The Feedback You Resist Is Usually the One You Need

Restack on Steroids: my take on the Substacks I connect with. This time, Kaila Colbin talks about the hardest feedback she ever got.

I hear you, but …

In fifteen years of coaching and three decades of exec roles, the pattern I trust most is this. The feedback a person fights the hardest is usually the feedback they most need to hear, and it rarely arrives from the person who delivers it well. It tends to come from the one who irritates us, the colleague whose own behavior seems to contradict the very thing they are pointing out in us.

Kaila Colbin captured this beautifully in her piece, The Hardest Feedback I Ever Got. She was told she was defensive, and her instinct was to snap back that she was not, which of course was the very thing being pointed out. She sat with the discomfort, worked on it, and watched her relationships and her capacity to learn improve. Her larger point is one I wish more leaders understood: that we pour enormous energy into becoming great at giving feedback when the rarer and more valuable skill is becoming great at receiving it.

She is right, and I want to build on it because there is a trap beneath her story that quietly costs people years.

The trap is the messenger, not the message

We let the quality of the delivery decide the value of the message. When feedback is clumsy, badly timed, or comes from someone whose credibility we question, we use those flaws as permission to dismiss the content entirely. Sometimes the delivery really is poor, but poor delivery does not make the information wrong. The moment we treat the two as the same thing, we protect our self-image and lose the lesson in the same breath.

This is why I encourage the people I coach to stop treating feedback as a verdict and start treating it as data. A verdict is something you accept or reject, while data is something you examine. Not all of it is clean, not all of it is complete, and not all of it deserves equal weight, but a leader who sorts the signal from the noise ends up far better informed than the one who threw the whole thing out because they did not like how it was handed to them. Feedback simply tells you how someone experienced you, and where your intention and your impact may have drifted apart, and that is worth knowing even when it stings.

Defensiveness shows up in the body first

Kaila is honest that she still struggles with defensiveness, and so do most of us, because feedback does not press on our behavior so much as it presses on our identity. A single sentence about how you came across in a meeting can set off a quiet spiral about your competence, your reputation, and whether you still belong. That spiral is not a strategy; it is self-protection, and it usually shows up in the body before it reaches your mouth, as a tight chest, a flush of heat, or a rebuttal already forming while the other person is still speaking.

Amy Edmondson’s work taught organizations to build rooms where people can speak up and admit mistakes without fear, but there is a personal version of that safety she talks about less, and it is the real leadership edge. You cannot only demand safety from the room. You have to build enough safety inside yourself to hear something hard without collapsing, attacking, or performing openness while privately dismissing the point. That is the difference between looking coachable and being coachable.

What to do in the moment

Good intentions dissolve the instant the heat arrives, so here is what I actually teach people to do when it does.

First, notice the reaction before you obey it. When you feel the defensiveness rise, name it silently: something in me feels threatened, and I do not have to act from there. That one pause has saved more relationships than any clever reply.

Second, buy yourself a moment with one honest line, something like, thank you for telling me. I want to understand it before I respond. It does not commit you to agreeing. It only shows you are strong enough to listen.

Third, ask for specifics instead of building a defense. Rather than arguing, ask where they noticed it, what you said or did that created the impression, and what would have landed differently. Vague feedback breeds shame, while specific feedback gives you a choice.

Repair beats perfection

I watched this play out with a director whose team had told her she came across as dismissive. Her first instinct was to explain that she was under pressure and simply keeping things concise, and the team quietly learned never to raise it again. When she revisited it months later, she asked for a specific moment instead, and a teammate reminded her that when a colleague raised a concern, she had said we already covered that and moved on. She replied that she could see how it shut the room down, that she had been guarding the clock, but the cost was a real concern going unheard, and that next time she would name the time pressure and offer a separate conversation rather than cut it off. That is not perfection. It is repair, and repair is what people actually follow.

The goal Kaila points us toward is not to become someone who never feels defensive, because that person does not exist. It is to become someone who notices the defensiveness before it takes the wheel, who can hold a hard sentence long enough to find the useful part inside it, and who turns that into one visible change rather than a long apology that changes nothing.

The feedback that hurts is rarely there to shrink you. More often it is there to sharpen you, if you are willing to pick it up, turn it over, and keep the part that is true.

Thank you, Kaila, for a piece worth sitting with. Subscribe for more like this: https://riseupatwork.substack.com/subscribe