I have had a few encounters with feedback recently. Most lawyers (and most people for that matter) have a love-hate relationship with feedback. We know we need it to learn and grow, but actually hearing it can be a double-edge sword.
When an appraisal is positive, we may feel proud and feel validated. But when the assessment is middling to negative, we can feel deflated, defeated, and hurt.
Can mindfulness help lawyers navigate receiving feedback? You bet. This post will explain how and offer some steps to help you implement it for yourself.
Feedback and The Eight Worldly Winds
Feedback seems like a fact of modern life. Even if you aren’t looking for a rating of yourself, you may find it by doing the most basic things. Most lawyers have LinkedIn profiles that allow others to recommend them. If you avoid LinkedIn, you probably still use some social media that allows people to rate how they like your posts or comments.
This constant evaluation can be troubling for sure, but it isn’t new. In fact, humans have always rated, judged, and reacted to each other. If you doubt me, you might consider the Buddhist teachings on the eight worldly winds.
These include:
- Praise and blame
- Gain and loss
- Pleasure and pain
- Success and failure
Of course, these are the manifestations of impermanence in everyday life. Good things come and go and so do bad things. Nothing lasts forever, they each blow around us, much like the wind.
Cultivating Equanimity Helps
To say that these things are “like the wind” is not to suggest that we can simply ignore them. Sure, we may not notice when a gentle breeze rolls by, but any of us can get knocked or slowed down by a storm or hefty gust.
And that’s the point of the teaching of the eight worldly winds: we can’t control them but we can learn how to live with them. The way to live with these worldly winds of life is equanimity. For more on this as applied to giving and receiving feedback, check out the book Confidence by Ethan Nichtern.
Equanimity is a trait that implies relative stability and calm amidst changing circumstances. It does not mean apathy or numbness. Instead, it means acceptance and skillful navigation through pleasant, neutral, and difficult situations.
Part of the skill here, though, can be hard but essential to learn. That part is clinging or resistance. Most people, including us lawyers, usually cling to the pleasant things but resist the bad things.
Why Feedback Is Hard for Lawyers
This is where feedback can be challenging. Even though many of us claim to be above such things, most lawyers care deeply about our reputations and social status. There is good reason for this too. Our reputations matter to the success of our law practices and can even affect our ability to serve our clients.
As a result, it is only natural that lawyers would crave, cling to and strive for positive ratings of our performance or character. On the other hand, we will also dislike, actively avoid, and resist negative evaluations. Or we may try to block all these feelings and live with a buried sense of imposter syndrome.
Given this, it may sound unattainable that any lawyer could ever bring a sense of equanimity to getting feedback. But the truth is that we can build this trait, just like we can build the traits of mindfulness and compassion.
Steps for Responding to Feedback with Equanimity
As I have written before, meditation practice goes a long way in cultivating the trait of equanimity. Every time you bring your wandering mind back to the breath or pause before scratching an itch, you are building patience. In each tiny moment like this, you are creating equanimity by choosing to not react in a huge way to every issue that comes along.
Even so, some types of feedback may require a bit more attention and skill. After years of meditation, I am the first to say that feedback still can get to me. All of us may need a framework to help us navigate reviews, ratings and assessments of ourselves with kindness and skill. Here are the steps that help me.
1. Don’t Argue or Gush
Because feedback is so likely to activate our egos, one of the easiest ways to get stuck with it is by arguing with or wallowing in it. Negative ratings may push us to argue the facts underlying it or challenge the intent or credibility of the reviewer. Positive ratings may have the opposite effect, causing us to obsess and puff up the meaning or importance of the assessment.
This is why one of the best ways to promote equanimity and your own sanity is to just receive the feedback for exactly what it is. Don’t add on to it or try to diminish it unfairly. As much as you can, just hear it or see it for what it is.
2. Allow Your Feelings
Of course, receiving feedback is bound to produce feelings. Equanimity does not mean blocking or resisting your feelings. Far from it. True equanimity means accepting your feelings for what they are. That means giving yourself the time and space you need to allow your feelings without doing violence to yourself or others.
That means you can feel hurt or angry or defensive when you receive a negative rating. It also means you are allowed to feel happy, grateful, and proud when someone praises you or your performance.
The important thing to understand, though, is that these feelings, like all feelings, are temporary. Let them come and let them go and recognize that no amount of good or bad feedback will make any feelings last forever.
3. Keep Perspective
Another thing that makes feedback challenging is that we don’t always request or consent to it. To make things worse, much of the feedback we receive may be offered thoughtlessly or unskillfully.
As I mentioned, lawyers may be subject to many kinds of feedback that are brief, perfunctory, and casual. Even when an evaluation is more thorough and well thought out, it still remains a singular data point rather than a final referendum on our character. One of the ways that we can help ourselves not get hooked with every rating or review is to keep them in perspective.
Primarily, I do this by putting it in a context by considering the following factors:
- Was the feedback relevant, timely, and offered with good intent?
- Did I explicitly or implicitly request the assessment?
- Did the review provide useful and practical information or did it appear to rate me as a person?
- Was the assessment consistent with other assessments I have received or was it an outlier?
- Would I provide feedback like the rating I received to someone whose growth and development mattered to me?
This is a rough outline of questions that help me put feedback in perspective. More “yes” answers to these questions suggest feedback that deserves more of my attention. If I answer most or all of the questions in the negative, that is a strong sign I just need to move on and let go.
4. Learn What You Can and Move On
Even though they can challenge us, evaluations from others really can help us learn and grow. In truth, not everyone will tell you what they really think. This is why, most of the time, feedback can be valuable even if we have to take it with a large grain of salt.
For this reason, the last step before moving on is take whatever lessons you can from the evaluation. With skillfully offered feedback that you have requested, this may be easy. You may get practical ideas about how to adjust or improve.
For ratings that are more generic or less skillful, the lesson may be as simple as slow down, choose your words carefully, or you can’t please everyone. In short, if there is a message in the feedback that you need to hear, take it, reflect on it, and then move on.
Conclusion
In the end, there is no secret recipe for being unbothered and unaffected when lawyers get feedback. That’s because mindfulness practice is not about checking out on life, but being more present in it. All of us are wired to crave praise and resist and reject blame. We want people to like us and think well of us and we don’t want them to tell us negative information about ourselves or our performance.
Mindfulness is not a magic pill that can make the worldly winds of life go away. But with time and practice, it may help you cultivate equanimity an essential trait for navigating ups and downs in life and work. By using the steps offered in this post, I hope you can bring equanimity to your next encounter with feedback.
Want to learn more about mindfulness and compassion? Check out my new book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer, for a simple guide to creating a meditation practice of your own in 30 days. And to share mindfulness with your little one, check out my new children’s book, Mommy Needs a Minute.
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