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Most of us know how to receive feedback at work in theory. In practice, when it lands hard, the nervous system gets there first. The stomach drops. The jaw tightens. And somewhere in those first 30 seconds, before the thinking brain has caught up, the emotional response is already shaping what the feedback will mean and what you will do next.

That reaction is not weakness. It is physiology. And there is a framework for what to do after it happens.

In this episode, I introduce the Receive and Recover framework, a four-step process for what to do when feedback hits hard. It starts with the step most people skip: feel it. Not performed openness, not toxic positivity. Actually acknowledging where the feedback landed in your body and giving yourself permission to process it before you respond, especially when it arrives outside your field of awareness and changes your picture of yourself.

From there, I walk through how to unbundle the feedback, because most of it arrives as one thing, one verdict, one emotional charge, when it actually contains four distinct components: the content (what was literally said), the delivery (how it was said), the inference (what you concluded beyond what was said, which connects directly to Episode 287's Story Audit), and the signal (what is actually worth using). Poor delivery does not invalidate useful content. Good delivery does not validate poor content. Each component can get a separate verdict.

I share two stories: my own experience getting scored after keynotes and workshops, including a moment when someone insisted on giving me feedback immediately after I stepped off a stage and my brain simply could not receive it, and an executive coaching client who asked to pause her performance review mid-conversation because the feedback was outside her field of awareness and she recognized she was not in a position to respond well. That decision to pause and return the next day is one of the most emotionally intelligent moves I have seen a coaching client make.

Listen and catch the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch it and replay it on my YouTube channel, JanelAndersonPhD.

LINKS RELATED TO THIS EPISODE:

Episode 287 — Stop Believing Everything You Think at Work: The Story Audit

Giving and Receiving Clear Feedback with Discretion — Janel's full course covering both sides of the feedback conversation, available in the training catalog at drjanelanderson.com.

Think about the last time someone gave you feedback that stung. So not a gentle suggestion, but something that really hit hard. You know, the punch to the gut feedback at the end of your performance year that surprised you. Comment from your boss that sat with you for the rest of the day.

Maybe a client who pushed back in a way that felt very personal, or a colleague who said something that you just weren't ready to hear, even if it was true. What did you do in the first 30 seconds after it landed? Well, whatever it was, it probably wasn't your most useful response, and not because you handled it badly, but because your nervous system got there before your brain did. Today's episode is all about what to do after that happens, and the framework that I've developed for it is called Receive and Recover.

Okay, so we're gonna start with talking about why don't take it personally is the worst advice ever. Of course, we're gonna take it personally. It's about us personally. Okay, so the standard workplace advice when feedback hits hard is don't take it personally.

Stay professional. Try not to be defensive. Okay, well that advice isn't wrong. It's just simply too impossible to execute on in the moment.

Okay, so your nervous system responds to perceived threat before your thinking brain gets involved. You get dysregulated. Your body decides whether to fight, flight, or freeze, and it does that in milliseconds before conscious thought ever catches up, and there is this host of hormones flooding your your brain and your nervous system, your cardiovascular system. You've got adrenaline and cortisol and elevated heart rate, and your jaw tightens and your stomach drops, and this all happens before you've had a chance to even think about what just happened.

So, telling someone to not take it personally after their system is already reacting is like telling them not to flinch after a doctor hits their knee to do a reflex test. The reaction already happened. Okay, so I'm here to tell you that yes, in those milliseconds after it happens, of course you're going to take it personally. It happened to you, okay?

If it happened to me, you wouldn't take it personally, and if it happened to you, I shouldn't take it personally. But when it happens to us, we take it personally. So this doesn't mean you're bad at receiving feedback. It just simply means that you're human, and that when you try to not take it personally, you're working against a system that is faster than your good intentions.

So the issue at hand is what you do after you react. You're going to have that initial reaction. You just are. Now, do you let that first reaction determine what the feedback means and what you do next?

Well, that, my friends, is where I want to give you a little bit, a little bit of leverage. I want to give you a tool, the receive and recover feedback tool, so that you can get in there, grab that feedback, take it in, and then recover from it, and decide what you're going to do with it. So, in my profession as a professional speaker, I get feedback both solicited and unsolicited, all the time. I get scored at nearly every keynote, every training, every workshop that I deliver, and so I'm in front of the scoring on a weekly basis.

