on it. You change.
Fair enough. You might be right. It is not always the case that the person yelling at you actually wants you to do better. Some people just like the sound of their own voice, or they need to put you down so they feel big.
It is easy to see a boss's criticism as a weapon. It feels like they are trying to hurt you. If that is all you hear, you will just get defensive. You will close up.
You will stop listening. But here is the thing. If you are wrong, it does not matter how nice they were about it. If they tell you a wall is green and you paint it green, you still have a green wall.
It is still wrong. So you have to separate the message from the messenger. Most criticism at work falls apart because you do not trust what is behind it. I look at a review I got last week.
It was brutal. It cut deep. I felt stingy. But then I thought about the person who wrote it.
I know they do not get paid extra for being mean. I know they do not want to look better at my expense. They just want the project to work. They want the team to win.
Because I trust that they are not trying to destroy me, I can actually use the words. I can fix the thing. If I thought they were a bully, I would throw the email in the trash and forget it. But because I trust their motive, I change.
So, you decide to do the thing. The meeting ends, the email is sent, the report is filed. You might be right at this point. The logic held up.
The data was solid. The real work starts when you are alone again, and the doubt creeps in. You look at the document on your screen, not because there is a mistake there, but because you are scanning it for an attack. You are waiting for the invisible arrow to fly at your face.
That is why most feedback fails. It is not that people are stupid or lying. It is that you do not trust what is behind it. You see a negative comment from a stranger in a big company, and your brain hears: "He is trying to make himself look better at my expense." Your body tenses up.
You scroll away. You delete the criticism before you even read it. You protect yourself from the pain, but you also throw away the chance to be better. This is where my mother comes back into the room.
I have a colleague who says, "This is weak." I hear the criticism, but I do not hear the knife coming. I hear the person who knows how I fight. I know they are not trying to humiliate me. I know they want me to win the next round.
Because I trust their motive, I change. That is the standard you should look for. You are looking for the person who criticizes you when nobody else is watching. You are looking for the person who tells you that your tie is ugly or your argument is flawed when there is nothing in it for them.
You are looking for the one person who speaks the truth because they love the truth more than they love your friendship. That is the only voice you should listen to. So, as a teacher, I always give my students a lot of comments and criticisms -- with the hope that the students would appreciate those them, as markers of love, care, an appreciation, the way I used to feel about comments from my own teachers. I want them to see the red ink as a sign of respect, not a sign of anger.
I want them to know that I am fighting for them, even when I am pushing them away.
"I love my mother, but, as we know, our love for our mothers is different from the love we would have for someone who is in the same generation as ours." I mean that there is a ceiling on how much we can expect to be challenged by the people who gave us life. I want to replicate that kind of fierce, unflinching care with the people I work with, the people I teach. I want to be the one who stands in front of them and tells them exactly what they are doing wrong, so they know I am not trying to hurt them. I want them to see the criticism as proof that I am on their side.
Fair enough. Maybe you do not have a mother like mine, and maybe you do not have colleagues who can be that honest with you without it feeling like a betrayal. Maybe you look at a critique from a boss and you only hear the ego. It is hard to act on feedback when you cannot trust the hand that is holding the pen.
It is hard to believe that someone is trying to help you when you are convinced they just want to look better than you. The question is: how do you tell the difference between a critique that is about you and a critique that is about them?