Ask for advice instead of feedback
No one wants to criticise you, but everyone knows what you could do better.
Giving feedback is hard, even if you’ve been asked to provide it. You don’t want to hurt the person, you don’t want to be seen as either disinterested or too focussed on small details. When asking others for feedback, they have the same experience.
There’s an easy fix though.
Do you remember the last time someone asked you for advice? Suddenly it is easy to give recommendations, focus on the things that they can reasonably change. For some reason giving advice feels less judgemental, and you might even feel good about being able to provide something valuable.
That’s the secret: when asking someone else for advice, you are giving them an opportunity to shine. And you can use it anywhere: as a conversation starter, to solve misunderstandings, to bond with neighbours, to find out who really makes the decisions at your new job.
In a nutshell: If I ask for your advice, I assume that you are an expert in the thing I need advice about, and that makes you feel good. Which is very different to when I ask you for feedback ;)
Interestingly, it’s also easier to receive advice, than to receive feedback. It might be semantics. Advice often comes in the format of “if I were you, I would”, which feels less aggressive then the typecal feedback format of “when you did this, it impacted me like that”.
The difference is small, but significant. Feedback often feels personal, it’s about you as a person, it feels like criticism. Advice is different. Advice is about the other person. It is their interpretation of your behaviour/actions and as such, you can accept or dismiss their comments while still looking into what they highlighted.
Advice is benevolent. It’s easy to acknowledge or ignore, depending on how much importance you ascribe to the source. And it can actually be very helpful.
Next time you need feedback, ask for advice and see what happens.