Okay, now again, that feedback sometimes comes solicited in the form of a feedback form, whether it's this feedback form that I use to get feedback from my audience, or oftentimes it is the meeting planner, the conference organizer, or so on, who are asking attendees for feedback, and sometimes both. So when that feedback comes, that feedback, that more formal feedback, comes written, and I will get it either later that day, or sometimes not, even for a day or two, or sometimes a week or two later. So there's a little bit of distance that that feedback that that's naturally inherent in getting that feedback, but sometimes it comes in real time, and especially when it is unsolicited in real time, it can completely catch me off guard, and to be fair, even when I'm reading the typed-up feedback, the written feedback that I get long after an event, it still sometimes catches me off guard. So let me walk you through a specific moment, and this is well, this is not this is more of an amalgamation of a specific moment.

So let's say I gave a presentation in front of, you know, 300 people. Of those 300 people, maybe 150 people, maybe half give the actual feedback. Okay, so now I have 150 different responses that I'm looking through, and they may be scoring me on a scale of one to five. Was the speaker engaging?

Did you learn something new? Like those kinds of things. So I've got a numerical score, and then I've also got a place where people maybe will write, you know, what their top takeaways were, or is there anything else you want the speaker to know? Those sorts of open-ended kinds of questions.

Well, what I do, and I'm not alone in this, is I will over-index on the one or two that had some critical feedback. So I might have 150 sets of comments, and I'm going to look at the two or three that had that critical edge to it. And again, it's a punch in the gut. It's a oh, they totally misinterpreted what I said, and I'm like immediately defensive, immediately caught off guard, immediately upset.

All of the things I'm feeling, all the feels. Okay, so I use my own tool here. Okay, so this is what happens first, and then I'm going to walk you through what I choose to do instead of living and dwelling in that space. Okay, so I've put in the reps when it comes to taking feedback, and you know sometimes people will pull me aside and say in real time at an event, could I give you a bit of feedback?

And my standard answer to that is thank you, but no. And in fact, I remember very recently somebody came up to me. I like I like to stick around for the client reception or the networking event or whatever is after after the keynote that I do or the you know conference session I do or whatever. And so I'm at this conference with several 100 people at it.

I've just given the keynote on a big stage, and I'm and I was at the end of the first day, and now they're all in a networking reception, and I'm hanging out with them, getting to know them, and all the things. Anyway, somebody comes up to me, can I give you some feedback? And I said, I graciously said, I appreciate that, but no, I really, I'm not mentally in a place right now to receive feedback because I've just gotten off the stage. If you filled out the form, that'd be great.

If you want to send me an email, that'd be great. And she insisted, and I really got nervous. I can't even tell you. I was just like, Please don't go here.

And she's like, No, no, no, but I must insist. And then she proceeded to give me some very positive feedback, and still, right now, I can't even remember what it was. And this wasn't even that long ago. This was just a few weeks ago.

But but that also goes to the point of like you just can't take in feedback in a moment like that because your brain is just not in a place to receive it. So I really wish she would have written that down, or she would have called me up, or maybe even sent me a little video testimonial with the feedback because then I would be in a place to take it in much better. So even if it's positive feedback, sometimes you can't take it in in the moment. But yes, I have had my opportunity to put in the reps as it relates to feedback.

Now, some of you might be thinking, Yeah, but I'm not in front of big audiences, Janel. I don't get that kind of feedback. Well, let me tell you about an executive coaching client that I was that I was working with a couple of years back, and she called me up outside of our regular coaching session, and she said, Janel, I think I maybe just did a career limiting move, and I love that phrase, a career limiting limiting move. So I was like, Oh, tell me what happened, and she explained that she was getting she it was her annual performance review, and she had a relatively new boss, which I knew from our coaching conversations, and he he had only been her vice president that she reported directly to for about three months, and she shared that she got some feedback that was outside of what she knew to be true about herself, and so outside of her field of awareness, and and she was like, wow, that's probably true, and I've gotten this far in my career, and nobody's ever told me that before.

So it was really, really unexpected. And and so what did she do? She asked him if you know she waited for him to finish, and she acknowledged as much of it she could. She took some you know detailed notes as he was talking, and she took some deep breaths.

