Feedback Is a Fire: How to Give and Receive Feedback More Effectively

Feedback is a remarkably complex phenomenon.

We tend to talk about it as though it is straightforward information: That went well. This could improve. Try this differently next time.

Except receiving the information is only the first step. There is a second phase where we decide, often very quickly and without much conscious awareness, what the feedback means.

The difficulty with receiving feedback is that we are never receiving only the information. We bring an existing sense of who we are, what we are good at, where we are vulnerable, what mistakes have meant in the past, and how we tend to talk to ourselves.

A coach says, You rushed that decision.

One athlete hears, Slow the play down next time.

Another hears, I always screw this up when it matters.

Same feedback. Very different downstream effects.

A narrow comment about one decision, one paragraph, or one performance can become a much larger conclusion about competence, identity, or what someone else thinks of us.

That matters because feedback is foundational to learning. If we want to get better at taking feedback, we need to understand what happens between hearing the feedback and deciding what it means.

Feedback lands on an existing self-concept

Feedback is easier to integrate when it has somewhere plausible to land.

Positive feedback does not automatically increase confidence. When praise is too far removed from someone’s existing view of themselves, they may have difficulty integrating it.

Tell someone who fundamentally doubts their competence, You’re brilliant at this, and there is a reasonable chance their brain responds with some version of, No I’m not.

Or, worse: If they think I’m brilliant, eventually they’re going to find out they’re wrong.

More specific feedback tends to give us firmer ground: Your preparation was strong, and you handled that difficult section well.

There is something observable there. The person can look at their preparation. They can remember the difficult section. They can begin accumulating evidence about a particular capability. This is one reason confidence tends to be built more reliably through credible evidence than through increasingly enthusiastic reassurance.

Our baseline self-concept also affects how we process corrective feedback. When our sense of competence is reasonably stable, there is more room to hear that one thing needs work without having to renegotiate our entire identity. When confidence is fragile, feedback can acquire considerably more heat.

Enter: the marshmallow

Feedback is a little like roasting a marshmallow.

A marshmallow held over good coals gets warm, changes gradually, and, if you have more patience than I usually do, becomes evenly golden. Put the same marshmallow directly into a large flame and you get a tiny fireball. Hold it six feet away and nothing happens.

Feedback works surprisingly similarly.

For feedback to be useful, we need to stay close enough to the heat for something to change while remaining regulated enough to keep thinking. Too far away and we dismiss, minimize, intellectualize, or avoid it. Too close and there may be very little cognitive bandwidth left for learning.

Someone who is reasonably regulated may be able to stay near the heat long enough to think: That stings. Is it accurate? What happened? What do I need to change?

Someone carrying considerable shame, insecurity, stress, or self-criticism may find that the same feedback puts them much closer to the flame.

You rushed that decision becomes I can’t be trusted under pressure.

The useful zone is somewhere near the coals. Enough heat to create change, enough psychological space to stay in contact with the information.

Some heat is useful. Error is information that something needs updating.

The feedback loop

Our existing self-talk gives incoming feedback a ready-made interpretation.

If my usual response to a mistake is I should know better, corrective feedback fits easily into that narrative. If I carry the rule Competent people shouldn’t need help, a perfectly reasonable suggestion can produce embarrassment.

A feedback loop can develop very quickly:

feedback given → interpretation → emotion → self-talk → implementation → next performance

What gets carried into the next performance may therefore have surprisingly little resemblance to the feedback that was actually given.

The supervisor said, This section needs more work.

Three hours later, the employee is mentally responding to, You’re terrible at your job and everyone has noticed.

Those are very different pieces of information. Only one of them was actually delivered.

Learning how to take feedback is part of performance

Feedback tends to become more important as performance level increases.

Athletes move into stronger competition where increasingly small adjustments matter. Professionals take on work with greater ambiguity and consequence. Experts reach a point where improvement depends less on learning obvious fundamentals and more on detecting subtle inefficiencies.

At that level, taking feedback becomes a performance skill in its own right.

We often call this coachability. Being coachable involves more than looking receptive while someone is talking. Coachability is the ability to extract something useful from feedback and change behaviour afterward.

Being coachable does not mean assuming every piece of feedback is correct. It means staying open long enough to evaluate it before deciding what to use.

