Feedback Case

It takes guts to give a negative feedback and even more guts to take it in. The article is about the importance of negative feedback in personal development and learning process and how to master the art of critical feedback.

The article started with a narrator "who teaches writing in a university" telling about personal experience with giving or taking feedback, especially negative feedback. A student threatened to punch her on face after discussing how to improve her thesis.

Though negative feedback is essential for negotiating life and social relations, but by definition is something no one wants to hear. At best, it's annoying; at worst, it may seem to threaten identity, even our very survival.

Negative feedback sometimes comes as a result of our mistakes. Learning relies in large part the ability for one to learn from mistakes by recognizing, analyzing and fix mistakes. This learning from mistakes is vital for personal development and self-improvement because mistakes expose individual weakness and learning from it, improves the weakness.

Feedback and learning is a fact of life in the work world - in form of performance review, sport team - spew diatribes-cum-feedback by coaches from the sideline, and spouses regularly conduct their own none-too-flattering reviews of each other.

In fact, so much of learning, loving and living depends largely on negative feedback that one would think that we all should be good at it by now. Instead, criticism almost feels hostile and extraordinary, even to the person delivering it. People react strongly to criticism no matter how it is delivered.

According to Robert Sutton, in our society, we are not trained in either giving or getting criticism and we are remarkably incompetent at understanding how we offer people. Consequently, negative feedback is very, very difficult to do well.

Preparing to give someone negative feedback can be very difficult, considering the reaction from individuals being criticized. Therefore, while preparing and giving negative feedback, it is important to focus on the behavior, not the person.

According to the article, there is evidence that separate circuits exist to handle negative information and events, and they are more sensitive that the circuits that handle positive phenomena. "Most people respond more to the bad that to the good" (John Cacioppo).

Our hypersensitivity to criticism may also lead to us saying it where nonexistent or in some cases concluding on being criticized before finding out or understanding the context of a situation. Sometimes questioning someone task can be perceived as criticism, but the intention might be to understand the intention of what the person is doing for interest purpose.

Since identity is very closely tired up to the groups we belong, strong criticism within the group threatens ones membership, and that is a powerful force. When the content of a negative feedback is not delivered skillfully, the effect of the threat within