Feedback doesn’t usually work, because people are too self-conscious to take it to heart. And if feedback makes us self-conscious, it can make us perform worse. Nevertheless, negative feedback can be immensely helpful, if we can manage to focus on the task rather than on ourselves.
It’s hard to be objective about ourselves and our performance, but that’s exactly what we must do — put egos aside and accept the feedback. To learn from negative feedback, you’ve got to get comfortable with failure.
