“Man, she is so sensitive. I’m just trying to help… What’s her deal?”
I had that thought, back in high school at the start of Chemistry block. My friend Anna had glanced at my latest test grade (a high A, woohoo!) and exclaimed, “WOW! How do you get such good grades?!”
“O-oh…” I felt flattered. “I just study a lot.”
“I do too,” Anna said with a huff, “You’re just better at this than me!”
“I’m really not,” I argued back, “I’ve seen you study. If you stopped looking at your phone every few minutes and actually focused, you wouldn’t get low grades, I promise.”
Oof.
I cringe at those words now. My poor friend Anna also cringed back then and became, in my mind, “sensitive”. She shut down and refused to talk to me anymore; she seemed hurt and moody for the rest of class. She certainly didn’t take my advice and continued to look at her phone during class, almost rebelliously.
Why? I wondered. I really was just trying to help her; she was my friend, after all. I wanted her to do well, and I knew that seriously dedicating herself to study Chemistry would improve her grades.
But clearly, my advice wasn’t taking hold or making an impact. Instead, I seemed to have had the opposite effect.
If you’re a Thinker, you might be familiar with the frustration I felt back then. According to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality assessment, a Thinker is someone who tends to step back from a situation to view it objectively or impersonally. (Compare with Feelers, who tend to step into the situation to view it subjectively or empathetically.)
Part of being a Thinker means that we can be more critical, analytical, or skeptical. (We’re outside of things, so we’re not as rattled by calling things for what they are. If it’s ugly, it’s ugly. If it’s inefficient, it’s inefficient.) Fault-finding and truth-speaking come easily to us Thinkers.
All of these traits can be double-edged. We have a natural eye for how to improve, but we can also hurt peoples’ feelings in the process.
To navigate this delicate balance, many Thinkers fall into one of two resorts:
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all.”
Unfortunately, this strategy fails, because your silence deprives the world of your natural strengths! We Thinkers have so much to offer in terms of improving our teams, processes, and results. Keeping our criticisms to ourselves is a total waste.
“Deal with it!”
Many Thinkers also rely on the expectation that others should just “grow a spine”. Especially if we Thinkers are in positions of authority (leaders, parents, etc), we can easily get used to criticizing others without consequences.
The danger of this solution is that, like with Anna, relationships can erode and turn hostile under a constant harsh eye. When those around us stop supporting us, we’ll quickly find ourselves handicapped, alone, and even potentially sabotaged by the very ones who we expected to help us.
So if those aren’t great options, then what should we do?
A good place to start is to ask why others, especially Feelers, can get so “sensitive” to our criticisms. If we can understand their wiring, we can identify how to adjust.
As I mentioned earlier, Feelers are different from us Thinkers in that they generally prefer to step into situations to take a subjective and empathetic view. Being inside of a situation gives them many strengths. They feel what is happening. As a result, they may pay more attention to people-impact, values, and harmony. They’re excellent at reading rooms. They’re also typically very in touch with emotions, and thus they can powerfully foster influence, generate buy-in, and boost clear communication.
But since they’re “inside” the situation, Feelers can also struggle to see criticisms in a contained context. Instead, they tend to globalize criticisms. For example, a comment to their work may be taken as a comment to them personally! It’s not: “Your work is bad,” but, “You are bad!” Or if I want to edit just slide 13 of a 20-slide presentation, a Feeler might believer the entire deck they made is a failure.
Being “inside” the situation, Feelers can’t easily separate out criticisms from the greater whole, just as we Thinkers struggle to combine the two. (Remember that one isn’t better than another; both have pros and cons. The trick is in adjusting!)
That leads us to the core of what we Thinkers need to learn in order to make effective criticisms. Maybe you could guess from the above… The piece we need to focus on most is harmony.
Feelers want to know we are for them. They need to know we are aligned in our goals. They need to know that our criticism will help the whole situation, including them personally, their emotions, others involved, etc.
Here’s a formula for how to do that. As you practice this, you’ll learn to adapt it and make it your own. For now, you can think of these steps as jump points for sharing effective criticisms.
Step 1: Internally draw a connection between your criticism and the desires of the Feeler.
If I had done things right with my friend Anna, the first thing on my mind would not have been getting my point across, but identifying what she wanted at that moment, in school, and in her life as a whole.
I knew Anna loved music and theater. I also knew she got frustrated easily at Chemistry because it was a time-sink for her when she wanted to be practicing for the upcoming school play.
To complete this first step, I could have thought: “If Anna gets better at Chemistry, she’ll have to spend less time in remedial study classes so she can practice more for the play. She also won’t be as frustrated, so her mind is clearer to memorize her parts.”
The point of this step is to see if your criticism holds benefit to the Feeler, and to describe that benefit from the Feeler’s perspective.
