Learn how wiring and temperament affects your story

Chapter 7: LEARN HOW WIRING AND TEMPERAMENT AFFECTS YOUR STORY
Book: Thanks for the Feedback. The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (Douglas Stone)

Krista doesn’t lack self-confidence. She laughs as she recounts this story: My husband and I spent the first six months of our marriage traveling the States by car, with “Honk if you support our marriage!” scribbled in shoe polish on the rear window. People honked and waved like crazy, and it was exhilarating to be supported by friendly strangers. When we returned to regular life, my husband cleaned off the window, but I didn’t notice. So, I’d be doing some dumb move in traffic, pulling a U-turn. Someone would be honking furiously, and I’d be waving back with this big grin, saying, “Hey, thanks so much. Thank you! I love you, too!”

“That’s typical for me,” Krista adds. “I can be oblivious to negative feedback.
When I hear that someone doesn’t like something I did, I immediately think, Really? But do you know how amazing I am? Honestly, I’ve got so much selfconfidence it’s practically inappropriate.”
Of course Krista’s life has seen its share of rain, and she wasn’t smiling through it all. But even at her lowest, her upbeat disposition helped to pull her through: “My first husband and I divorced, and a divorce is a giant oozing spitball of negative feedback. I questioned everything about myself—whether anyone could love me, whether I was capable of real love at all. I went to some dark places, like everyone does.
“But,” she adds, “I didn’t stay very long. I can get from ‘no one will ever love me’ to ‘that’s ridiculous, lots of people love me’ pretty quickly. Within a year I was in an awesome relationship with my current husband, driving around the country getting honks of loving support.”
Alita finds herself at the opposite end of the spectrum. A popular obstetrician, Alita received feedback from last year’s patient survey. Her reviews were glowing, and many patients made special mention of her attentive approach to their pregnancy questions. But several patients commented that Alita’s schedule often ran late, and that they resented having to wait. The comments came down like a sledgehammer. “I was so disheartened,” Alita says. “I give each patient so much time and care, and then they turn around and complain. Until I read my feedback I loved my job. I haven’t felt the same about my practice since.” The envelope with the most recent patient survey results has been sitting on Alita’s desk for the past two months—unopened.
For Krista, feedback is like water off a duck’s back, while for Alita, it penetrates deep into her soul. We each metabolize feedback in our own way.

THE LIBERATION OF HARD WIRING

One reason why Krista and Alita respond so differently to feedback is their wiring—their built-in neural structures and connections. Our wiring affects who we are, tilting us toward being anxious or upbeat, shy or outgoing, sensitive or resilient, and it contributes to how intensely feedback—both positive and negative—affects us. It influences how high we go, how low we descend, and how quickly we recover from dread or despair.
This chapter takes a look at our different emotional reactions to feedback and at the role our wiring plays in that. We’ll also look at how those emotions influence our thinking, and how our thinking influences our emotions.
Understanding your own wiring and tendencies helps you to improve your ability to weather the storm of negative feedback—and to dig yourself out in the morning.
Learning that how you are in the world is due in part to your wiring might feel discouraging—just one more thing that’s wrong with you, and one that seems impossible to fix. But it can be freeing, as well. Like your naturally curly hair, high cheekbones, or flat feet, your wiring is no more judgment-worthy than whether your second toe is shorter or longer than the first. If you’ve spent a lifetime being told that you’re either “hypersensitive” or “totally oblivious,” this is a moment to step back and say, “Okay, so that’s how I’m built. That’s how I showed up in this world.” Your reactions are not due to a lack of courage or surplus of self-pity.
This doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for how you are and how you act. It is simply a true and usefully complicating observation: wiring matters.

