A young colleague once showed me a piece of feedback she'd received — specific, useful, slightly uncomfortable to read. She'd skimmed it once, said "noted," and moved on to the next task within a minute. I asked her, gently, what she planned to do with it. She didn't have an answer. I have done the same — skimmed past a sharp comment because the praise three lines above it felt nicer to sit with.
The feeling, in both cases, is a small flinch — barely noticeable, gone in seconds, filed away as "feedback received."
What the flinch reveals is a quiet avoidance: a preference for feedback that is comfortable over feedback that is useful. Left unexamined, this gap doesn't just slow skill-building — it trains a person to seek comfort and call it confirmation, while the actual gap in their skill stays exactly where it was.
The tool worth naming comes from Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice: feedback only builds skill when it is specific and immediate — not "good job," but "this exact thing, this exact moment." The practice is to ask for that kind of feedback on purpose, once a week, on one piece of work, and to sit with it for longer than the minute it takes to feel the flinch.
My colleague, I later learned, went back and reread that comment properly. I don't know if it changed anything yet. But I suspect rereading it was the actual beginning.
If this resonates: Anders Ericsson's Peak lays out the deliberate practice research in accessible terms — the chapters on feedback specifically are worth the read.
