Dealing with Fake Feedback

You're here because you have already achieved some outer success and reached your current executive leadership position. But growth doesn't have to stop here. There is a thrill and satisfaction in challenging yourself, stretching and seeing how much you can achieve. Have an impact and make a contribution.

The talents, skills and tools that have got you to this point will not necessarily take you further. Or the approaches you've used to achieve this success may have been expensive in terms of time, energy, stress and effect on your relationships. You need new or upgraded power tools to make sure you can sustain or advance your position more easily.

The High-Performance Executive Newsletter introduces these tools, so that you can level up, as video-gamers would say. It draws on many areas of solid research into high-performance in business, including neuroscience, psychology, physiology, trauma therapy and flow-state study.

The three essential areas for high performance are neuro-regulation (to get and stay calm), clear the negative self-talk and the beliefs that create them (including imposter syndrome), and create new success habits.

This week we're looking at fake negative feedback - i.e lies.

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Fake Feedback can Mess You Up

You grow fastest with good feedback. But what if feedback is deliberately false? Someone maliciously trying to bring you down?

I hope it never happens to you. But if it does, it can make you doubt yourself, lose confidence and play small if you’re not very careful.

Fake feedback is a lie. It’s when someone says your performance is bad when it’s good.

They might say it’s your work, your results, your skill or your personal qualities. In essence, they mean that you are not good enough; personally, professionally or both.

Why would someone give you deliberately fake feedback?

Usually, it’s someone trying to sabotage your success and who wants you to fail. This can be someone competing for the same job, or resenting your success. It could be revenge for something they think you did to them. Or it can be a bully trying to make you feel weaker to give them the (false) sense of feeling stronger. And many more possible reasons.

If this happens, three of your best qualities can work against you.

Yes, that’s your good qualities help them to bring you down - unless you’re alert to it.

1.?Your Growth Mindset

Your desire to grow means that you look out for ways to improve. It is a key driver for your high performance.

You train yourself to look for growth opportunities; you continually watch out for mistakes, and micro-failures, as these are things you can improve. You’re open to ‘negative’ feedback because it is so valuable to you. That is, negative feedback is important to you. Many high-performers I work with choose to pay more attention to negative results than to positive results.

And if the feedback is valid, then this approach leads to huge success.

However if the feedback is false, your growth mindset means you take it seriously anyway - as if it’s genuine.

People with a growth mindset tend to assume that all feedback is real and valid. This is not the case for fake feedback.

2.?Your Reasonableness

Reasonable people listen to feedback and consider it carefully. It’s an excellent leadership quality. You compare a challenging idea to your own experience and viewpoint. You take the feedback seriously and it becomes a data point. Even if you then disregard it.

At first, you might dismiss the fake feedback as ludicrous. It doesn’t match any other feedback, nor your own perception of reality.

But if you get this fake, negative feedback on a consistent basis, you may begin to doubt yourself.

It starts with confusion because you don’t believe it and it doesn’t match any other feedback. But if it repeats, a reasonable person will ask ‘Is there any truth in this?’ After all, there’s a saying ‘there’s no smoke without fire.’

When you repeatedly ask yourself the question if this unreasonable feedback is valid, your mind searches for the answer. That is, you are automatically questioning whether you or your work are good enough over and over.

After a while, this can undermine your sense of what’s true. It can lead to a habit of self-doubt and undermine your confidence.

3.??????Your Healthy Brain

You are wired for survival by millions of years of evolution. Your brain continually scans the environment for threats to your physical body.

Neuroscience research shows that this survival mechanism weights the attention we give to things. Threats have more weight to a danger-seeking brain than pleasurable experiences. In effect, a negative thought needs more positive thoughts just to get to neutral.

This means that negative, false feedback will take up more of your attention and time and disturb the balance of your thoughts.

How To Respond

Your growth mindset, reasonableness and healthy brain together can make you vulnerable to fake feedback from bad intent. The natural response is confusion which can then trigger self-doubt, imposter syndrome or a loss of confidence.

When you encounter surprisingly negative feedback for the first time, just pause. Consider the source.

Who is giving you this feedback and what do you know about their motivations? Ignore the content of the feedback for now and ask yourself if this is good quality feedback.

Then get feedback from other people. Is it consistent with what everyone else says? If it’s not, it might be fake. Get support from someone who is neutral and non-judgemental. And make sure you do your own assessment of your work, not just take what someone else says to be true.

If you do suspect that someone is maliciously trying to undermine you, don’t just assume it must be you. Get proactive, assess whether that person’s comments are valid. If they’re not, then don’t entertain those thoughts and don’t consider new comments in the future.

This is a tricky situation. If someone is giving you fake feedback, assume that all their feedback is fake. Assume the cup is poison and don’t drink it. Don’t even sniff it.

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What I've loved this week:

?My Oura Ring

The Oura ring is by far the most elegant wearable health tracker out there – for men and women. It tracks sleep, heart rate variability (a measure of stress), activity and more - delivered on a dashboard app to your phone.

Here are three screens of last night’s sleep ?– not a great one for me, by the way. But I'm with sharing it anyway.

All of this is sound data, giving you great quality feedback you can use to optimise your behaviour and keep you in shape physically. I’ve had an Oura?ring since 2017 and used it to improve my sleep quality and exercise.

Tech like this is continually improving and I’m excited about the direction of wearables – so long as they look good too!

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An action step you can do this week…

Find a good sounding board

One thing I notice about many high-achievers, especially if they have imposter syndrome, is the tendency to not ask for help or support.

As if help is somehow cheating!

As you saw from the main article, sometimes it’s essential to have a neutral person to talk situations through with. A balanced second opinion that can help you spot fake feedback, for example.

This can be a mentor, a friend or a coach. As long as they are not part of the situation, their third-party perspective is invaluable for your career success and fulfilment.

If you don’t have one already, think about who might be a good candidate.

Then ask them!

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We'll cover more on feedback in future issues.

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I'm Dr Tara Halliday, Imposter Syndrome Specialist.

I've been a holistic therapist and high-performance coach for over 21 years.

I'm the creator of the premium Inner Success for Execs programme - the fastest and best solution to imposter syndrome.

My book, Unmasking: The Coach's Guide to Imposter Syndrome was an Amazon #1 bestseller in 2018.

Check out the Inner Success for Execs programme for fast 'up levelling' of your internal leadership tools.

https://www.completesuccess.co.uk

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Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend!

Tara

?#success #leadership #highperformance