A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT YOURSELF ON FEEDBACK

Our understanding of the brain is under construction. By “our” we mean the general state of human understanding (not to mention the authors’ understanding). Discoveries in neuroscience pour forth, debates proliferate, interpretations shift. Writing about neuroscience is a little like leaping from a moving train: No matter how carefully you time your jump, you’re likely to get roughed up. Even so, we think it’s useful; dipping into the recent social science and neuroscience research can help us understand why we each react to feedback the way we do, and why others react differently.
One of the brain’s primary survival functions is to manage approach and withdrawal: We tend to move toward things that are pleasurable and away from things that are painful. Pleasure is a rough proxy for the healthy and safe; pain is a rough proxy for the unhealthy and dangerous.
But our approach-withdrawal function is too crudely calibrated to navigate the nuanced worlds of modern work and love. The brain gets tangled when it encounters short-term pain that is necessary for long-term gain—that exercising you put off, for instance. And the opposite is also true: Short-term pleasures that produce long-term pain—as with, say, recreational drugs or an extramarital affair—also produce confused approach-withdraw signals (“wine, women, and song” in older days; “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” to baby boomers). These brain-life mismatches are the source of great fascination and endless torment.
What does this have to do with feedback? Like sex, drugs, food, and exercise, feedback is one of these areas that boggle the brain and muck up the approachwithdrawal system. Doing what feels good now (finding a way to make negative feedback stop) may be costly in the long run (you are left, fired, or simply stagnate). And what is healthy in the long run (understanding and acting on useful feedback) may feel painful now.
A lot goes on in both your brain and body when you experience mood-altering feedback, more than anyone yet understands, and certainly more than we can describe in a short chapter. But for simplicity’s sake, we can say that your “reaction” to feedback can be thought of as containing three key variables: Baseline, Swing, and Sustain or Recovery.

“Baseline” refers to the default state of well-being or contentment toward which you gravitate in the wake of good or bad events in your life. “Swing” refers to how far up or down you move from your baseline when you receive feedback. Some of us have extreme reactions to feedback; we swing wide.
Others remain on an even keel even in the face of disquieting news. “Sustain and Recovery” refers to duration, how long your ups and downs last. Ideally, we want to sustain a boost from positive feedback and recover quickly from a negative emotional dip.

1. Baseline: The Beginning and End of the Arc

Whether we feel happy or sad, content or discontent, is not determined merely by each individual successive moment of life experience—a good thing happens and I’m happy, a bad thing happens and I’m sad. It doesn’t work that way. While our experiences affect our mood, we are not blown in a completely new direction by each gust of wind. We feel emotions in the moment, of course, but they occur against a broader backdrop.
As humans, we adapt—to new information and events both good and bad— and gravitate back to our personal default level of well-being.2 There will be highs and lows, but over time, like water seeking its own level, we are pulled toward our baseline—back up after bad news and back down after good. The euphoria of first love fades, and so does the despair of divorce. This tendency is best seen with little kids and their toy joy: When they get what they’ve longed for, they believe they will be happy for the rest of their lives. And for the first few minutes of the rest of their lives, they are. But then the kids—like adults— adapt.
There is enormous variance among individuals when it comes to baseline.
This is why our uncle Murray seems perpetually dissatisfied with life, while our aunt Eileen seems delighted with everything for no apparent reason. Happiness is believed to be one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality. Twin studies have led to estimates that about 50 percent of the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.3 Famously, studies of lottery winners have shown that a year after claiming their prize, winners are approximately as happy (or unhappy) as they were prior to the windfall.4
Why does your baseline matter when it comes to receiving feedback? First, people who have higher happiness baselines are more likely to respond positively to positive feedback than people with lower self-reported well-being.
And people with lower general satisfaction respond more strongly to negative information.5 Krista has a pretty high baseline, so it’s not surprising that she’d find honks of marital support exhilarating, and criticism less emotionally “sticky.” Alita likely has a lower general baseline, so she may get less of a boost from the positive patient ratings, and be hit harder by the criticism.
This may seem particularly unfair to Alita. After all, she’s the one who needs to hear the positive feedback and get the emotional boost it offers. But don’t worry—there are things Alita can do to turn up the volume on the positives and temper the negatives when receiving tough feedback. For now, it’s useful simply to be aware that for her, positive feedback may be muffled and negatives amplified.

