Feedback and why you should listen

The most painful aspect of studying is feedback.

I’ve asked my fellow PhD candidates and they all tell me the same thing ‘It’s hard to take…at first. But you get better with it over time.’

We all want to be perfect. That is the nature of being human. But the truth is, everything we do can be improved. We aren’t perfect. We make mistakes. It isn’t that what we created was necessarily wrong, merely that we didn’t think of something or that we forgot to fix that rubbish sentence or that we were working to a deadline and didn’t submit a high-quality draft.

Or…we were, in fact, wrong.

Being wrong is a trigger for all of us (PhD candidate or not). No one wants to be wrong. We all like being right and telling others just how right we are!

The reality, however, is that it is how we deal with our mistakes that defines the potential within us and expands or limits what we are capable of. Our brains are filled with DNA waiting for activation. The way to activate this potential is to do something new and get it wrong.

This is called learning.

Remember when you first got behind the wheel? You had to think about every little detail and you were making mistakes left, right and centre. Whoever was teaching you was the worst person EVER pointing out ALL of your mistakes and being mean to you…

…only, they weren’t really. It’s just that you had a lot to learn and the stakes were high. Make a mistake and risk crashing the car.

Okay, so the stakes aren’t quite as high with your study.

Or are they?

What if you don’t open yourself up to learning, to being willing to get it wrong and then working through those mistakes? What then?

So you don’t plumb the depths of your own potential. You don’t make the most of people who do know more. Your project is okay. It ticks the boxes but doesn’t push into the hard stuff. You’ve got your degree. You call yourself ‘Doctor’, add it to your CV, and maybe get a better job (or maybe not). Is anything truly lost?

I’m afraid so.

You see, you lose the most important thing about your project: the way it is supposed to add to collective knowledge and understanding. ‘But I added new knowledge’, I hear you say. Was it everything it could have been? Did you contribute everything you could? Did you do the hard yards? Did you fight the dragon? Did you rescue the captives? Did you risk being wrong so that you could make your way toward something new?

This is why feedback matters.

It pushes you beyond yourself and into a space that makes the most of your potential. Be humble. Your supervisors are there to make your project better. There is nothing in it for them to undermine you. Their name is going to be associated with this work, too. Let them help you with the things you missed or don’t know or just got plain wrong.

During my Colloquium, the assessor I was most intimidated by told me that she thought my project was still too broad. She admitted that she couldn’t quite put her finger on what exactly should be narrowed and she left it with me. I considered her words for months. I wanted to dismiss what she had to say but I chose to sit with it. I chose to be open to the idea of it, before making any sort of decision to dismiss her feedback.

Then it landed. She was right. My definition of trauma was too broad. As soon as I narrowed my definition things began to click together.

My work-boss tells me that ‘gifts aren’t always nicely packaged’. She’s right. Sometimes the things that help us aren’t wrapped very nicely and are hard to take.

Am I suggesting that you accept what everyone says willy-nilly? Nope. There are people who have earned the right to give you feedback and people who haven’t. It is important to know who is who.

When I give poetry to my supervisor, I pay close attention to his feedback. He is often my first reader and his opinion matters. When I give the same poetry to a friend, I am listening for misunderstandings that indicate where the writing isn’t clear but I don’t particularly worry if they stumble on a poetic technique. They aren’t experts and I don’t expect them to be.

And when someone random reads my published work and ‘has things to say’? I let them have their say. Maybe they will say something helpful, point out something I hadn’t noticed. Maybe they won’t.

It doesn’t matter how old you are, there is always something new to learn. There is always something to learn.

An apt word is a gift. The product of learning isn’t just new knowledge. It’s energy and life.