Present Perfect November/December 2009

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"We are all strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others"

La Rochefoucauld

IN THIS ISSUE

1. Dear Present Perfect readers: Accentuating the negative
2. A sensitivity scale
3. Harsh and loving critic?
4. Food for Thought: on noise and silence

ACCENTUATING THE NEGATIVE

Dear Present Perfect readers,

Some years ago, on a training course, each of us had to give short talk, on which the trainer, and our fellow students, gave feedback. Mine went well and the feedback I received was generally encouraging. Chatting informally later, a woman who'd attended a talk I'd given months earlier at an exhibition enthused about how much I'd improved. I was mortified. Surely I hadn't been that bad the last time she heard me. I went back into the training room my confidence knocked. All the positive feedback on my performance that day was forgotten as I brooded on how bad I must have been for her to say I'd got much better.

This example of letting negatives over-ride positives came back to me as I pondered an article by Lionel Shriver in a Saturday Guardian about her family's reaction to her fifth novel, 'A Perfectly Good Family'. The novel is about a family with three siblings fighting over an inheritance. And though she herself did grow up in a family of three, she had two brothers while the siblings in her novel are all girls. With this and many other changes and a plot that had never happened to her own family, she believed she had fictionalised enough. But when the book came out her parents and one of her brothers nevertheless saw themselves in the characters and didn't like what they saw. 'Incandescent' was the word she used to describe her parents' reaction.

What Shriver recognised in the article years later was that she'd been 'shockingly ignorant' when writing her manuscript: 'I'd imagined that many tender, admiring and empathetic sentiments would act as counterweights to the occasional zinger'.

Yet the reality she now saw clearly is that 'Even with the tough-skinned you can write reams about how accomplished and charming they are, but if you include a single sentence that puts the knife in, that defies what they think of themselves, that hits a point of special sensitivity, if only by accident, that sentence will be all they remember.' The italics are hers.

And this should not be surprising, she acknowledges: 'On a farcically smaller scale, it's only the nasty lines that I ever recall from reviews of my books. The compliments evaporate.'

The compliments evaporate: that was the key insight. For many of us negatives cut into us while compliments quickly slip away. I like to think I have greatly improved since that long ago training course and am now able to take a much more balanced approach to feedback, good and bad. But it's a struggle: I'm still vulnerable to accentuating the negative judgements of others while allowing the positives to slip away. How about you?

With best wishes for a month of noticing the positives more than the negatives

Chris Carling

A SENSITIVITY SCALE

The reality is, of course, that we all vary in our response to criticism, just as we vary in most other areas of human existence. Some people are robustly thick-skinned while others are more easily bruised by their encounters with others. If we think of this kind of sensitivity as on a scale, then at one end we have the thickest skinned who have built themselves a carapace designed to repel the knocks of the world, while at the other we find the thinnest skins, exposed with almost no protection to others' capacity to criticise and judge and hurt. Ironically, it's often people who pride themselves on being blunt, on telling it as it is, who are among the thinnest skins when they're on the receiving end!

Though most of us are somewhere between these two, we are usually aware whether we tend more towards the tougher or more sensitive end. But we don't always know where other people fall on the scale, which is why giving feedback can be such a minefield. Particularly since what I've neutrally called 'giving feedback' is often emotionally charged. Lionel Shriver's parents' feedback on her novel came from a place of 'incandescence'.

When giving feedback

When giving feedback, therefore, whether it's at work as a manager, or with our nearest and dearest, we need clarity in key areas:

• Sensitivity scale: towards which end does the person on the receiving end normally sit, bearing in mind that people often hide their thin skins, dying inwardly as we tell them what we think? Can we guess how robust they are from what we know of them? How plainly can we speak without destroying their confidence? Or, if they seem very thick-skinned, how can we penetrate their defensive carapace and get them to hear what we are saying?
• Motivation: what's driving us to tell them what we think? Is it our feelings: do we want to show them how displeased or disappointed we are by their performance or behaviour? Is the feedback more about us and our need to vent our feelings? Or is our wish to be genuinely supportive? Help them make progress and move forward?
• What do you want them to hear? What is the best way to get through? Do we over-value bluntness and call it honesty? Or do we try so hard to be tactful that the impact of our feedback is lost? If they've upset or angered us, how can we let them know without going on to the attack? If we think we know what they should be doing differently, how can we avoid turning our opinion into a mini-lecture?