2. Swing: How Far Up or Down You Go

Wherever our natural baseline, some of us swing far in either direction, even when the input is minor, while others live in a narrower emotional band. These tendencies appear to be present from birth. Some infants are more sensitive than others and can experience a strong physiological jolt even from comparatively small inputs—loud noises, novel situations, or scary drawings, for example.
Of course, newborns aren’t subjected to performance reviews, and feedback for adults is rarely accompanied by scary drawings. But it turns out that infants who are what research psychologist Jerome Kagan calls “high reactive” are more likely than others to grow into adults who are high reactives. High reactivity in infants can translate into a big swing for adults. And we can reasonably assume such adults would be likely to be more sensitive to negative feedback.6 Brain imaging studies suggest that differences in sensitivity may correlate with anatomical differences as well. The adults who had low-reactive infant temperaments had greater thickness in the left orbitofrontal cortex than the highreactive group while the adults categorized as high-reactive infants displayed greater thickness in the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex.7
Whatever is going on inside our cortexes, differences in swing are easy to observe within our conference rooms. When a client sends the same critical comments to both Eliza and Jeron, Eliza is frantic with anxiety while Jeron has no reaction beyond “Well, this means a bit more work.” Because Eliza and Jeron are teammates, their disparate reactions create tension. Jeron thinks Eliza is melodramatic and attention-seeking; Eliza thinks Jeron is in denial about the depth of the problem. Now they have feedback for each other about how they are each (mis-)handling the feedback.

Bad Is Stronger Than Good

Whether we are easily swamped or nearly waterproof, there’s one wiring challenge we all face: Bad is stronger than good. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt elaborates: “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.” This observation sheds light on an eternal riddle about feedback: Why do we dwell on the one criticism buried amid four hundred compliments? Built into our wiring is a kind of security team that scans for threat. When it detects danger—real or perceived—the team responds instantaneously, bypassing our slower, more reflective systems. The amygdala is a key player.
This small, almond-shaped bundle of neurons sits at the heart of the limbic system—a part of the brain central to processing emotion. As Haidt explains: The amygdala has a direct connection to the brainstem that activates the fight-or-flight response, and if that amygdala finds a pattern that was part of a previous fear episode . . . it orders the body to red alert.
. . . the brain has no equivalent “green alert” . . . threats get a shortcut to your panic button, but there is no equivalent alarm system for positive information. Bad news is emotionally louder than good, and thus will have bigger impact.
So why are you still obsessing over that oblique comment your mother-in-law made during an otherwise lovely holiday visit? Because she unwittingly activated your red alert system—the one that evolved more than 100 million years ago9 that was later used to detect snakes, saber-toothed tigers, and other life-threatening creatures that lurk. Long after your mother-in-law has left, your emotional brain remains ready for her to pounce.

3. Sustain and Recovery: How Long Does the Swing Last?

Whether you swing wide emotionally or barely budge, the last variable is duration—how long it takes you to return to your baseline. Do you recover quickly from even the most distressing feedback, or are you brought low for weeks or months? And how long do you sustain the high of good news? When a grateful customer e-mails to extol your expertise, do you have a bounce in your fingertips for the rest of the day? Or just until you read your next e-mail? Researcher Richard Davidson has found that the amount of time that we sustain positive emotion, or need to recover from negative emotion, can differ by as much as 3,000 percent across individuals.

