There is feedback you were given once that you decided was wrong. Do not throw it away.
It happens to everyone. Someone tells you that you are too blunt in reviews, or too slow to commit to a decision, or that you go too deep into detail in meetings. You think about it honestly and you conclude they have misread you. Maybe they had. Maybe they were measuring you against themselves, or they caught you on your worst week, or they were repeating something they heard secondhand.
So you set it aside, which is allowed. You do not have to act on everything you are told.
But do not delete it. Write it down, put a date next to it, and come back to it in six months.
Here is why. Some feedback is wrong. Some feedback is early. In the moment those two feel identical, because both arrive as something that does not match how you see yourself.
The early kind is the valuable kind. Somebody noticed a pattern before you had enough examples of it to believe them. Six months later you have the examples. You read the note again and it lands completely differently, because now you have three incidents to hold it against instead of none.
I have watched people have that moment and it is always the same. A quiet, slightly annoyed, oh. They were right. I just could not see it yet.
The ones that really were wrong turn out to be useful too. After two or three readings you can say, with evidence rather than defensiveness, that you have checked this one more than once and it does not hold. That is a far stronger place to stand than a flat denial in the moment.
And watch for repeats. A note you dismissed from one person is easy to write off. The same note from three unrelated people across two years is not an opinion about you. It is a measurement.
Keep the file. Be honest when you read it.
The feedback you argued with is usually the feedback most worth revisiting.
– Asael Shinder
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