When did you last get some negative feedback? As PhD students and academics, we get negative feedback quite often, either comments on drafts of papers, rejections from journals, applying for jobs, all sorts of things. We get bits of negative feedback and it can really hurt. So what do we do when we experience negative feedback? What do we do with the fact it hurts and how could we perhaps do something different in the future? That's what we're going to be talking about in today's podcast.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode two of season two of the PhD life coach and today we're going to be thinking about responding to negative feedback. I remember the first time that I got reviewers comments back. So I was a PhD student my second year, something like that, and I'd submitted a paper for publication, been super excited about it and we got the reviewer's comments back and they were harsh. I think it is fair to say they are, they were harsh. Harsh in the sense of being quite critical about some of the decisions we'd made, but also just. being wrong with some things.
I was devastated. I was so upset. They'd rejected our paper and it was just awful. And I made it mean so many things. I spiralled off into I'm never going to get published, everything I'm doing is pointless, all of this stuff. And thankfully, I had wonderful supervisors, and I talked to my wonderful supervisors, and they took two very different approaches, both of which I'm going to sort of hedge whether I recommend or not, but I'm going to share them with you because I think they were super useful.
The first one was one of my supervisors said that if they're wrong, we need to tell them they're wrong. So not the bits where they were disagreeing with us, but stuff where they'd actually just factually missed where we got it. He helped me write a letter back to the editor explaining why the reviewers had been wrong and we actually got it re reviewed. So we immediately jumped onto the offensive and was like, okay, let's go. Again, that's not always the way to cope, but it's a really strong memory that I have of managing negative feedback right at the beginning of my academic career.
The other memory I have, with a second paper from my PhD, was my supervisors being similarly outraged by the comments from the reviewers and the other supervisor sat me down and said we're going to write the letter that we wish we could write and we went through responding point by point basically telling them why they were idiots. Put in this way, it was bad enough that when we were then editing it into something that we could actually send, I had to do find and replace to make sure that we hadn't left any swear words in.
It was ridiculous. I am not necessarily arguing for either of these. Can I tell this story? I don't even know if I can tell the stories I'm going to tell today. But we'll see. Let's go. I'm not saying this is the way to handle it. Was it mature? No. Did it make me laugh a lot? Yes. Did it make me feel better? Yes. Did that paper ultimately get published? Absolutely.
I'm not going to give you techniques like that today, but what I am going to help you do is think through why negative feedback is so painful and give you, as usual, some tools and techniques that you can use right now if you're either experiencing or anticipating negative feedback.
Because that's really important, isn't it? This isn't just about how we respond when we do get negative feedback. It's the fact that the anticipation of negative feedback can also make it really hard to submit stuff in the first place.
I have so many clients say to me, I'm too scared to send this to my supervisors because I know they're going to give me a lot of comments and I don't want to hear it, or I haven't got time to deal with it right now. Or they say, I need to send this to my supervisor, but I'm worried they're going to think I'm an idiot and I just can't deal with that.
So if we can learn how to manage negative feedback, not only does it make it better when we got it, it also makes it easier to actually submit things in the first place. Because if we know we can manage negative feedback, there's much less barrier to submitting anyway.
The other thing that a fear of negative feedback can do, is it can make it really hard to assert your viewpoint, to assert your opinion. People sometimes hold back in being really explicit about what they mean in an article, particularly where you're making an argument, because they're worried that people will tell them that they're wrong. And again, if we can learn to handle critique of our work, handle critique of ourselves, then it's easier to actually put across our perspective in the first place, because it's a less terrifying thing to be thinking about.
So one of the bits of advice we see all the time when it comes to handling negative feedback is don't take it personally. And while well intentioned, everybody who's ever told you don't take it personally, they're really well intentioned, they're caring about your mental health, but I don't think that actually helps.
I don't think it's useful advice. And that's for a bunch of reasons. Partly, everyone takes it personally. There will be, as I said, you know, my supervisors, super senior, especially one of them, super, super senior in his career at the point he was supervising me. Did he take it personally? Yes! He took it as an absolute personal affront to his academic prowess.
Did he then make that mean that he was rubbish and all of those things? No, he didn't, but he took it personally. It offended him, it absolutely offended him. Anyone who tells you that it's just like water off a duck's back, I never let it bother me, they're lying. It bothers them. Okay? And the good thing with knowing that is that it means if it bothers you, there's nothing wrong with you.