Surprisingly, negative feedback and positive feedback are mediated by different parts of the brain; in fact, they appear to be mediated by different halves of the brain. And those different halves of the brain can be differently good at their job. This subject gets complicated quickly, but there are some simple insights that emerge from the research on this front.
Negative Recovery: Righty or Lefty? It’s crucial to have a red alert system for threats, but due to the high number of false alarms encountered in everyday life, it’s just as crucial to have a way to turn the alarm off.
The amygdala is a key player in the alert system, but it’s no lone cowboy. The frontal cortex runs the show, working to integrate the emotional response with the actual content of the feedback. The frontal cortex can contain or intensify the stampedes that the amygdala starts.
Sitting just behind your forehead, your prefrontal cortex is the seat of higherorder reasoning, judgment, and decision making. Like other parts of your brain, it is divided in two, with a right and left side. When you experience negative feelings like fear, anxiety, and disgust, your brain shows increased activity on the right side. When you experience positive feelings like amusement, hope, and love, your brain shows increased activity on the left side. Researchers have termed this the “valence hypothesis,” suggesting that people who have more activity on the right side (“cortical righties”) tend to be more depressed and more anxious; cortical lefties tend to be happier.11 (We shouldn’t overstate current scientific consensus; this “locational” theory of emotion is not without controversy.)

With the help of imaging devices like functional MRIs, which reveal how the brain responds to particular stimuli, neuroscientists are beginning to understand how recovery from negative emotion may work. Surprisingly, it’s the left side— the positive side—that seems to be responsible here. While the amygdala is fanning the flames of fear and anxiety, activity in the left side of the brain exerts a calming influence. Strong activity on the left is associated with quicker recovery from upset.

People who are faster to recover not only have more activity in the left side; they also tend to have more connections (“white matter” pathways that connect brain regions to one another) running between the left side of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.13 This appears to create more bandwidth along which the positive messages can travel to the amygdala. People with numerous connections effectively have a superhighway to deliver reassuring signals, while those who are slower to recover have narrow country roads.

The bottom line is that people whose brain wiring and organization are more right-sided, or righties, are slower than lefties to recover from negative feedback.
Recovery is slower whether the feedback is small (you forgot to take out the garbage . . .) or large (. . . and therefore I’m leaving you).14
If we hooked up Alita to an fMRI while she read the criticism about keeping patients waiting, we’d likely see activity in her amygdala and right prefrontal cortex increase. “There’s danger!” yells the amygdala. “It’s a disaster!” confirms the right prefrontal cortex. In contrast, activity in Alita’s left prefrontal cortex— the more positive side—would show comparatively less activity. “Let’s all just calm down. Lots of patients appreciate the time you spend with them,” says the left, but too faintly to be heard above the bluster of disaster and doom.
Alita is likely a cortical righty. Compared with a less sensitive colleague, she’ll feel more physiologically aroused, more anxious, more depressed. It will be harder for her to find hope or humor (which are mediated more by the left side) and more difficult for her to calm herself down.

Krista’s fMRI in the same situation would likely show a different pattern.
Initially, she might feel anxious, angry, or hurt (Krista’s amygdala will light up, too), but her strong left prefrontal cortex will soon kick in, quieting down the quick emotional response: “Relax, don’t overreact. Most of your patients love you, and anyway, motherhood is all about learning patience, so you’re giving them a head start. C’mon, let’s go have some Mexican food.”

While a fast recovery time has real advantages—those who are resilient are more likely to respond to setbacks with energy and determination and less likely to suffer from depression—being at the extreme end of this scale presents its own challenges as far as feedback is concerned. Because negative feedback has less emotional resonance for Krista, it may not adequately catch her attention or even stick in memory. She may be dismissive of suggestions or lack motivation to work on improving. Those around her may see her as callous to the concerns of others, not because she doesn’t care, but because she doesn’t always realize how serious their concerns are. And anyway, she’s moved on.

Sustaining Positive Feelings

Recovery measures how quickly you emerge from the abyss of upsetting feedback. Sustain measures how long positive feedback has you walking on air.
What’s going on in the brain that helps us sustain positive feelings? We need to zoom in on a cluster of neurons inside the ventral striatum called the nucleus accumbens. This region sits just in front of your temple and is part of the mesolimbic pathway—sometimes called the “reward pathway” or “pleasure center”—which is responsible for releasing dopamine, which in turn prompts feelings of pleasure, desire, and motivation. Connected to that upbeat left side of the prefrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens creates a circuit in which positive experiences trigger a dopamine response, which triggers more positive feelings, which triggers more dopamine.