And then, when there was a natural pause in the conversation, she asked if they could resume her performance evaluation the next day. And he said to her, But Michelle, not her real name, but Michelle, I haven't even gotten to the good part yet. And she said, I appreciate that there is some good news, and right now I I'm not really in a place to take that good news in because some of what you've just shared with me was really news to me. It was outside my field of awareness.

I was not aware that I was doing that, and I just really need some time to let that settle before I'm ready to resume this conversation. Is that is it okay for us to continue tomorrow? And he was very gracious about it and said absolutely. And then her first call was to me, like, Have I royally screwed up?

And I was like, No, that is the most emotionally intelligent thing that you could do because she really was not in a place to respond well to what was said or even respond effectively to what was said. So, So then, the next day, of course, they finished her performance evaluation, and she was able to respond back in a way where she had, you know, received and recovered, received the feedback, taken some deep breaths, recovered from it. She was now in a place to re-engage, you know, from a cognitively sophisticated level, because when you're in fight, flight, freeze, and you're just completely emotionally dysregulated, you can't even have an intelligent conversation about it. And that's where she was, and she recognized that about herself.

Which again, I think that demonstrates a lot of emotional intelligence. So let me give you the receive and recover framework so that you can do this yourself. Okay, now it is fall as I'm recording this, and I do love myself a good football game. And I don't care if it's a high school football game, college football game, or professional football game.

Go Vikings! I am here in the purple and gold territory. So in football, when a receiver catches a pass, they often stutter step a little bit. You know, the pass comes wailing at their chest, and they grab it, and and like there's oftentimes a physical reaction, and then they stutter step a little bit, they catch their footing before they really start to run down the field and hopefully score or get the first down.

Now that stutter step is not a mistake; it is how they get their equilibrium back after catching a hard pass to the chest. Usually, it comes in a hard pass to the chest. Now, sometimes you see them reach up, and it almost the the pass almost like attaches like Velcro to their you know to their gloved hand. Now, I'm not talking about those kind of passes.

Those look magical and so on. But I'm talking about the ones that hit them really hard in the chest. And again, you can physically see the reaction. Okay, and then they catch their footing, and then they, you know, and then they go.

Okay, so think about it like that. If if if football is a good metaphor for you, okay. So this is going to be a four step process: the receive and recover process. Okay, so step one is feel it before you do anything else.

Let the emotional response happen. Usually, when you let that emotional response in, it doesn't last nearly as long as when you resist it. Okay, so acknowledge what's happening in your body. Where is it landing?

Did it land like a gut punch? Is it making your heart race? Is it making your body feel like 10 degrees warmer? Okay, so acknowledge how it's happening in your body, and then name it if you can.

Does it feel like shame, frustration, defensiveness, hurt, embarrassment, disbelief, anger, whatever it is. When you can name it and put words to it, it helps you get a handle on that dysregulation because you're going like, Oh, I'm experiencing anger. Now it takes you out of the anger a little bit because you're looking at the anger. Okay, so when you name it, that is the first part of the recovery.

It's also a part that's going to help that emotional response move through you faster. Now we're not about moving through it as fast as possible, or any sort of toxic, toxic, toxic positivity, or toxic positivity, toxic positivity. Okay, we want to really actually feel the feels here. Okay, and this matters most when the feedback is outside your field of awareness, as it was with my client, or as it is for me.

If I do something that didn't really land with an audience member, obviously I'm not trying to alienate an audience member. If I use a particular term, like I don't know, somebody might write in that they hate football and that they wished I hadn't used a football metaphor here. Okay, totally fine. I get that.

I acknowledge it. Would my feelings be hurt a little bit? Maybe. Maybe not so much on that.

But if they disagreed with the whole premise, okay, my feelings might be hurt, and I might be defensive, and I might be like, they didn't get any part of this episode, and I'm upset with it, and so on. Okay, I just need to sit with that upset for a little bit, okay. So this is going to illuminate something that you genuinely did not know about yourself or how you're being perceived by others. And in those moments, the emotional charge is higher.

Your emotional reaction is stronger because you just weren't braced for it. You weren't ready for a different picture of yourself to be presented to you for you to take a look at. And that's not a weakness. That's just what it feels like to learn something that matters, or something that might matter.

