It’s Wednesday evening, and you’ve just finished a coaching conversation with your Team Leader. It wasn’t the kind you were hoping for. Three things you thought were going well turned out to be areas they think you could improve, and one of them was something you’d quietly been proud of.
You say thank you, leave the conversation, and spend the journey home thinking about it. Most people know some version of that feeling.
Feedback can be particularly difficult when you’re new because you’re still working out what you’re good at, what other people expect from you, and how you want to develop. The useful question isn’t whether feedback feels uncomfortable. It’s what you do with it afterward.
At Ascend Marketing, coaching helps Team Members understand what’s working, identify areas to develop, and ask questions about what to do next. You don’t have to agree with every piece of feedback immediately. But learning how to listen, evaluate, and decide what to do with it is a valuable professional skill.
Give Yourself Time to Process It
You don’t need to have the perfect response immediately. Sometimes feedback makes sense as soon as you hear it. Sometimes you’re surprised. Sometimes you disagree. And sometimes the first thing you feel is disappointment because you thought you were doing better in that area. All of those responses can happen.
The important thing is not to confuse your first emotional reaction with your final assessment of the feedback. You might want some time to think. You may find it useful to write things down straight away. Someone else might prefer to talk it through with somebody they trust. There isn’t one correct routine.
What matters is giving yourself enough space to understand what was actually said before deciding what you think about it. Feedback is information. You still need to process it.
Write It Down, Then Sort It
Once you’ve had time to think, write down the main points. Keep them simple. Then separate them into three groups.
The first is feedback you understand and can act on. Maybe you’ve been interrupting people without realizing it. Perhaps your explanations aren’t always as clear as they could be, or you need to prepare more thoroughly before taking on a particular responsibility.
The second is feedback you don’t completely understand. Someone may have told you to communicate more confidently or become more organized, but you aren’t sure exactly what they noticed or what improvement would look like. That’s where questions help.
The third is feedback you disagree with. Disagreement doesn’t automatically mean the feedback is wrong. It also doesn’t automatically mean it’s right. Ask for examples. Explain your perspective. Try to understand what the other person observed and why they reached their conclusion.
Sometimes that conversation changes your view. Sometimes it provides useful context. And sometimes you may still disagree afterward. The aim isn’t automatic agreement. It’s understanding.
Choose Something Specific to Work On
A detailed coaching conversation can leave you with several things to think about. Trying to change everything at once can make it hard to focus on any one thing. Instead, identify something specific.
If you’ve been told you interrupt people, focus on listening all the way through before responding. If preparation is the issue, think about what you need to know before beginning a task. If you’ve been told your explanations can become unclear, practice simplifying them and ask somebody for feedback.
The improvement doesn’t need to happen within a week. Some habits change quickly. Others take longer. What’s useful is turning broad feedback into something you can actually practice.
“Communicate better” is difficult to act on. “Make sure I’ve understood the question before I answer it” gives you somewhere to start.
Ask for Follow-Up Feedback
One of the easiest ways to find out whether an adjustment is helping is to ask somebody to look again. You might say:
“I’m working on the point you raised about interrupting. Could you let me know if you notice a difference over the next few days?”
Or:
“I’ve been thinking about what you said about making my explanations clearer. Could I run through this with you and get your feedback?”
That turns feedback from a single conversation into part of an ongoing development process. It also allows you to check whether you’ve understood the original point correctly.
Sometimes you think you’ve made the requested change only to discover that the person giving the feedback meant something slightly different. That’s useful information too. You don’t have to guess whether you’re improving. Ask.
Be Honest About the Difficult Part
Feedback isn’t purely technical. Sometimes it hurts. Maybe you worked particularly hard on something and were disappointed that it wasn’t received as well as you’d hoped. Perhaps the feedback challenged something you considered a strength. Or maybe you agreed with the point but didn’t like how it was communicated. Those things can exist at the same time.
It can be useful to separate two questions: Is there something valuable in this feedback? And: Was it communicated appropriately?
You might decide the feedback was useful even though you would have preferred it to be delivered differently. You might also decide that something about the conversation itself needs addressing.
If you’re unsure about what was meant, ask. If you have concerns about how feedback was communicated, it’s reasonable to raise them respectfully through the appropriate conversation or process. Receiving feedback doesn’t mean giving up your own judgment. The aim is to stay open enough to consider it properly.
Learn With the Team
Sometimes another person’s perspective can help. A colleague may have worked on something similar before. They might explain how they approached it, practice something with you, or help you see the situation differently.
That doesn’t mean you should turn every coaching conversation into a group discussion. Some feedback is personal and is better kept between you and the person who gave it. But when it’s appropriate, learning from colleagues can be useful.
If you’re trying to explain something more clearly, practice it with somebody. If you’re working on listening, ask a teammate to point out when you’re jumping in too quickly. If you’re taking on a new responsibility, ask someone with more experience what helped them when they were learning.
Feedback doesn’t only have to travel from leader to Team Member. People can learn from each other too.
Watch for Overcorrecting
Watch for overcorrecting. Sometimes feedback can make us change too much. Someone tells you that you speak quickly, so you become so focused on slowing down that your communication no longer feels natural. You’re encouraged to contribute more, so you start forcing yourself to speak in every discussion. You’re told to prepare more thoroughly, so you spend so much time preparing that you struggle to get started.
Improvement usually isn’t about replacing one extreme with another. It’s about understanding what needs adjusting and gradually working it into the way you already operate.
That’s another reason follow-up feedback is useful. You can ask: “Does this feel closer to what you meant?”
Development doesn’t require you to become somebody else. It means expanding what you’re capable of doing.
What Tough Feedback Can Give You
An uncomfortable coaching conversation isn’t automatically a turning point. It won’t necessarily produce your best week. But it can give you something valuable: information you didn’t have before.
Maybe it highlights a habit you hadn’t noticed. Perhaps it shows you that something you considered a strength needs adjusting in certain situations. It may even help you understand that the way you intended something isn’t always the way somebody else experienced it. That’s useful professional knowledge.
Learning how to receive constructive feedback, evaluate it, and make thoughtful adjustments can remain valuable throughout your career. The people giving feedback will change. The responsibilities will change. The situations will become more complicated. But the basic skill remains relevant.
Listen. Understand. Decide what’s useful. Ask questions. Then work out what you’re going to do differently.
Your Next Tough Session
The next time a Team Leader says, “Can we have a chat about this week?” you don’t need to assume something terrible is coming. And you don’t need to prepare yourself to agree with everything either.
Listen all the way through. Ask for examples where you need them. Clarify anything you don’t understand. Give yourself some time to think. Then decide what you can act on.
Choose something specific, practice it, and ask for feedback again. That’s what turns coaching into development. Not pretending criticism doesn’t bother you. Not accepting every comment without question. And not trying to prove you can change overnight. Just being willing to listen, think, and keep learning.
If you’re interested in joining a team where feedback and development form part of the experience, get in touch with Ascend Marketing to learn more about current opportunities and what a role with the team could look like.