One of the things people often mean when they ask how to take feedback better is: How do I stay open long enough to hear it without immediately becoming defensive, ashamed, or overwhelmed?

Sometimes the answer, at least initially, is that you cannot.

That is where regulation comes in.

Buy yourself a few seconds

When feedback produces a strong emotional response, you do not need to solve the feedback immediately. You may need to give your nervous system a few seconds to catch up.

Feel your feet on the floor. Lengthen the exhale. Drop your shoulders. Unclench your jaw.

A surprisingly useful response is: I hear you. Please give me a second to process what you just said.

That sentence buys time. It gives you a chance to hear the actual feedback before responding to everything your brain has attached to it.

If we are continuing the marshmallow metaphor, which apparently we are, this is moving the stick a little farther away from the flame.

Turn the story back into feedback

When feedback lands badly, our interpretations tend to become global.

I failed.

They don’t think I’m capable.

I should already know this.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy gives us a useful tool here: cognitive defusion.

They think I’m incompetent feels quite different from I’m having the thought that they think I’m incompetent.

The second creates some distance. We have identified it as an interpretation rather than a fact.

Then make the feedback smaller again.

I failed becomes One part of that approach didn’t work.

They don’t think I’m capable becomes They identified an area where my performance needs updating.

And finally, turn it into an instruction.

A coach says, Your timing was late because you rushed the setup.

Useful self-talk becomes: Slow the setup.

A supervisor says, The analysis is strong, but the recommendation needs to be clearer.

Useful self-talk becomes: State the recommendation first.

Procedural language gives the brain something to do. Vague self-criticism mostly gives it something to feel bad about.

That is a big part of becoming more coachable. The goal is to recover the useful information and do something with it.

Assume the fire is already stoked

The person receiving feedback can regulate, slow down, ask questions, create distance from their interpretation, and move themselves slightly closer to or farther from the flame.

The person giving feedback has a different job. They are looking at the fire.

They need to make some assessment of what is already happening in the system. How activated is this person? How secure is the relationship? What has their history with feedback been like?

With high performers, it is probably safest to assume that the fire is already stoked.

People rarely reach high levels of performance by being indifferent to how they are doing. There is usually a fairly substantial care factor operating in the background. They care about the work, the outcome, their role, their teammates, their patients, their reputation, or some combination of all of those things.

That investment is part of what makes them good. It also means feedback is rarely arriving in an emotionally neutral system.

If you are giving feedback to a high performer, assume that investment is already there. They probably do not need you to increase the stakes. They need information that is clear enough to use without unnecessarily adding fuel to a fire that is already burning.

For high performers, competence can also carry particular weight. When a significant part of identity is organized around being capable, feedback about performance has an easy route into questions about self.

A leader hears, That presentation wasn’t clear, and experiences, I’m failing in this role.

A colleague asks a physician, Did you have X on your differential?

Their brain goes to, I’m an imposter.

That jump from one missed possibility to a global conclusion about competence is classic imposter syndrome territory.

From the outside, the feedback provider may think they have offered a relatively narrow piece of information. Internally, the flame may already be much larger.

Difficult feedback still needs to be given. The question is how to give it in a form the other person has a reasonable chance of being able to use.

For someone who is already highly activated, clear, behavioural feedback may be especially important. Ambiguous global criticism leaves plenty of room for an anxious brain to fill in the blanks.

The person delivering feedback therefore has two useful questions: What does this person need to know? What delivery will give them the best chance of integrating it?

Care and challenge can comfortably coexist.

Feedback needs somewhere safe to land

Learning requires exposure.

We have to reveal what we do not know, try things we cannot reliably do yet, make errors where other people can see them, ask questions that may expose a gap in our understanding, and receive information that challenges how we currently see ourselves.

The environment surrounding feedback changes how costly those things feel.

A coach, leader, supervisor, or team can create conditions where a mistake becomes useful information that creates improvement, or where the safest response is to hide it.

That is the territory of psychological safety. And it is where I want to go next, because our ability to learn depends both on how we process feedback internally and on what happens when we expose the unfinished parts of our performance to other people.

For now, the marshmallow rule will do:

Stay close enough to the heat to learn and far enough away that you don’t burst into flame.