Feedback is a gift.
Some gifts are little treats for you to consume. Think of a box of chocolates. You enjoy them and then they’re gone, but you remember the thought that was put into them.
Sometimes gifts are utilitarian, like getting socks for Christmas. They are not the most exciting thing to receive, but you kind of need them as part of your normal day-to-day life, and you’ll get use out of them.
Some gifts are kind of useless. You said you liked coffee so someone got you a little home espresso machine, but they didn’t know you’ve already got a $6,000 La Marzocco sitting on your kitchen island. Regardless, you feel thankful for the thought and the gesture behind the gift… and then quietly get rid of it.
Or maybe you don’t get rid of it. Maybe you put the inferior espresso machine on your kitchen island too, and drink some inferior coffee, lose valuable bench space, get no use out of the expensive investment you already made, just so you can tell the gift giver how much you like their gift. Maybe you feel some kind of guilt or obligation to incorporate the gift into your life, even though it’s not a good fit. Is that a healthy response?
Sometimes people give gifts based on their own preferences and beliefs, without much consideration for the recipient. For example they might have built their whole personality around homeopathy, and so everyone in the family gets gifted little bottles of water with labels that indicate various poisonous substances like arsenic and nightshade. You get given the little bottles regardless of whether you’re sick or healthy. You get them after explicitly stating that they have been repeatedly disproved as placebos, and that you won’t take them. These gifts are all about the giver, not the receiver. And if that’s the case, how grateful should you feel for receiving these kinds of gifts? How much use are you going to get out of them? These are a window into the giver’s mind, though. You can learn a lot about how they think.
Sometimes gifts are given with an ulterior motive. They can be a part of a deliberate attempt to manipulate you into doing something that you wouldn’t otherwise do. Hare Krishnas famously used to give out free flowers before asking for a donation, and that tactic paid handsomely. You don’t have to accept every single gift that’s given to you. In some situations, e.g. with people you don’t trust and whose motives are dubious, the better response is to say “no thank you”, move on with your life, and forget about it.
Chocolates are nice but they don’t have a lasting impact on your life. The most impactful gifts usually come from people who understand you well and who want the best for you. Sometimes we’re blind to what’s missing in our lives, and identifying those missing things requires an outside perspective and experience that we might not have. There you are, shovelling kitty litter like a chump, resigned to your fate, when someone close to you gifts you a self-cleaning automated litter box with glass beads that gets plumbed in the same way the washing machine does. You wouldn’t have bought it for yourself because you didn’t know you needed it, but now you can’t imagine living without it.
On rare occasions, a gift can change your life. One day in high school Josh Minelli bought me a sausage roll from the tuck shop. We were all too young to have jobs, so cash was scarce. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t really need it, because I already had a packed lunch. He didn’t do it for any particular reason, and didn’t expect anything in return. We weren’t even super close friends. I remember how this one act of pure generosity shattered my adolescent concept of reciprocity. I didn’t know you could just buy someone a sausage roll for no reason. That day I learnt something important that shaped my character and changed my behaviour over the following twenty something years of my life. Thanks Josh.
There are certain situations where society mandates that a gift be given — a bottle of wine from an acquaintance arriving at your house for dinner, or a red envelope at Lunar New Year. Often these gifts aren’t particularly thoughtful, and they’re just being given because it would be rude not to. These don’t usually carry much meaning other than signalling that the giver cares about how you (and everyone else present) think about them.
If someone is giving you a gift, it usually means they care about you. People don’t give gifts to people they don’t care about. Even if the gift isn’t particularly good, it still signals some level of care.
If you react to a gift by being ungrateful, you probably won’t be getting any more gifts from that person. Do you want more gifts? If so, then you should probably thank the giver and make them feel good about it, even if the gift was kinda bad. Punishing a behaviour makes it happen less, and rewarding a behaviour makes it happen more.
If it’s not obvious already, everything above applies to giving and receiving feedback just as much as it applies to giving and receiving gifts.
I feel that “feedback is a gift” is a bit of a cliché. I also think that sometimes it’s used to mean “you should be grateful for whatever is said to you,” which is a sentiment I don’t subscribe to.
These days I like to think that feedback is a gift in the most literal sense: a thing that other people give to you. Feedback can be useful, useless, considerate, inconsiderate, projection, exciting, boring, manipulative, fleeting, impactful, obligatory, and/or life-changing, just like any other kind of gift. It’s not just a glib cliché. There is a lot of complexity packed in there.
If there’s one thing I would like you to take away from this, it would be that most people find it easier to receive a bad gift than to receive bad feedback, but the two are not necessarily that different. Reframing feedback as a literal gift could make things easier. Give it a try.