By Jane Carroll  Andrade

We all have a “buzz.” That was lesson No. 1 for those attending a lively, engaging, humorous—and sometimes emotional--session yesterday on “Feedback—Give it, Get it, and Grow.”

According to leadership coaches Carol Grannis and Cindy Maher, your buzz is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Believe it or not, we should care about that, despite what mother told us.

“I don’t think she was right because what people say about us matters,” Grannis told the group of mostly legislative staffers.

The reason? What people say about us either supports us, or it gets in our way.

Grannis and Maher said that after years of training people how to give feedback, they had a bit of an epiphany: How we receive feedback is crucial to our growth, both professionally and personally.

When we receive tough feedback, they said, the universe is telling us something and we tend to push it away. “It is exactly those moments we need to embrace,” Maher said. “It’s a profound challenge to be on the receiving end of feedback.”

The duo identified three types of feedback that trigger defensiveness and cause us to shut down, then offered strategies for overcoming those natural, but ultimately unhelpful, reactions.

The “truth trigger” is when we disagree with the feedback we’re given, so we dismiss it as untrue. But when we do this, we “miss the learning.” The antidote is to get curious. Ask the feedback giver for more information and even advice. Ask: “What would you do?”

Maher also cautioned attendees that what we hear is not always what was meant. She gave the following example:

Feedback giver: “Be more confident.”

Feedback receiver: “So you want me to pretend to know something when I don’t?”

What’ meant: “Have the confidence to say you don’t know.”

The second type is the “relationship trigger.” This type of feedback may have nothing to do with what’s being said and everything to do with who’s saying it.

“It’s called marriage,” Grannis joked.

The third “identify trigger” is when feedback we receive goes against everything we believe about ourselves.

Whatever the trigger, the bottom line is that in order to grow, we need to be open, curious, and willing to listen and learn, even from the “surprise players in our lives.” People who seemingly don’t know us very well sometimes tell the truth even more than those who know us better.

“They are identifying your buzz,” Maher said.

There was plenty of laughter as the facilitators acted out scenarios illustrating various ways in which we humans react to not-so-flattering feedback. And there were tears, too. Grannis shared that a gentleman came up to her after a similar session and said he’d been married for more than 30 years and realized that he hadn’t ever really listened to his wife, which caused a lot of stress in their marriage, but he was going to change that.

The lesson? Feedback is powerful, especially when we’re open to receiving it. And that’s the real buzz.

Jane Carroll Andrade is a program director in NCSL’s Communications Division.

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