The Art of Receiving - How Elite Performers Manage Feedback

The difference between elite performers and everyone else isn't talent or work ethic. It's what happens in the three seconds after they receive harsh feedback. Most people either deflect it or let it loop endlessly in their minds. Elite performers do something else entirely.

In last week’s issue, we explored the paradox: harsh feedback can transform us, but it can also become toxic headtrash. The question isn't whether to give or receive direct feedback. The question is: what do we do with it once we have it?

The Manager Self Problem

There's a concept from Tim Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis 🎾 that explains why harsh feedback often backfires. Gallwey discovered that we have two selves: the manager self and the doer self. The manager self analyzes, critiques, instructs. The doer self performs, flows, executes.

Here's the problem: the more the manager self tries to control the doer self, the worse performance gets. When a tennis player consciously thinks "bend my knees, follow through, watch the ball," they play worse than when they just hit the ball. The conscious management interferes with the body's natural ability to perform.

This is exactly what happens with feedback. We receive harsh truth about our performance. Then our manager self goes into overdrive, constantly replaying the critique, managing every detail, trying to consciously correct everything. This doesn't improve performance. It paralyzes it.

I saw this play out recently at a conference. I was talking with two people and I remember while speaking feeling a tingling sensation at the top of my skull. Right in the middle of my head. It felt familiar, but I'd never consciously recognized it before. In that moment, I realized: this is what it feels like when I'm overly attached to being right. When my ego is digging in. When my manager self is trying to control the outcome of the conversation instead of just being present to it.

The sensation was a gift. A signal that I'd shifted from curious presence to forceful management. From being to performing.

Here’s another time an intense sensation was a gift last weekend.

First, Second, and Third Order Consequences

Ray Dalio, in his amazing book Principles, introduced me to the idea first, second, and third order consequences.

Most of us make decisions based on first order consequences. The immediate impact. Working out? First order consequence is time spent and significant discomfort. Harsh feedback? First order consequence is ego bruise, emotional pain, feeling threatened.

But the meaningful outcomes in life come from second and third order consequences. Working out: second order is sore muscles two days later. Third order, over time, is a more attractive physique, greater strength, greater mobility, opportunities to explore this beautiful world with our bodies, and a longer life where we can create legacy with our families.

Harsh feedback: second order is the opportunity to see our blind spots. Third order is transformation, growth, becoming the person we're capable of being.

This is the shift we need to make with feedback. Our animal brain screams at us that feedback is a threat. First order thinking. Survival mode. But if we can train ourselves to think in second and third order terms, feedback becomes fuel instead of threat.

This takes deliberate work. Our animal brain is deeply wired to protect us, to save us from immediate danger. Our animal brain is actually threatening our best life because of its instinct to protect us. That instinct served us well on the savannah. It doesn't serve us well in a performance review.

The Ultrarunning Breakthrough

I learned this lesson the hard way in ultrarunning. For years, I tried to control outcomes. I'd focus obsessively on pace. I'd measure myself against other runners during the race. If someone passed me, I'd think "I can't let this guy beat me" and push harder to stay ahead. This approach almost always ended in disaster later in the race.

The problem was I was trying to control something I couldn't actually control: the outcome. We don't control outcomes any more than we control another person. Our presence influences outcomes. It merely increases the probability the outcome we're hoping for will happen.

When I finally shifted my focus to inputs, everything changed. Instead of worrying about pace or other runners, I focused on the only thing I can contro: my effort. My energy output. My state of being in the moment. I stayed locked into those inputs, completely ignoring the thoughts and feelings about how I was doing, what others were doing, what might happen, or what happened before.

After learning these things I returned to the race and beat my previous 100 kilometer time by an hour and a half and finished in the top 15 overall.

The shift was from forceful to fluid. From trying to manage outcomes to simply being present with optimal inputs. When I unburdened myself from having to deliver outcomes outside my control, I moved from tension to release. We move from being anxious to accepting, we let go a little. Grind yields to flow. This unlocks joy, fun. We are free to be curious and laugh.

Gary V posted something beautiful this week about detaching from outcomes. Check it out.