As usual, you ain't gotta fix yourself. You're just a human being who doesn't like hearing that the thing they worked really hard on has got some criticisms of it. So everyone takes feedback personally at some point, and that's okay. It means that you are normal. You don't have to beat yourself up for that. Usually it means you care about the thing they're critiquing. Usually it means that you care about somebody else's opinion. None of these are bad things. It only becomes bad when it becomes debilitating, when it stops you submitting, it stops you asserting your opinion. Or it means that you dwell on it for weeks and weeks after you've received negative feedback and it holds you back from responding to the comments. So don't worry if you take it personally. It's all good. I've got you.
The other reason don't take it personally is unhelpful advice is because it just isn't as easy as that. It's like, oh, okay, I'll not take it personally then. Okay. As if, who's ever been told don't take it personally and then not taking it personally.
You need actual things to think about, actual tools, beyond "just don't get upset", that will help you actually manage it. And that's what we're going to be doing today. Some proper things that you can actually use.
First thing I want you to do is for us to really think about what types of situations you get feedback. And for me, you can categorize them in two different ways. You can categorize them as personal critiques and task or project critiques.
Sometimes you'll receive feedback on an article and that's very much task feedback, project feedback. Sometimes you'll receive feedback on yourself. I had to do, I did this leadership training thing at my old university and I had to do 360 degree feedback where they asked some of your peers, some people above you and some people who worked under you to answer a bunch of questions about what you're like as a person and what it's like to work with you and what your strengths and weaknesses are.
Oh my goodness. Terrifying, terrifying, lovely in many ways, gut wrenching in others. I had to learn to manage a lot of feedback at that stage. And that was more personal feedback. That was about me. That wasn't about a particular piece of work. It was critiques of my approach and my management and my leadership and those sorts of things.
So we can kind of divide into personal and tasks or projects. We can also divide into the kind of reasons for giving the feedback. And for me, these fall into two categories as well. You can give feedback for growth. So with my 360 feedback, it was very much about growth. They weren't giving me a job or not giving me a job. They got me. Was a professor there. ,But it was about how could I be a more effective leader? How could I get feedback that would help me to do my job more effectively? Okay, so that's like growth feedback. And similarly, you can have growth feedback on an article. So when your supervisor gives you comments, your co authors give you comments, those are growth feedback.
They are intended to help you improve the thing. If you get a revise and resubmit or a minor modifications, either for your thesis or for an article, that's growth feedback. It's feedback intended to help you improve the thing.
You can also get what I'm calling consequence feedback. So this is where they're telling you why you've got a particular outcome. So on the personal side, that might be feedback as to why you did or didn't get a job, why you did or didn't get a scholarship or something like that and in the task thing, it might be feedback on why they've rejected your paper, why you didn't get your grant, those sorts of things.
Okay. And it's really important for you to figure out when you're thinking about feedback, which of these things it is. Is it about you or is it about the task and don't get those things muddled up with each other. We'll talk more about that later. And is the feedback intended to help you improve this particular thing or is it intended to help you learn from a past experience. So it's explaining why you didn't get it so you could learn from that in future.
Being clear on which of these it is makes it much easier to plan how you're going to use this feedback going forwards, because that's the point of feedback. We take it, we work out what we want to use and how we want to use it, and we move forward from there.
The second thing I want you to do is write down everything that you are making this mean. Because actually, having somebody say, this part of your writing could be more clear. You've missed out an argument here. It gets a bit muddled there. Those things are not necessarily positive or negative until we make it mean something.
And what I see with my clients and with myself is the problems come when we make a piece of feedback mean far more than it actually does So first I want you to ask, what am I making this feedback mean about me? Am I making it mean that this means I'll never get my PhD done? This means I'll never publish? This means no one will ever want this article? This means that I'm a terrible writer? This means I will probably be an embarrassment to my family, lose my job, and have to move to the woods. What are you making it mean about you? It's so common to have this kind of catastrophizing where we make it mean far more than this one individual piece of feedback ever intended.
The other question, especially if you're somebody who, like one of my supervisors, got mad about this stuff. What are you making it mean about them? By them, I mean the people giving you feedback. Are you making it mean that they think you're an idiot? Are you making it mean that they're a terrible person? Are you making it mean that they're an idiot who knows nothing at all? Be cautious what you're making it mean about them too, because it doesn't necessarily mean any of those things either.
Same as it doesn't mean anything about us as an individual, negative feedback doesn't have to mean anything negative about the person that gave it. They may have given it with great intentions, they may have given it with not much thought at all. That's often the case. They may have given it because they're not a particularly nice person? Who knows? But we have to be careful what we're assuming it means about them, that they've given this negative feedback.
Because if we don't stop and think about what we're making it mean, we can very rapidly whip it up into this story of how it means terrible things for our future, it means they're an awful person, and suddenly we're in this like maelstrom of emotions, most of which isn't actually grounded in anything that actually exists.