We don't even know yet if it's going to matter. Okay, when you get that feedback outside your field of awareness, now you're not being asked to respond positively right now. You're not asked to be grateful for the feedback and say thank you for this gift. Okay, oh my gosh, that kind of stuff.

Great on my last nerve. Okay, what you're being asked to do is to to acknowledge where this thing landed in your body and just be with it for a moment before anything else. Okay, so step one is just to feel your own reaction. Some reactions you can process in minutes.

Some are going to require a day or a good night's sleep, or maybe even a walk around the block before you're really ready to examine the feedback and give it the attention that it actually deserves. And that is absolutely allowed. Okay, so what is not useful is letting that first reaction be the final verdict. Okay, so we're clear.

Step one is feel all the feels. Step two, separate it out. Okay, most feedback arrives bundled, and it lands like as one, one thing, one, you know, punch to the gut, one verdict, one emotional charge, one meaning. But that bundle, that that feedback, actually can be pulled apart, and we can look at it in four different distinct components.

Okay, and they don't all have to. We don't have to give them all the same weight. Okay, the first component is the content. What was literally said?

The actual words, the actual point being made, as specifically as possible. Now, for me as a speaker, that content gets typed up. If they didn't like something, they type up exactly what they didn't like, what they disagreed with, the example that I used that didn't resonate. Okay, so I've got the content actually written up, and a lot of times with feedback, you've got that content written up as well.

So what was said in your performance evaluation typed up into the form, or what was said in the meeting. Now again, if you have jotted down some notes about exactly what was said in the meeting, now you've got the exact content, and you want to get as specific as possible with the content. Now we're going to separate the content from the delivery. Okay, so the delivery is the second part of the bundle.

How was it said? What was the tone? What was the timing? What was the setting?

What is your relationship with the other person? Was the other person thoughtful, or were they careless? Was the con was the context appropriate, or was it completely off? So delivery really matters, and it does give us some additional cues to help us interpret how we're going to think about that content.

So for me, with the delivery again, if it's all typed up, I there are still things like somebody just puts in a few phrases as opposed to the person who writes a more carefully worded couple of sentences with actual punctuation and so on. So I'm going to weight that delivery differently. So one, you know, the random phrases could just be tossed off. The person was in a hurry or in a rush or whatever, compared to somebody who gave it a more thoughtful response and typed it up with actual punctuation and full paragraphs or full sentences.

Okay, so part two is the delivery. Part three is the inference. Okay, this is on you. So, what did you conclude beyond what was actually said?

What story did you add? Now, if you heard the episode I recorded for last week, episode 287 on the story audit, like how we believe things that we tell ourselves at work all the time, we believe thoughts that we're thinking that we probably shouldn't be believing, okay? I walked you through a methodology called the story audit. There, so we want to apply that and take a look at what are we inferring that wasn't actually said.

What story are we layering onto this beyond what was said? Okay, so that's a good key for us to tease that part apart. And then the fourth part is the signal. What's genuinely use worth using out of the feedback that I got here?

What, if anything, should I change or shift as a result of this feedback? Okay, so again, if you're thinking about your performance evaluation, and if there are some certain metrics that you should be hitting that you haven't been hitting, okay, that's worth taking a look at. If something's a little bit more about your attitude, okay. Well, now we're gonna tease that apart a little bit more.

And does it matter? How much does it matter meaningfully and substantially to the work itself, to the team culture, to the organization's culture? Okay, because there's a bunch of different things that some of that teamwork and cultural component can hit at. So anyway, we want to tease that apart so that we can figure out which pieces of the feedback, which kernels of truth and wisdom in there, are useful for us to take action on.

Okay, so these four things are not all the same. They don't all need to be weighted the same. Let me just run through them again, really quick. For those of you who are taking notes, you can write them down.

The content that was what was actually said or written. The delivery, how was it? How did it come to you? The inference: What story did you add?

And then the signal: What are you going to take from it and put into action? So these four things, again, they are not all the same. And treating them as one in the same is where people can potentially misinterpret or misuse feedback. So poor delivery doesn't invalidate useful content, but maybe poor delivery has a you know you need to tease that apart to determine how much of that content maybe the person who's giving you the feedback was nervous.

