Feedback is such an amazing and powerful tool that we forget how much we do get manipulated by that.

Think about the time when you wanted to start a new thing, and a friend told you that it wasn’t such a great idea.
Did you feel that kind of disappointment? Did you get a little less enthusiastic?

Or what about the opposite? What if a feedback pumped you up so much you did an all in into a project that was a failure to begin with?
And maybe the feedback from your friend was just a polite way to avoid confrontation?

These are the pitfalls and they occur not because people are not to be trusted or feedback to not be listened, they occur because we get manipulated by feedback instead of seeing feedback as an additional input to understand a scope, a project, a situation.

We should look at feedback as we would look at the results of the test. By understanding the domain, the context, and the information we should seek the info that helps us choose what to do or to improve, but we should not consider them, if taken singularly, a complete representation of the outcome. They can’t be.

And the hardest past is to dismiss the good feedback and look at it objectively, while accepting the bad feedback instead of dismissing.

By doing the opposite of what we usually do we can aim for a more objective processing of the information, because the biggest pitfall of all is the ego that, pumped by the good feedback, forgets everything else.