It's just this story we've created by spiralling off in as many different directions as our brain allows. So really pin down what you're making it mean. And try and pin it down non judgmentally. It's not, we don't want to look at this and go, Oh my God, I'm such an idiot. Why am I making it mean all this?
You're making it mean all this because it hit a nerve. It kind of, you know, it touched you. Maybe it reminds you of a voice you heard a lot in your past, or something like that. There's a whole bunch of reasons why your brain makes up these stories, usually grounded in trying to protect you in some way. So don't worry if you're making it mean a whole bunch of things. Totally normal. But notice, just notice. Accept that these are all stories. It doesn't have to mean any of those things.
Then, as usual, you get to decide what you want to make this feedback mean. What does it mean about you? Maybe it means there's a little bit more you need to learn. Maybe it means that you're really good at this aspect of writing, but you need to work on that aspect. What does it mean about them? As I say, try and avoid making it mean too much about them at all, but be aware that there are a whole bunch of things that you might not have taken into account.
The person who gave you this feedback might have been in a terrible mood when they did it. They might have done it in five minutes because they completely forgot they were meant to do it and did it at the very last minute. Maybe they did it from the intention of, I'm going to tell them all the negative things so that they can change those because the bits I don't comment on are brilliant and I'll just leave those, but I'm not actually going to write that because I haven't got time.
Sometimes there's cultural differences. I remember getting really upset because, and this shows my perfectionism, so bear with me. I remember getting really upset because an American reviewer of something I'd written had described my work as "quite" good.
I was mortified. I mean, for me, in English English, quite good means, eh, it's alright. I mean, it's not good, but it's quite good. Whereas in a lot of cases in American English, quite is a sort of increaser. It's like, ooh, it's really quite good, as in quite good is better than good. They meant it as a compliment. I did not take it as a compliment.
So there can be cultural differences. Sometimes different cultures are more direct than others. Sometimes we beat around the bush. Sometimes we say it like point blank and it doesn't necessarily mean that it was intended to be rude or it was intended to be passive or any of those things and we can criticize it both ways around if we're not used to it but just be aware that we can decide what this feedback means for us.
From there, when we're deciding what we want to make it mean, this is never about denying an emotional response to it. If you've got feedback that is consequence type feedback, so it's feedback as to why you didn't get a scholarship or why your paper's been rejected, for example, it's totally normal and totally okay to be disappointed, to be sad, perhaps even to be embarrassed, a whole bunch of different emotions.
And when we talk about what are we making it mean and what do we want to make it mean, we're not just going to choose completely positive thoughts. "Oh, this is a learning opportunity". No, it's rubbish. Because they rejected my paper and I wanted them to publish it. It's okay to think that's rubbish and it's okay to be really sad about that and disappointed because you worked really hard and it's not going to go in the journal that you meant it to.
What I would really encourage you though is while you're experiencing these negative emotions, - totally normal, totally human - is choose to be as specific as you can be. So be sad about the fact that your journal article got rejected, that you were hoping to publish it in that particular journal, and they've said no.
Just be sad about that. That's okay. Let's be disappointed, because your supervisor gave you way more changes to do on an chapter that you thought was nearly finished. Let's be disappointed that that specific article isn't as far along as you thought it was and that there's more to be done. So we experience the emotions, but we keep our brains specific. We keep our brains in the room.
So instead of spiraling into all these other reasons to be sad or that catastrophizing that I talked about a second ago, we keep our emotions to this specific thing. And then we can experience them. Because pushing down emotions never helped anybody. Experience them. But you'll find that if you can just keep it as disappointed for this thing, sad about this thing, they dissipate so much faster than if you keep pushing fuel on the fire of telling it why else it's disappointing and why else it's sad. So trying to keep it focused as much as you can.
One of the things with allowing yourself to experience these specific emotions about this specific thing is sometimes it's useful to give yourself the space to do that. So one of the things I used to do, I used to read my comments, then I put them away. And I'd leave. I'd go for a walk, I'd go and see my friends, I'd go and get a snack, whatever it was, um, and I wouldn't come back to try and work on my comments, at least till later in the day, if not till tomorrow or the day after. Give yourself the time and space to experience the emotions that are specifically to do with that.
The only exception I'm going to give you to that is where there is a quick win involved. So I once spent months writing a grant, for a large Research Council, I'm going to say. I'm not going to say which one, and I got three reviews back. Two of them were absolutely gleaming. Loved it. And one gave me a 3 out of 10. and there were inaccuracies in the report. I was furious. Absolutely furious. Spoke to the organization to say, look, this review scuppered my grant, the other two would have put it through and there's, there's things that are just blatantly not true about the qualifications of the people involved and things like that.