So you might have a supervisor or a boss who was really nervous about giving you critical feedback, and that could have impacted the delivery. Okay, so this is where, when you get a little distance from it, you can start to tease these things apart, and you know. And again, good delivery does not validate poor content. Poor delivery does not validate good content.

Careless comment can still contain accurate information, and the careless content might not be because the person was intending to be careless. I mean, really, who walks through life intending to be careless, they might have just been nervous in a hurry, that sort of thing. And a kind, well-intentioned piece of feedback can still be wrong. Okay, so separating these things out is how you slow down your judgment and how you get to be more discerning about the feedback and more deliberate about how you're going to use it.

So you can stop discarding useful feedback because it arrived in a flood package, and you can stop giving underdeserved weight to feedback that doesn't hold up when you clearly take a look at it under the microscope. Okay, now again, if you remember the story audit from last week, you can apply the story audit to each of these four components. What do you actually know about what what was said, and what story did you add? And then, what do you actually know about the intent behind the delivery?

What did you infer? What else could be true about any of this? Okay, and this isn't even about deciding what you're going to do with the feedback yet. This is about you looking clearly at the feedback that was given before you respond in a meaningful way.

Now, of course, you might have had your gut reaction in the moment, and you can always go back and clean that up. And you can you you can acknowledge, oh man, did I have a gut reaction to that? That really threw me for a loop. I was not expecting to hear that in my performance evaluation conversation.

Okay, and you can own your response, and then you can say now after I've given it some some thought, I have some questions, or I want to follow up. I want to discuss it more. You know more. Okay, so sometimes the examination surfaces in that follow up conversation, and that's where the really meaningful piece of what you're going to do with that feedback comes.

So when you said X, can you help me understand exactly what you meant by that? Because I could think about three or four different things that it might mean, but I would love to have you elaborate on it. Okay, so that question is going to convert an inference that you might be making into actual data because you ask the person what they meant by it, and it moves you from speculation over to information, which is a much better place to work from. Okay, and then step four, you're going to decide what you're going to use.

Now you get to make the call. Not all feedback is worth incorporating. Some of it reflects on the on the giver's mood. Maybe they were in a bad mood.

Maybe they were in a rush, and not your actual performance. So recognizing that not all feedback is is actionable feedback is really, really helpful in this, and you don't have to be defensive about that. It's not defensiveness; it's discernment here, because defensiveness might have happened in that initial gut reaction. Now, after you've gone through this this process, you've received the feedback, and now you're reacting to it and ready to take action on it.

So again, some feedback is going to be worth using, even if the delivery was poor, even if the timing was bad, or the relationship with the person is complicated. But the delivery and the content are two separate variables here, and some of it is going to require more time, more information, more context, or even more conversation before you can really make a clear decision about what you're going to do with it, so that is also an option. So this is the moment when your agency returns to you. The feedback doesn't determine what happens next; you determine what happens next with the feedback.

So again, when we think about this feedback, it's the receive and recover framework, and that recovery. I mean, you get to own your recovery if you did not receive it well in the moment. And hey, we don't always you get to recover and own that recovery in a follow up conversation. Okay, the goal with all of this is not to become somebody who loves feedback.

Okay, this is one of those workplace ideals that sounds admirable and is mostly aspirational fiction. I cannot tell you anybody who really loves critical feedback. Okay, and I am in a profession that is rife with critical feedback. We get critical feedback as speakers all the time, and none of us love it, and we have become perhaps better than some other roles at discerning it, teasing it apart.

Although I know people who would just stick their head in the sand and they don't like to look at their feedback, and they may never look at their feedback, and that's not helpful either. And then again, it is quite common for us speakers to do what I do, which is to over-index on the couple of comments that either were critical, borderline critical, or whatever. In and and they're worth examining. They absolutely are, but they shouldn't get more weight than anybody else's comment.

So if I got 150 comments, I should be able to treat them all the same. Again, my defensive reaction is going to want to index those others with a higher, the you know, the critical feedback with a higher weight. But again, this is where the discernment process and the receive and recover process really helps me in my role. Okay, now the goal is to get better at recovering from your initial reaction because we're all going to have that initial reaction.

