The Universal Translator, the best way to handle feedback

Getting feedback is often uncomfortable for many people, especially when its negative. However, in order to improve you have to learn how to effectively take and incorporate suggestions, especially when they don’t match what you want to hear.

Now I cannot take credit for the title The Universal Translator, as a friend of mine mentioned provided it, but I have thought this way for years, and it has helped me to learn a lot of new things. Especially when the lesson itself was presented in a way that was confrontational and or even intended to be demeaning. There are several ways that it works, the first way is:

Separating the message from the emotion

For the sake of this description I am going to break down a statement into two parts….fact/message and emotion. Fact/message is information the person is trying to get across, and emotion is the manner they are trying to do it, and also the importance of it.
This could be best shown in a quick example:

“Could you please turn the TV down”

“Can you turn down the TV I am trying to read here?”

“ARE YOU &*(% DEAF? TURN DOWN THE TV OR I AM GOING TO THROW IT AND YOU ACROSS THE ROOM!!”

Now I think that you can clearly see how the message stayed the same but the emotion behind it changed and amplified it dramatically. Now on the other side of the coin is the person who is receiving these comments. Now if they hear all three in a row then they understand the emotional explosion and it makes sense. However, sometimes the “work-up” happens outside of the situation so this communication is the first one people have. So let look at potential responses on this line of communication from that perspective, (assuming that the other person is not trying to be rude)

“Yeah sure”

“Yeah alright, relax, all you have to do is ask”

“I’LL TELL YOU WHAT YOUR REAL PROBLEM IS…..YOUR JUST A BOSSY JERK WHO ALWAYS HAS TO BE IN CONTROL

Now maybe you can see yourself in one of these situations. You notice that by the third one the message is totally gone. The emotional level is so dominant that message gets washed away, and the other person only responds to the emotion and not the message itself.

I think the best demonstration of this is if you have ever witnessed two people arguing a point they were passionate about for several minutes, to the point that they are almost yelling at each other, and then they realize that they are on the same side of the argument. They get so caught up in the emotional level that the information/message is being completely overlooked.

So in this case The Universal Translator is simply a method of consciously recognizing the difference between the message and the emotion, and then only focusing on the message to solve the problem.


Not adding more meaning than necessary

How this can be helpful in receiving feedback is by making sure that you recognize that the feedback is directed toward a problem, and not the person. This is absolutely critical to remember. What this means is that most feedback is not about you…its about what you did. There is a crucial difference there, You are a person and What you did is really quite easy to change and is not a value judgement on who you are. An example that I am sure everyone has either experienced or witnessed might go something like this:

What the director actually said:
Trumpet 2, in Bar 39, it should be a Bb not a B natural

What Trumpet 2 could have heard:
You misread it should be a Bb

Or

WRONG NOTE, WRONG NOTE, WRONG NOTE You are a horrible musician with no hope for a career, in fact you are probably a total screw-up in all other aspects of your life too. Nobody will ever love you…..

This is only partly meant as a joke, because I know that I have seen it a lot. A simple comment, can often spark a heated response either internally or externally, and the problem is that the response is often not the least bit helpful. Which one of the two above comments has the most positive affect on getting the desired result? I think you can quickly decide.

Universal translator in action


So if you find that you are someone who naturally hears closer to answer No. 2 from above, here are some steps you can take to reword what people say to you to give you an idea of what I mean.

1. Get rid of the word "you"
Change “You played that wrong” to “That was played wrong”

2. Decide if the comment has merit, ask yourself, “Does the feedback lead to improvement?” If it does, incorporate it. If it doesn’t, disregard it.

Change “You are playing way to loud” to “the volume needs to be lower” then lower the volume

OR

Change “Have you guys ever even heard the way that song is supposed to go” to “Blah blah blah”

When this happens don’t bother trying to sort for the message the person is not trying to help you to improve, and frankly its better to just ignore the comment, thank them for their observation and move on.

This skill is invaluable because it allows you to receive the message and not give it extra weight.

You have to always remember that you can’t change anything about someone else but you have absolute control over how you deal with it. You have the decision to react emotionally or choose (because it is a choice) to solve the problem instead.


So just remember the main steps are:

- Separate the message from the emotion, and respond to the message and
- Take the feedback at face value and as a specific comment on a specific issue, not a general comment on you as a person

If you can consistently do this you can improve quickly and consistently, because you will be able to keep your ego out of the way and just keep learning and incorporating, from both people who are at a higher and lower level of expertise.