And they said really sorry, but there's nothing we can do about it, but it just is what it is. And it was one of those situations where I absolutely was going to give myself space to be angry and things like that. But I also knew that there was a grant deadline for a different organization, a charitable organization this time that was in about three days time.
And this was back in the days where you could write grants fast. You know, this was before the days of research offices having to sign things off and all of that. So we're talking a different time here, but I knew vaguely in the back of my head that there was this other deadline because I decided not to go for it when I was going for the first one.
And that popped into my head. So I didn't give myself space to be angry. I didn't give myself space to be upset. I didn't go off and rant or any of those things. I just went, okay, fine. And spent two days completely rewriting my grant to fit it into the categories for this other grant for a charity. Had to cut it back because it was for less money, still a substantial amount and submitted it within 48 hours. I channeled all my crossness into getting it in somewhere else. And about four months later, I found out that I got a six figure grant from that organization that I had written in two days, basically fuelled by my crossness with the review process at the Research Council.
So, in some situations... You might want to give yourself space to experience the emotions. Other times you might want to channel it specifically into something productive. It's up to you which you pick, but be aware of the emotions you're experiencing and allow yourself the grace to spend some time with those emotions.
When you give yourself a bit of space and then dive into the comments and actually read what the criticism is, make sure that you avoid all or nothing thinking. So it's really easy to really notice the negative comments, ignore anything positive, ignore anything that hasn't got comments on it at all, so they're kind of blank pages, and then to make it mean that the whole thing's terrible.
So you sort of really emphasize the negative feedback, ignore the rest, and add it up to mean that it's been ravaged by your reviewer or whatever. Take a minute to spend a bit of time with the nuance, to see, oh they like these bits, they left those bits blank, they complimented those bits, these bits are minor, this bit's negative, where they think there's bigger things to change, for example.
Take a little bit of time to see all the nuance in the comments. Try not to lump it into one big, this is a good review or a bad review, because that misses so much useful information.
When you're doing that, I also want you to remember, you don't have to take every single comment they make. And this is true whether it's your supervisor or whether it's a reviewer of an article. You get to look at these comments and you get to decide what's useful. You get to decide what you want to do with it.
Getting comments from any of these people isn't a sort of simple instruction list where you just have to go through and do all the things they say and respond to everything they want. You get to pick. And remembering that you've got that autonomy is a really important part of staying motivated to respond to these questions.
And there's a whole bunch of reasons that you could use to make those decisions. You might disagree with some of their comments. And if you disagree with their comments, you can choose to ignore them, and explain why you're ignoring them. You could choose to explore a bit more where this disagreement came from. Have they misunderstood something, or is it an actual disagreement? You can also decide to deprioritise something. Especially so I get a lot of people who are right up against deadlines to hand things in. And this is a point where you get to prioritize. You get to say, yeah, I probably could make that paragraph clearer, but I don't have time.
Another thing I want you to be cautious of around feedback is thinking too much about what emotions you have induced in the person who is giving you feedback. So often I hear people say things like, I think they're disappointed in me, I think they're cross with me, I think they're frustrated that I'm not doing this faster and really getting up in the heads of the reviewers or supervisors.
We've all been there. We all want to kind of micromanage, for want of a better phrase, how people respond to us. We want people to like us. We want people to think we're good at what we do. And when we get evidence that we think means that they don't, it can be really easy to get upset about that and in turn to try and change it.
So if you're worried that your supervisor is disappointed in you, then sometimes the response that is, Oh, how can I make them proud? How can I do everything they say? How can I get this all done? And how can I get it done faster? And sort of really put yourself under tons and tons of pressure to stop your supervisor being disappointed.
Or, if you feel like they're angry or frustrated, maybe you tiptoe around them. You don't tell them that maybe you disagree with one or two of their statements because you don't want to make them more cross. And the problem here is we end up acting weird because we're trying to change or not elicit again somebody else's emotions.
And a fact I want you to really, really absorb and reflect on is we never get to control somebody else's emotions. Everybody is responsible for their own emotions. They're responsible for the thoughts that they have and the emotions that they experience.
And that's not to say they're to blame for them. That's not overlooking things that make our thoughts and feelings hard for us to manage ourselves sometimes. Particularly if you've got mental health problems or any of those things. So it's not to say that people are to blame for their thoughts and feelings, but they're responsible for their own.