Both Krista and Alita feel an uptick in joy when given a positive boost, whether it’s a honk of marital support or the cry of a newly delivered baby boy.
But Krista’s nucleus accumbens stays active, continuing to release dopamine and maintaining the emotional high long after the honk fades. For Alita, the positive feelings evaporate in minutes.

Just as we can retrigger negative feelings by recalling negative feedback, we can extend our positive sustain by recalling positive feedback—replaying that appreciative comment from a customer or reminding ourselves that no matter what happens at work, we’ve got nine kids who love us at home. Or perhaps remembering that no matter what happens at home, our kids aren’t allowed to follow us to work.
Our sustain and recovery tendencies can create virtuous and vicious cycles. If you find it easier to sustain positive emotion, you can ride the boosts you get from happy moments large (We landed the account!) and small (That was a great cup of coffee!). You might reread positive feedback from your child’s teacher or from a grateful constituent when you need a reminder that you’re doing something right. Positive feedback sticks, and helps you turn the corner to recovering your equilibrium. This sense of control over your emotional state means you feel more confident about your ability to cope with whatever life throws your way. You will tend to be optimistic that the future will be bright and confident that regardless, you’ll manage things well. That’s a pretty good definition of peace of mind.
But when positive sustain is weak, it’s harder to remember what you’re doing right, and pessimism seems the more realistic outlook. If you’ve been low and had trouble recovering, you may doubt your ability to pull yourself up the next time you stumble into a particularly troubling time. This can produce a challenging combination of pessimism and self-doubt. This is where baseline, swing, and sustain come full circle and together constitute what is sometimes referred to as temperament.16

Four Sustain/Recovery Combinations

Krista has both quick recovery and long sustain. Her nature enables her to bounce back quickly from adversity and to luxuriate in life’s joys. Alita is the opposite on both fronts; she takes longer to recover from negatives and has more trouble sustaining positives.
But these aren’t the only two sustain/recovery combinations, because how long you sustain negative feelings operates independently from how long you sustain positive ones. From a purely physiological point of view, there are four combinations of sustain/recover tendencies. The chart below doesn’t address whether you receive feedback skillfully, or whether you find it helpful and important to learning. It merely suggests different variations on how you might experience feedback, given your wiring. It’s an oversimplification, but the categories are illuminating.



WIRING IS ONLY PART OF THE STORY

The danger when talking about brain wiring and temperament is that we take our wiring as fixed and assume it is destiny. It’s neither.
There are genetic bases to our temperament; understanding them helps us understand ourselves, and just as important, offers insight into why others are different from us. But while aspects of our temperament are inherited, there is ample evidence that they are not fixed. Practices such as meditation, serving others, and exercise can raise your baseline over time, and life events that involve trauma or depression can have a profound impact as well. This growing understanding of neuroplasticity is a thrilling reminder that even wiring changes over time in response to our environment and experiences.

THE MAGIC 40

Perhaps more important, our wiring—whether fixed or not—tells only part of the story. Research suggests a 50-40-10 formula for happiness: About 50 percent of our happiness is wired in. Another 40 percent can be attributed to how we interpret and respond to what happens to us, and 10 percent is driven by our circumstances—where we live and with whom, where we work and with whom, the state of our health, and so forth. Whether these are exactly the right proportions is obviously debatable, but what’s certain is that there is a lot of room to move in that magic middle of around 40 percent. That’s the piece we have control over—the way we interpret what happens, the meaning we make, and the stories we tell ourselves.
Indeed, University of Pennsylvania researcher Marty Seligman suggests that for some people, these interpretations and responses can help turn post-traumatic stress into post-traumatic growth.18 Our interpretations and responses to what happens to us—and to the feedback we get—can help turn upsetting feedback and even failure into learning.
But there’s a catch.
Our emotions have so profound an influence on how we interpret what happens and the stories we tell about it that, in the wake of upsetting feedback, our upset itself distorts what we think the feedback means. Our boss offers us some gentle advice that is as harmless as a kitten. But in the flush of anxiety, the advice appears to us as threatening as a tiger, poised to rip us apart.

