Last updated on 2025/05/04
Pages 27-37
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 1 Summary
Feedback that leaves us confused or enraged, flustered or flattened, is a challenge we all face.
Understanding our triggers and sorting out what set them off are the keys to managing our reactions.
Triggers are not just obstacles; they can also serve as information—a kind of map.
Receiving feedback well is a process of sorting and filtering.
Managing truth triggers is not about pretending there’s something to learn... It's about recognizing that it’s always more complicated than it appears.
Feedback in relationships is rarely the story of you or me. It’s more often the story of you and me.
Our identity is under attack when critical feedback is incoming; our security alarm sounds.
Understanding the common wiring patterns as well as your own temperament gives you insight into why you react as you do.
Learn to keep feedback in perspective, even when doing so doesn’t come naturally.
Those who handle feedback more fruitfully have an identity story with a different assumption at its core.
Pages 38-49
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 2 Summary
Being seen, feeling understood by others, matters deeply.
Appreciation motivates us—it gives us a bounce in our step and the energy to redouble our efforts.
Coaching is aimed at trying to help someone learn, grow, or change.
We need evaluation to know where we stand, to set expectations, to feel reassured or secure.
When feedback is offered as coaching, it can be heard as evaluation.
Explicit disagreement is better than implicit misunderstanding.
Without appreciation, your coaching isn’t going to get through, because I’m listening for something else.
The main purpose is to entertain the TV audience.
The worst thing that could happen? It already did, and I survived.
Understanding whether we are getting appreciation, coaching, or evaluation is a first step.
Pages 50-75
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 3 Summary
Before we determine whether feedback is right or wrong, we first have to understand it.
Feedback often arrives packaged like generic items in the supermarket labeled 'soup' or 'cola.'
The label is not the meal.
It’s easy to forget that when we convey the label to someone else, the movie is not attached.
The surest way of doing that is to spot the label in the first place.
Understanding their views doesn’t mean we pretend we don’t have life experiences or opinions.
If you do want to follow the advice, would you know how to do so?
Your goal here is not to ignore or dismiss the interpretation.
Life would be a lot easier if we routinely asked that question about different data.
Giving up wrong spotting isn’t easy, and you don’t have to give it up altogether.
Pages 76-94
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 4 Summary
There is always a gap between the self we think we present and the way others see us.
By the time others are describing you—to you—the figure they’re describing may bear only vague resemblance to the "you" you know.
We judge ourselves by our intentions, while others judge us by our impacts.
When we are angry, we are focused on the provocation, the threat.
Our blind spots are their hot spots.
Our tendency to subtract certain emotions from our self-description adds up.
To find out, we have to get specific.
Thoughts about feedback can serve as a blind-spot alert.
Emotions play a huge role in the gap between how others see us and how we assume we are seen.
Consciously or unconsciously, we often ask the people closest to us to be supportive mirrors.
Pages 95-111
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 5 Summary
When I tell you things and you don’t listen, it’s a huge insult to me. It makes me feel like I don’t matter.
The dynamic that Louie and Kim have fallen into is so common that we’ve given it a name: a switchtrack conversation.
Switchtracking defeats feedback.
We often have the most room to grow when we are under stress or in conflict.
If they’re coaching you on how to deceive your spouse or how to embezzle from the pension fund, by all means, proceed with caution.
Often when we feel hurt, frustrated, ignored, offended, or anxious, we try to keep feelings out of the picture.
What is wrong with you?!
Understand that it’s not just about accepting who you are, but also about recognizing others’ worries for you.
I see two related but separate topics for us to discuss. They are both important.
The giver might be jealous or mean-spirited or totally nuts, and yet their feedback might be dead right.
Pages 112-130
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 6 Summary
When something goes wrong in a system, we each see some things the other doesn’t.
It takes the two of you being the way you are to create the problem. That’s how systems work.
Instead of focusing on what the other person is doing wrong, notice what you are each doing in reaction to the other.
Understanding what’s going on often necessitates looking at the broader team, department, or cross-functional dynamics.
Seeing my own contribution to my circumstances makes me stronger, not weaker.
If we’re going to have better conversations about feedback, we need a better handle on the ways that giver and receiver... are contributing to the problem under discussion.
Continual pestering, which you thought was the "following through" solution, is actually reinforcing the problem.
If the employee wasn’t aware of a policy because you didn’t tell them about it, perhaps you correct the ignorance and issue a warning.
What you pour in matters, but so does the shape of the tray.
If one of you changes, the whole system improves.
Pages 131-144
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 7 Summary
Learning that how you are in the world is due in part to your wiring might feel discouraging—but it can be freeing, as well.
Your reactions are not due to a lack of courage or surplus of self-pity.
Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.
Bad is stronger than good.
Your emotional reactions to feedback can be thought of as containing three key variables: Baseline, Swing, and Sustain or Recovery.
We adapt—to new information and events both good and bad—and gravitate back to our personal default level of well-being.