Sometimes, you might find that your criticism doesn’t hold benefit for the Feeler. For example, if Anna didn’t need Chemistry, didn’t feel pressure to get it done, and didn’t care about how much time it consumed for her… I wouldn’t have had any reason to share my criticism at all! Knowing that ahead of time would save us both a lot of trouble. I wouldn’t be trying to push my needless criticism on her, and she wouldn’t waste time trying to deflect and defend herself.
Step 2: Confirm the Feeler’s desire with them.
Let them know that you see their goals, their feelings, their story - their full self.
So Anna had said, “You’re just better at Chemistry than me!”
Instead of telling her to study more intently, I could have said, “Hey, you don’t need Chemistry to get on Broadway. All you have to do is pass.”
If I’ve truly nailed Anna’s desire (i.e. to pass Chemistry), she’ll feel heard. She would have said, “Ain’t that the truth!” or, “You’re telling me! D’s get degrees!” She would have opened up more to me because she would have sensed that I knew her well; a layer of trust would have been built.
Step 3: Say, “I’m for you,” and, “I want to help.”
Simply knowing someone well isn’t a strong enough foundation to hold criticism. Anna also needed to know that I was for her, that I wanted to help her.
I could have said: “Hey, I know the school play is coming up soon, and you have a lot of prep to do for it. I was thinking of something I bet might clear up some time for you. You know I’m super excited for you and the play. I’d love to help if I can.”
Again, if I’ve truly nailed Anna’s desires and shown her that I want to help her succeed, everything changes. She is no longer sensitive, cautious, or defensive. Now, buy-in is being created. Anna is likely to feel curious, eager, and interested.
Step 4: Ask if you can help and if now is a good time.
Despite the work we did to build trust, you still always want to ask for permission to share a criticism. Other things may be going on in the person’s life that make now not the best time for advice.
“Is it okay if I share with you what I’m thinking?” I would ask, “If now is not a good time or if you’re not interested, that’s totally fine too! You know I’ll support you no matter what.”
To note: if you did Steps 1-3 right, very rarely will someone decline a criticism or bit of advice “just because”. Even if they don’t share why with you, Feelers often have a good grasp on their emotions; they know what they can take. If a Feeler says no at this step, don’t be surprised if they come back a few days later and ask for your advice once they feel like they have capacity to receive your help.
Step 5: Share your criticism. Share the why. Make it actionable.
If Anna had said, “Yes, please!” to Step 4, now is my chance to be honest.
“I know it’s tedious, but I think that if you put your phone away when you’re in class or studying, you’ll pick up more than you expect.”
Don’t forget to add why you’re sharing your criticism!
“It might make things easier for you when you have to complete homework, do labs, or take tests. If you can get them done faster, you can get back to practicing your role faster. Versus if you’re on your phone during class, you pretty much have to reteach yourself everything at home, so you’re doubling the time you spend on Chemistry.”
Step 6: No matter what they do with your criticism, you’ve said your part. Don’t repeat yourself.
Thinkers can be so truth-oriented that, if someone doesn’t understand our view, we think that we simply didn’t explain ourselves well enough.
Feelers can be so harmony-oriented that, if they have to say something harsh, they may beat around the bush or get so subtle that they fail to make their point at all.
If you’re a Thinker and you feel like a Feeler is resisting your criticism, resolve to trust that you’ve made yourself clear - and then let it go. The danger is that you’ll engage in debate: hashing your point over and over again from different angles. Doing so would lead you right back to what you were trying to avoid in the first place: a lapse of harmony. Again, Feelers are often in-tune to subtleties, so if you made yourself clear once in Step 5, they heard you. I promise.
What may be happening is that Feelers are resisting for a different reason, but don’t want to hurt your feelings by out-right saying they won’t take your criticism. If you have a well-built and trusting relationship with the Feeler in question, it never hurts to ask why they’re resisting, but again, you’ll want to really reemphasize harmony. For example, “I want to see if I can remove any obstacles for you to help you succeed,” or maybe, “It sounds like my advice isn’t tailored to your style of doing things. Is there a way we can work on it together so that it’s natural for you to do?”
If you lead a team, you may have a direct report that consistently refuses to accept your criticisms, no matter how effectively you deliver them. In those rare cases, it’s again worth figuring out why they’re hesitant to change… and in even rarer cases, you may have discovered a bad fit for your team. Certainly keep track of who doesn’t follow-through with your criticisms so you know when to escalate to a more serious conversation, but be cautious of scrapping and arguing with Feelers. What may be a natural and helpful process for us Thinkers can be destructive for them.
There’s certainly no point in carefully following Steps 1-5 if you decide to throw out all of your hard work at building harmony in Step 6.