EMOTIONS DISTORT OUR SENSE OF THE FEEDBACK ITSELF

If we’re going to get better at handling tough feedback, we have to understand how emotions interact with, and distort, the stories we tell about what the feedback means. Is it really just a kitten, or is it a tiger? Or is it something else altogether?

OUR STORIES HAVE AN EMOTIONAL SOUNDTRACK

We don’t live our life in data, but in stories—big stories, like who we are and what we care about and why we’re here, and smaller stories, like whether we embarrassed ourselves at the company picnic last weekend.
And these stories are made not only of thoughts but of feelings. We don’t experience them as separate. We don’t think: Here’s a thought and here’s a feeling. At any given moment we have a seamless awareness of our life. It’s similar to the way a music soundtrack works in a movie. When we’re absorbed in a good movie, we don’t notice the swell and fade of the soundtrack. The music adds to the suspense, the excitement, the poignancy of the plot, yet we are as unaware of the music as we are of the projector.
Most of the time that’s a good thing. A movie is better when we get lost in it and the same is true in life. When we are at our most engaged, most creative, and most energized, we achieve that delicious state of unselfconsciousness called “flow.”19 But when things go wrong, it’s worth slowing things down to observe the effect our emotions are having on how we tell the story.

THOUGHTS + FEELINGS = STORY

When someone behind you honks when the light changes, you don’t think: That person behind me honked. You instantly embellish that thought into a story: Dude! Obnoxious people like you are what’s wrong with this town these days.
How you feel in that moment has a big impact on the story you tell yourself. If you are already in a dark mood, you’ll tell a darker story. If you’re frustrated, you’ll tell a frustrated story. If you’re sitting at the light feeling like a loser, and the guy behind you honks, it’s just another example of you being a loser. You can’t even drive right. That guy sees right into your sad, incompetent soul.
Thanks, pal, but I already know. If you’re newly in love, you’ll feel patient and generous: Oops, sorry about that, I was doing a little daydreaming there at the light. But ain’t life grand? In these examples, the feeling comes first. The feeling colors the story and influences how we perceive the characters in it. But there’s a second pattern between thoughts and feelings, and confusingly, it’s just the opposite: Sometimes the thought is first, and the feelings follow.
For instance, I may have started my journey feeling just fine, but then I looked at the clock and saw that I might miss my flight. A story unfolds in my mind about how the rest of the day will play out—I’ll miss my flight by seconds,
I won’t make the meeting this afternoon, my client is going to be annoyed, my boss will be apoplectic. And now—because of these thoughts—I’m on edge. In this case, the feelings follow the thoughts.
Jonathan Haidt gives us a glimpse of the biology behind this intertwining of thoughts and feeling: Not only does [the amygdala] reach down to the brainstem to trigger a response to danger but it reaches up to the frontal cortex to change your thinking. It shifts the entire brain over to a withdrawal orientation. There is a two-way street between emotions and conscious thoughts: Thoughts can cause emotions (as when you reflect on a foolish thing you said), but emotions can also cause thoughts. . . .
There’s a key insight that follows from this observation that is relevant for feedback: If our stories are a result of our feelings plus our thoughts, then we can change our stories by working to change either our feelings or our thoughts. So there are two ways in.

HOW FEELINGS EXAGGERATE FEEDBACK

Let’s start by looking at the predictable ways that feelings distort our stories.
Knowing those patterns is crucial to being able to tell a less distorted story.
In general, strong feelings push us toward extreme interpretations. One thing becomes everything, now becomes always, partly becomes entirely, and slightly becomes extremely. Feelings skew our sense of the past, present, and future.
They distort our stories about who we are, how others see us, and what the consequences of feedback will be. Below are three common patterns of distortion.