This growing understanding of neuroplasticity is a thrilling reminder that even wiring changes over time in response to our environment and experiences.
While aspects of our temperament are inherited, there is ample evidence that they are not fixed.
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.
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.
Pages 145-158
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 8 Summary
In order to understand and assess the feedback, we first have to dismantle the distortions.
It means finding ways to turn down the volume on that ominous soundtrack playing in our minds.
We can manage our own tendencies by imagining that the news is bad.
Self-observation awakens your left prefrontal cortex—which is where the pleasures associated with learning are located.
The goal in untangling the strands of emotion, story, and feedback is to see what you’ve woven in that does and doesn’t belong there.
The present does not change the past. The present influences, but does not determine, the future.
You can illustrate balance as a drawing, a pie chart, or a macaroni sculpture.
When we think about the consequences of feedback, the goal is not to dismiss them or pretend they don't matter.
The good news is that others aren’t actually spending as much time thinking about you as you might imagine.
Ask those around you to be supportive mirrors.
Pages 159-175
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 9 Summary
Identity is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Learning profitably from feedback is not only about how we interpret the feedback; it’s also about how we hold our identity.
Our ability to metabolize challenging feedback is driven by the particular way we tell our identity story.
We can all learn to hold our identity in ways that make us more resilient.
As long as you tell your self-story in these black-and-white terms, you will find no peace.
You are someone who cares deeply about being trustworthy or fair or responsible, and there are a thousand examples of your being each of these.
Accepting the fact that you will make mistakes takes some of the pressure off.
Your capabilities are always evolving. Effort and hard work pay off.
How we tell the story matters.
The initial evaluation is not the end of the story. It’s the start of the second story about the meaning you’ll make of the experience in your life.
Pages 176-190
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 10 Summary
Being able to say no is not a skill that runs parallel to the skill of receiving feedback well; it’s right at the heart of it.
You need to make your own mistakes and find your own learning curve.
Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own.
You can plant fruit trees or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all.
If you can’t keep your judgments to yourself, if you can’t accept me the way I am now, then I will leave the relationship.
Unhelpful feedback is useless; relentless unhelpful feedback is destructive.
No matter what growing you have to do, and regardless of how right (or not) the feedback may be, if the person giving you the feedback is not listening to you and doesn’t care about its impact on you, something is wrong.
You are worthy of love, acceptance, and compassion—right now, as you are, full stop.
Using 'and' to describe our feelings isn’t just about word choice. It gets at a deeper truth about our thoughts and feelings: They are often complex and sometimes confused.
The clarity of Steve’s boundary has made it easier for the brothers to spend time together.
Pages 191-211
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 11 Summary
If you can identify the conversation keyframes, you can do your own ‘tweening.
Listening may be the most challenging skill involved in receiving feedback, but it also has the biggest payoff.
You can’t just passively receive feedback; you’re building a puzzle together.
You should both know where things stand.
You need to know what the sales numbers are before you can decide what they mean.
You aren’t listening to be polite. You’re listening to understand.
Understanding doesn’t equal agreeing.
If understanding is purpose one, letting the giver know you understand is purpose two.
Good conversations are often a series of conversations over time.
When you’re at an impasse, ask about the underlying interests behind the suggestion.
Pages 212-237
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 12 Summary
"Just a useful thing. A place to start."
"What’s one thing you see me doing that gets in my own way?"
"In aiming for one, you’re setting expectations: Let’s focus."
"You may not be able to work on ten concerns... Work to understand and validate them."
"Sometimes we fall somewhere in the middle, unsure if it’s a good idea or not."
"Try the feedback out, especially when the stakes are low and the potential upside is great."
"It’s a sad story, but it makes sense... if, that is, our projection that we are going to continue to go down is correct."
"Every choice can be seen as an experiment. What if we’re at the bottom of the curve and are about to head up the happiness slope?"
"It’s not all-and-always. Just some-and-sometimes."
"By seeing the choice in a new light, or by actually changing the choice, you can change your behavior, and that very often sets in motion a virtuous cycle."
Pages 238-252
Check Thanks For The Feedback Chapter 13 Summary
The greatest leverage is helping the people inside the system communicate more effectively.
We need to equip receivers to create pull—to drive their own learning, to seek honest mirrors as well as supportive mirrors.
No system can make you learn, but no system can keep you from learning either.
When we are asked to make a choice about a subject we’re worried about, and we are presented only with the benefits, we supply the potential drawbacks on our own.
Every system has its drawbacks. The plan we’re looking at now has the fewest drawbacks, and also the most important benefits, given our goals and what we’re up against.
Ismail’s honesty helped people to see that this was not an administrative problem, but a human problem.
When we ourselves are screwing up or shooting ourselves in the foot, we want someone to tell us.
Teachers and leaders should bring the challenge of learning into everyday conversations.
What kind of learner do I want to be, and what kind of mentor do I want to be?
The responsibility to get the balance right on all three kinds of feedback ultimately lies with both givers and receivers.