There’s a meme that has been circulating for a long time in organizations, in management books, personal development courses: feedback is a gift.

According to this meme, we should give and receive feedback assertively and maturely, so that it helps us and those around us. It sounds very nice and yet, we rarely do it.

Why? Here are some reasons:

  • We don’t give assertive feedback because:
  • We don’t care;
  • We don’t want to ruin our relationships;
  • We don’t want to upset anyone;
  • We don’t know how;
  • We don’t want to know how;
  • We care more about what the other one thinks about us than about trying to help them develop, understand or change something in their behavior;
  • We can’t see the connection between giving positive and constructive feedback to someone, and performance, behavior and attitude change;
  • We don’t trust that the other one can receive correctly what we’re saying;
  • We want to be ”nice”.
  • We don’t ask for and don’t receive assertive feedback because:
  • We are afraid of what we might find out;
  • We don’t want to feel bad;
  • We think we are wonderful, our ego leaves no room for doubts;
  • We don’t know how to manage the difference between our intention and our behavior;
  • We do not accept that just as we have a perception, others have their own perceptions, and the reality of each is given by personal perception;
  • We feel attacked by others, they are mean to us, as if we are the center of their universe, they couldn’t wait to criticize us;
  • We have our beliefs, ideas, which we fell in love with, we don’t want anyone to question them;
  • We don’t really have doubts, therefore there’s no room for other perspectives.

Returning to our feedback as a gift – I challenge you to think about how it feels like receiving a gift. Do we throw it somewhere or do we carefully unwrap it, value it, even if there is only a Kinder egg inside?

Do we look at it or do we throw it somewhere and come across it while cleaning the house?

Too often we throw it somewhere, in a drawer and we forget that, in fact, when that someone bought us this gift, as little as it could be, they spent a few minutes of their life thinking about us. And that’s not insignificant at all.