OUR PAST: THE GOOGLE BIAS

Today’s upsetting feedback can influence the story we tell about yesterday: Suddenly what comes to mind is all the damning evidence of past failures, earlier poor choices, and bygone bad behavior.
It’s a little like using Google. If you Google “dictators,” you’re going to pull up 8.4 million sites that mention dictators. It seems that dictators are everywhere; you can’t swing a cat without hitting one. But that doesn’t mean most people are dictators or that most countries are run by dictators. Filling your head with dictator stories doesn’t mean there are more dictators, and ignoring dictator stories doesn’t mean there are fewer.
When you feel lousy about yourself, you are effectively Googling “Things that are wrong with me.” You will pull up 8.4 million sites, and suddenly you are pathetic. You see “sponsored ads” from your exes, father, and boss. You can’t recall a single thing you’ve ever done right.
We all have our own ways of experiencing these distortions. Marc describes how the “Google bias” manifests for him: The feedback could be small, but if I’m feeling vulnerable, it’s as if I fall through the floor, plunged into the basement where all the things I’ve ever regretted are collected. It’s as if they are happening all at once, right now.
I feel guilty about the people I’ve hurt and ashamed of the selfish things I’ve done. When I’m not in the basement I literally don’t think about it. But when I’m there, it’s the only reality, my failures surround me, and I can’t believe I was ever happy.
Of course, when you feel good, the Google bias tilts in the other direction, offering up the successes and the wise and generous choices that have led inexorably to your bountiful life. You rock and always have. Either way, when it comes to your stories about yourself, you get what you Google.

Google search parody designed by Sarah Seminski 



OUR PRESENT: NOT ONE THING, EVERYTHING

When we feel happy and healthy, we are able to contain negative feedback to the topic or trait under scrutiny and to the person doing the “scruting.” We are hearing the feedback as it was meant. If you are told you sing off key, you think,
Okay, this person thinks I sing off key. The feedback is about your singing. And it’s from one person.
But if you’re in the grip of strong emotion, negative feedback floods across boundaries into other areas of your self-image: I sing off key? I can’t do anything right. We rush from “I have trouble closing certain kinds of deals” to “I’m no good at my job,” and from “My colleague has a concern” to “Everybody on the team hates me.”
Flooding can drown out any positive attributes that might lend balance to the picture. Whether you sing off key has no bearing on your long-standing commitment to improving your community’s social services, your tenacious dedication to your daughter, or the astonishing quality of your slow-roast short ribs. But when we get flooded, that’s all washed away.

OUR FUTURE: THE FOREVER BIAS AND SNOWBALLING

Feelings affect not only how we recall the past, but how we imagine the future.
When we feel bad, we assume we will always feel bad. You feel humiliated by the shoddy presentation you gave at the joint venture launch and assume that you will feel precisely this humiliated up to the moment of your death.
And perhaps worse, we engage in catastrophic thinking, and our stories can eventually snowball out of control.21 A specific and contained piece of feedback steadily turns into an ever more ominous future disaster: “I had mayonnaise on my cheek during the date” becomes “I will die alone.”
What’s so amazing about these distortions is how real they appear to us in the moment. Common sense suggests that the bigger the gap between our thoughts and reality, the more likely we would be to notice that the two are misaligned.
But unless we are consciously looking for it, we can’t see the gap when we’re in it, so the size is irrelevant.
The strong feelings triggered by feedback can cause us to distort our thinking about the past, the present, and the future. Learning to regain our balance so that we can accurately assess the feedback is first a matter of rewinding our thoughts and straightening them out. Once we’ve gotten the feedback in realistic perspective, we have a real shot at learning from it.
In the next chapter, “Dismantle Distortions,” we’ll look at strategies for straightening out distorted thinking, so that we can more accurately assess the feedback we get.

Summary: SOME KEY IDEAS

Wiring matters.

# Baseline, Swing, and Sustain/Recovery vary by as much as 3,000 percent among individuals.
# If we have a lower baseline, the volume will be turned down on the positives, and up on the negatives.

Emotions distort our stories about the feedback itself.
# The Google bias collapses the past and the present.
# One thing becomes everything and everyone.
# The forever bias makes the future look bleak.

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