And when we start to want to change something about the way our supervisor's thinking about us, for example, then there's so many problems. Because we don't actually know what they're thinking about us, we don't know why they're thinking about it, and we don't actually know what we could do to change that anyway, because the way they're feeling is down to the thoughts that they're having.
What can be a much better approach here is to focus on who do I want to be in response to these reviewers comments. I want to be somebody who methodically works them through, figures out which ones I want to take on board, which ones I want to ignore, and then gets them done. I want to be somebody who remembers that my supervisor's only giving me feedback because they want to improve my research. I want to be somebody who can stay calm and who can retain their confidence even if they get negative feedback.
If we can focus here, we can focus on how we want to think, how we want to feel in these circumstances, and therefore what actions we want to take, that's the bit we have control over. We don't have control over whether our supervisor is cross, stressed, disappointed, frustrated, any of those things. We get to be the person we want to be in light of the circumstance of receiving this feedback, and then we get to move forwards from there.
And that's what I want you to do, that's why I want you to move forwards, because really, we want to be seeking this sort of negative feedback. I see so many people avoiding getting negative feedback and procrastinating sending stuff off, whether that's to journals or to your supervisor or whoever, procrastinating applying for jobs even, because they're worried about the negative feedback.
If we can trust that we are somebody who can receive negative feedback, we can give ourselves space to experience whatever emotions we're experiencing that are specific to this situation, that we trust we'll be kind to ourselves during that process and not tell ourselves we need to get over it or whatever. And we can be somebody who then methodically works through that feedback to work out what's useful and what's not and to act on what's useful and to leave what's not.
If we can trust all of those things about ourselves. We can put ourselves in a ton of positions to receive feedback. We can submit to other journals. We can submit to conferences. We can apply for jobs that we're not fully sure we qualify for. But because we know we can trust ourselves to respond to negative feedback, we can put ourselves in all those learning and exciting opportunities.
It opens up so many possibilities when you know that it doesn't matter if you get negative feedback because it will help you get better and it will allow you to apply for more and more exciting opportunities.
I want to finish though with what to do if you experience inappropriate feedback. So, I touched on it at the beginning. We got feedback for a couple of different things, so the article and the grant, that were inappropriate in the sense of being inaccurate. There was no opinion, they were just wrong.
In those cases of accuracy, you can go back and check with the person, explain the situation. Maybe it wasn't clear. Maybe they missed that bit. Maybe they read it fast. So you can go back and query those where it's a case of accuracy.
But we can also get inappropriate feedback in the sense of it just being really mean, it being written in a way that is unprofessional. So this is going way beyond things where maybe somebody's a bit harsher than you expected, or a bit more direct, or a bit more thorough in their criticism, but where people are writing you know, you're an idiot, or whatever.
Something that's actually personal, something that's actually insulting, and that you don't think is appropriate. And you have a series of choices there. And this depends, I have PhD listeners, I have academic listeners, all sorts of people listening to this podcast. So it depends a little bit on who you are and what stage you're at.
But remember, you can always... If you feel comfortable, talk to the person who gave that feedback, and say, look, I really valued all of this, but I found these comments difficult to take. They made me feel like X. I'm not sure that's what you intended, but I want you to know. So you can address it directly with the person, particularly if you have an already strong relationship with them.
If you don't feel comfortable doing that, there is always somebody else you can talk to. If you're a PhD student, it might be a second supervisor, a mentor, your director of postgraduate studies or whatever they're called in your department. If you're a member of staff, again, you might have a mentor, a head of research group, etc, etc. If you think that the feedback that you're getting is unprofessional or inappropriate, please do talk to somebody else and seek their advice about how it can be addressed.
They may be willing to have a conversation with the person with you. This may be a pattern of behavior. This may be something that is then best dealt with by your head of school, for example, your head of department. So if the feedback makes you feel uncomfortable, beyond the uncomfortableness of just hearing something you don't want to hear. Something that just doesn't feel right to you. Please do reach out.
Most times, feedback that feels overly harsh is a combination of somebody doing it in a hurry without really thinking through the consequences of what they're writing. But sometimes... there are people who are making comments that are just not okay and those people we do need to speak to and address this with them. So reach out for help if you feel like you're getting that sort of feedback.
I hope you found today useful. Let me know what sorts of negative feedback you've received and how you've managed them and how you could manage them differently in the future based on the stuff that we have talked about today.
If you found this useful, please do have a look at my website. I've got a bunch of workshops for PhD students that can also be adapted for members of staff. Let me know if your university would be interested in putting one of those. I do also have some spaces for one-to-one clients too, so reach out either on my social media or through my website, because I would love to help you work through any of these issues.
Take care. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful week.