This is why it's called receive and recover. Okay, you don't have to get faster at it. You just have to remember that you need to do it, and you don't have to perceive the feedback with a smile. Oh, please.

Okay, you just need to get recovered enough to be able to have that information be useful to you, so that you can again be discerning about what you're going to do with it. When you can receive and recover consistently-not perfectly, not painlessly, but consistently-you stop letting your first emotional response write the whole story. Okay, so if you got angry, you stop letting it be angry all the time. It's I was angry when I first received the feedback, or I was defensive, or I had this knee-jerk reaction.

Okay, that is just being human, and that is a different standard than loving feedback. Again, I don't know anybody who loves critical feedback. So let's all wrap. Let's wrap this all up with a nice big bow.

Number one, your nervous system responds to feedback before your thinking brain even gets a chance to, and that is physiology. It is not a weakness. Question is not about whether you're going to react; it's about what you're going to do after you react. React number two: Don't take it personally is terrible advice.

Of course, you're going to take it personally. It was directed at you, but now you're going to have the receive and recover framework to move you beyond taking it personally, so that you can discern what you're going to take from it that you're actually going to make good use of, okay, and what you're going to do with it. Number three, feedback always arrives bundled, so we want to separate out the content from the delivery, the content from what you inferred and the content from what's actually worth using. Those four things are there, and you get to sort through all of them, and they deserve your attention in those four different ways.

And then you're going to run the story audit on the feedback before you decide what it means. What are you inferring? What are you making up that really wasn't in that feedback? And then you can decide what you're gonna what you're gonna do with it.

So what else might be true? Again, your goal here is not to love feedback. Your goal is to receive the feedback, feel the feels, and then do some discerning work, and have the re you know, and and then have an intentional reaction to the feedback. So you have your initial reaction and then your intentional reaction.

All right, my friends, it is time for you to put it to work before your next performance evaluation or right after you've received some feedback that stung, and we all get it. I want you to revisit this episode. So bookmark this episode, and that might be your homework for that. That might be how you put it to work for right now.

Is you just simply bookmark this episode, and maybe you drop a note into your calendar right around the time of your performance evaluation. So you listen to this before your performance evaluation. You might have to listen to it before your performance evaluation, and then right after as well. But book bookmark it so that you have it at your fingertips.

Next time you get critical feedback that you weren't expecting, again in your performance evaluation, you're probably expecting. Hopefully, you're getting some balanced view, and you should be getting a couple of good nudges of things you could be doing better because that's what's going to push you to perform higher. Again, we still don't like hearing it when it happens, but it's useful to get some of that critical feedback because it helps us perform better. Okay, and then when it happens, you've got this episode right at your fingertips because you bookmarked it, so you can walk through the four steps.

You can give yourself permission to feel all the feels first, and then you get to separate things out, examine, and decide how you're going to really react and really put that feedback to work for you. So you don't have to do this perfectly. You just need a process so that you can use feedback effectively instead of just having that emotionally dysregulated response to it. Okay, so this episode is all about receiving feedback.

I do a full workshop on giving and receiving clear feedback with discretion. That's what it's called. I know it's kind of a long, a long title, but that covers both sides of the conversation: both giving, receive, giving feedback, and receiving feedback. If that sounds like something that your team might need or your organization might need, I do have a training catalog on my website where you can find out all the information on that at drjanelanderson.com.

And again, training is right in one of the top headings, so you can navigate to that quite easily. If this episode connected with you, I would love for you to hit like and share and leave a comment. Give this a rating if you're listening to a traditional podcast episode player like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and that helps other people find this episode. It helps other people find my podcast in general.

You might also be leaving. You might also be watching this on YouTube. In which case, you can do the same thing over there on YouTube. Is leave a comment in the comment section and let me know what you liked about the episode, or give me some feedback on the episode.

I will follow my own advice. I will have a reaction. I will sit with that reaction for a while. I will do all the steps we talked about right here, and then I will respond.

All right. You can find the show notes for this episode at janelenderson.com forward slash 288 for episode 288, and on that show notes page, we will put the links to episode 287, the Stop Believing Everything You Think at Work episode, where I walk you through that framework. Okay, my friends, be well, and we'll catch you here next time on the Working Conversations podcast.