When receiving feedback

When we're on the receiving end, when others, such as our boss, partner, parents or whoever, want to tell us what they think of what we've been saying or doing, we need similar clarity around:

• Sensitivity scale: where do we normally sit? Do we harden our carapace so that we don't feel the impact of criticism? Or are we so easily wounded we over-react to anything negative? How can we hear what is being offered and use it constructively?
• Receptivity: how open are we to hearing others' views of, for instance, how we perform at work, or behave at home? Is our immediate reaction often defensive, a mental 'no, it's not true', our way of not facing what might cause us pain?
• Understanding: do we actually listen rather than assuming we know what the other person is saying, and shutting it out? Do we make sure we understand what we're being told so we can properly assess whether the feedback is fair, and worth acting on, or not?

Rules for feedback conversations

• Ask: the best feedback conversations are prepared for. Ask if you can give feedback. If the answer's yes, ask what they think of their performance or behaviour or draft report or whatever before diving in with your view. Ask for feedback when you feel you need it. Be sure to ask someone you respect who knows how to be constructive.
• Acknowledge: even if it's just to yourself, the role that feelings might be playing: feelings that may be driving you if you're giving feedback; feelings that might be preventing you from hearing if you're receiving.
• Assess: the quality of the feedback. Not all feedback is useful or worth taking notice of. Assess as a giver as well as as a receiver.
• Accept: good feedback as a gift. Don't turn it down without good reason.

HARSH AND LOVING CRITIC?

My partner and I regularly show our writing to each other, and use each other as a sounding board in all kinds of other ways. Sometimes, in conversations with friends, he tells them he's lucky, he has a 'harsh and loving critic.' It's a phrase I've heard often, applied to myself, and I've assumed he means I tell him what I think openly but in a spirit of love. Because he always sounds so positive, I've accepted the epithet without thinking too much about it.

Until now. In writing this I began to feel uneasy about the word 'harsh'. At first I tried to convince myself he meant by it 'frank and ready to give a true and honest opinion'. But then why hadn't he used the word 'frank'? He'd chosen 'harsh' and harsh was not how I saw myself at all. Taking my own advice I thought about the sensitivity scale, and recognised that my partner lies towards the thinner skinned end however he may try to disguise it. I had no option but to face the question: had my plain speaking sometimes been a bit too plain?

Time to get some feedback. What do you actually mean by 'harsh and loving critic'? Do you really think I'm harsh?' Pause then: 'Sometimes, yes, when you say what you think of something I've written, it does feel harsh. But I still want to hear it. I want to know what you think.'

I decided to see if, in future, I could lose the word 'harsh' and become simply a 'loving critic'. He'll be able to give me feedback on how well I succeed!

Someone to watch over you

I may have been over-zealous on occasion in my 'loving critic' role, but we both agreed that everyone needs someone in their lives who will tell it as it is in a spirit of acceptance and love. Someone we know still loves and accepts us whatever they may feed back about what we've written, done or said. For a writer, it's invaluable to have a 'loving critic' to comment on your work. And more generally too. Even if you don't accept all your 'loving critic' says, or indeed any of it, you become more aware of the impact your words or behaviour may have and less prone to illusions.

Who is your loving critic? Where in your life do you act as a loving critic for another?

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

ON NOISE AND SILENCE

I've been re-reading Sara Maitland's excellent, first hand exploration of silence ('A Book of Silence', Granta 2008) in which she charts her own journey from living 'a very noisy life' to creating for herself a life in which silence is central. This extract is from the first chapter:

'As a matter of fact we all live very noisy lives. 'Noise pollution' has settled down into the ecological agenda nearly as firmly as all the other forms of pollution that threaten our well-being and safety. But for everyone who complains about RAF low-flying training exercises, ceaseless background music in public places, intolerably loud neighbours and drunken brawling on the streets, there are hundreds who know they need a mobile phone, who choose to have incessant sound pumping into their environment, their homes and their ears, and who feel uncomfortable or scared when they have to confront real silence.

We all imagine that we want peace and quiet, that we value privacy and that the solitary and silent person is somehow more 'authentic' than the same person in a social crowd, but we seldom seek opportunities to enjoy it. We romanticise silence on the one hand and on the other feel that it is terrifying, dangerous to our mental health, a threat to our liberties and somehow to be avoided at all costs.'

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