Remember Larry's daughter, the softball player from last week? She developed a mantra: "loose and aggressive." She would repeat it over and over when she got into the batter's box. Not with great emotional intensity. Just quietly, steadily. Loose and aggressive. Loose and aggressive. This quieted her manager self from overly controlling the doer self. It put her in an optimal state to unlock her top performance.

This is the key. We give ourselves the best chance to be in optimal state. With access to as much of our (correctly framed) history, memories, resources, skills, energy, awareness… Be and Do. That's all we can ask for in life. Not perfection. Not control. Not outcomes. Just showing up in an optimal state with maximum access to who we are, right now in the only place we can have power and influence: this moment.

Step Back From the Keyboard

We need to stop writing our history when we’re not thinking straight.

We all know we shouldn’t communicate when we are triggered. We should also wait until we’re level-headed before reaching conclusions about what things mean, for our own life-history writing in our brains. Step back from the keyboard of your own life's history when you’re all charged up. Give a little bit more time and space for our physiological state to hit a baseline of peace before you decide what things mean.

This is why journaling is so powerful. It allows us to reflect back and attach healthier meaning to feedback received, instead of casting that die in the moment when emotions are charged and our animal brain is poisoning our interpretation with survival chemicals.

We don't learn by experience as much as we learn by reflecting on experience. We have a powerful, perishable opportunity each day to recast or reclassify our experiences intentionally for our greatest gain, if we're deliberate about it.

I have a beautiful letter written to me by Mrs. Casey, who was my gifted program teacher all through elementary school. She included a quote that has stayed with me: “Life… is a grand experiment… where there are no mistakes — only different outcomes.”

Hay is in the Barn

In running, when we got close to race day, it was often tempting to start feeling anxious. To spin in loops about what else we could do, how else we could prepare. The reality is, when you're a couple weeks out from a race, there's actually nothing else you can do to add strength to your performance. You’ve already done the work. The best thing you can do is accept that ‘the hay is in the barn’. Race day should be considered a celebration of fitness, not a grinding out of performance.

I think the same is true with our lives. At every moment, the hay is already in the barn. It doesn’t do any good to worry about whether we’re good enough to be where we are doing what we’re doing. We belong because we are. Everything in our life has lead up to each moment. All that is left is to show up with joy and celebrate what we’ve lived so far to get us here. We already have all the experience, skill, and development that we could possibly have to perform at our peak. Our only job then becomes accessing it.

The daily and weekly routines of reading, journaling, reflecting, writing, speaking with friends, colleagues, coaches, mentors, those are the miles we're putting in to improve our strength. But in the moment that we show up for a meeting or an important conversation or a conference, when we're putting ourselves out there to expand our influence with others, the hay is already in the barn.

Our focus at that point should be anchoring ourselves, perhaps through a simple mantra, to put ourselves in that optimal state that will make greatest use of all our life's experience up to that point. In a playful, happy, light, non forceful manner.

What if feedback isn't about fixing what's broken, but about better accessing what's already there?

2nd & 3rd Order Consequences

Elite performers have learned to do three things that most of us struggle with:

They think in second and third order consequences instead of reacting to immediate pain. They shift from trying to control outcomes to focusing on inputs they can actually manage. And they step back from the keyboard of their own life story, giving themselves space to recast meaning when they're not flooded with survival chemicals.

The questions I'm sitting with now:

How do we shift from receiving feedback as a threat to receiving it as data? What would it look like to approach important moments as celebrations of what we've already built rather than tests we might fail? When we catch ourselves in that reactive loop, what's the mantra that brings us back to optimal state?

Am I 100% sure that interpretation is true? What else might be true?

In the next issue, I'll explore the boundaries. When feedback crosses from productive challenge into destructive abuse. How to tell the difference. When to lean in and when to protect yourself. The three red lines that should never be crossed.

For now, tell me: what's your version of "loose and aggressive"? What gets you back to optimal state when you've shifted from fluid to forceful? And how do you practice stepping back from the keyboard of your own story?

Want to see how soundly ChatGPT roasted a headshot of me? This may have you laughing (especially if you know anything about the Mormon’s)

Also, here’s a couple posts that seemed really popular this last week:

Why big tech failed in property management (my opinion)

How Chik-fil-a dummy-proofs the service delivery