Anneka Gupta: belief

Transcript context

…I love that. Yeah, they don't have to be involved in that. You just ask other people, "What is this person's motivations?" And then the idea is connect what they want with the thing you're trying to achieve. Beautiful. I really love this idea of when you're frustrated by someone just reframing it to like, "I'm grateful I'm going to learn something from this person in our interaction, even though they're making life hard for me." I really love that. Another skill I hear you're really strong at, and this comes from another one of your colleagues, Hema Mohan shared that you're world-class at giving feedback, giving hard feedback, and receiving hard feedback. And so I want to just ask you, what have you learned about how to do this? It's very hard to give hard feedback. That's why it's called hard feedback. So from either direction, what have you learned about receiving hard feedback or giving hard feedback where someone actually hears Zoom doesn't get defensive? The answer is so much, I've learned so much from it. So maybe I'll start with receiving feedback. So, on the receiving feedback side, I think it's very natural to feel upset, defensive, all the negative emotions when you first see a piece of negative feedback, whether it's you're reading it in a employee survey or you're receiving it in a one-on-one from a direct report or from a manager or from a peer. And I try to let myself just feel the things that I'm going to feel. Sometimes that's an emotional feeling, sometimes that means I want to step out of the room or it depends on who I'm talking to, but let myself feel the things that I'm going to feel. Then once that's passed, whether that's a few hours or a few days, don't react. Don't try to say, "Oh, I don't believe this." Listen. And then ask myself, okay, well where is this feedback coming from? Why am I getting this feedback? And try to be super curious about it. And that might be going back to the person that gave me the feedback and maybe asking someone that's a peer somewhere in the organization that might have more context and flavor to what the feedback really is, just trying to learn. Then I can decide, do I think this is valid or not? Is this something I should do something about or not? Actually, all feedback I think is valid. People's feelings are valid, but it doesn't mean that you need to do something about all of those things. Going through that process and letting myself ride the emotional wave and not judging myself for that, but then not reacting and letting myself then figure out and come back curious. I think when you come back curious, people then want to give you more feedback because they know that you're listening and that you're hearing what they say. So the advice is feel it, don't block it off and be like, "No, no, no, no, no, this isn't real." So fully let your body go through the roller coaster of feeling the negative feedback. Sometimes the feedback is just like, "No, this isn't actually a thing." Do you have any just heuristic of like I should actually pay attention to this deeply or just like let me wait for more data points?…

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