You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 104.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

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Hi, my strong friends! We are starting to go into spring. Is the sun shining where you're at? You still have snow on the ground? Is it still all rainy and cloudy and gloomy and gray? Or are you starting to have a few days where the sun's peaking through and it just feels so good?

Oh my gosh.

We've had a couple of those days out here on the coast and we started to do some spring cleaning. It feels so good to do some spring cleaning and purging things, getting things a little bit more organized. And I was definitely inspired.

I recorded a podcast. You're gonna get to hear it next week. I interviewed Tracy Hoth and she is an organizational coach. So she actually goes to people's houses and helps them to get everything organized. She also does an online version too. Oh my gosh. You are gonna love this episode. So definitely tune in next week so that you can hear that you're gonna get so inspired.

For today, I wanna talk with you about feedback. One of the things that can create a huge emotional storm in your life is when you get feedback. This could be from an employer, a customer, a client, someone in your life who's giving you feedback. And I've seen you. I've seen you get wrapped up in all of it and take it really personal and create a lot of pain for yourself that is completely unnecessary.

The Gift of Feedback

One of the things that I really appreciated about Don Miguel Ruiz book, The Four Agreements, it helped me get really anchored in the gift of feedback. That I could look at this as me, either meeting requirements or not meeting requirements.

I read that book, The Four Agreements at least a decade ago. And I started using it at work. I was an employee at the time and yeah, feedback hurt. It sucked. And in fact, anytime my boss would say, Hey, Gretchen, can we talk, oh my gosh, the tightness in my chest would go like my whole body would tense up. Because it's like, oh my gosh, where did I mess up? This is gonna be awful.

But as soon as I started to realize, no, this is gonna be good. I'm gonna learn. Where did I have a miss? Or where did I not have a miss? And what was funny is that oftentimes I'd go into his office and there actually was no feedback at all. It was us talking about some other project or something. And I thought, okay, this is a conditioned response on my part to always tense up that there's going to be some kind of negative feedback.

It's like going back to when I was probably 20 years old. And I had a boss who would just lash out at me was not good at giving feedback. It was really weird when I had a boss who was kind and gentle and there was never anything to worry about. But I had that emotional response.

I see that a lot with my clients and other folks in my life when they get feedback. So I thought this could be a great opportunity to share some of the concepts that I use with feedback because I've had phenomenal success in my corporate career. And then going on and creating my own business and creating products and services that actually help my client. It's because of feedback. I love feedback so that I can learn what are all of the things that are really important to them.

Even as an employee, I needed to know what were the things that were super important to my employer, so that I could focus my efforts on that. As an entrepreneur, I, of course, wanna create products and services that are going to help my clients the most, but I can't always accommodate everything that they're asking for. And that's okay. There are other service providers that can also provide some of those things and knowing when to tag them over to somebody else is also important.

I'm gonna go over five points when it comes to requirements.

1. Learning how to recognize when someone is expressing requirements to you.
2. Determining were those requirements even agreed upon at the beginning, or was that something out of scope?
3. What part of those requirements do you actually own? And taking ownership of it?
4. Is evaluating the rest of what has been communicated.
5. Deciding if you want to add in new requirements for what you're doing, and if not that you can gracefully release the rest of it.

Recognizing When Someone is Expressing Requirements.

Okay. So first let's just talk about requirements. When someone comes to you and they're giving you feedback, they may not be good at giving feedback. They may be really sucky at it, actually. So let's start with how people express their requirements.

There are three ways that people will express their requirements.

1. Emotional Spewers: There are the people that show up very emotional and they're just spewing a whole bunch of stuff at you. They might be crying. They might be yelling in some way. They're giving you a whole bunch of stuff. But somewhere in there, they're trying to communicate that a requirement wasn't met.
2. Peacekeepers: Then you have the peaceful people that they have their emotions in check. They recognize here was this one thing that didn't work. And they're just politely letting you know.

3. Positively Terrified: And then you have the person who is scared to death to give you feedback. So they've had reactions from other people in their past who reacted very negatively. They got feedback and they made it super uncomfortable to communicate that feedback.

Instead, they developed this communication system where they're gonna give you a ton of positive stuff, and then they'll just barely touch on the thing that you didn't meet, that one requirement that you didn't meet. And then they'll pile a whole bunch more positive stuff on it. It can be really confused thing. You don't know if there was anything that you missed, like, it might just seem like it's all positive feedback. And then the person who gave you the feedback doesn't understand why you don't change your behavior. Well, because it's confusing.

When I was in corporate, they would give us training on how to deliver feedback. And that last mechanism was part of it. But there's definitely a balance on how to do it because people have to understand that they're learning that there's something that they didn't hit some requirement that they didn't meet.

When you encounter someone who is trying to give you feedback, just recognize which of those three types are they? Are they the emotional type that's just spewing a whole bunch of stuff? Are they the peaceful person or are they one that's scared to death to give you feedback?

So just recognize that first, because then you have to try to tease apart in their communication. What was the requirement that they were trying to communicate to you that was not met?

Now, the person that is emotional and spewing a whole bunch of stuff. You might get triggered by the rest of the stuff that they're saying. And it's so hard to stay anchored and neutral because they might even be giving slurs towards you as a person or your appearance that really had nothing to do with it. It's just that person doesn't know how to control their emotions. They don't know how to communicate, hey, here's this one thing that didn't work.

So it's up to you to develop your skillset to look at everything that they said, and then go, okay, what was the thing that went wrong? It could be kind of hard, but just practice it. It takes a lot of emotional control to not get triggered. But when you recognize that that's all that they're doing is they got triggered and they don't know how to just communicate that one thing that didn't work.

So what is it that they had? What's that one thing they're trying to tell you, that's important. Find that that's, that's gonna be your goal for success.

Now, if you have a peaceful person, that's gonna be pretty easy. And you'll even be able to ask them questions and like clarification to really understand what's that requirement that they thought you were gonna fulfill? That was your responsibility, and what was it about it that didn't get filled.

And then if you have the person who is scared to death to give you feedback, and they're giving you all of the positive stuff, recognize that they're trying to communicate a requirement to you. Help them out, ask them a lot of questions, let them know that it's okay that they don't have to keep piling all of the praise on you. You're just trying to find out. What's the one thing that didn't work that was your responsibility so that you can fix it?

Cause if you can't find it, how can you fix it?

Determining Original Scope of Requirements

All right. Now, moving on to number two, once you've figured out from them what that requirement was, look at it objectively. Was this a requirement that really belonged to you? That you were supposed to fulfill? Was this something agreed upon at the beginning, was it communicated clearly? Or was this something that was a self-discovery along the way? That this person realized was a requirement for them, and now they're expressing that to you and assuming that you were a mind reader. And that you also had a thought, oh yeah, I should do this for this person.

Get really clear on it. And you could even communicate that with them of asking them, is this something that we agreed upon at the beginning? If you have something written, that's really helpful so that you can go back and go, ah, here's this, yes, that is part of the agreement or no, here's this other stuff that wasn't part of the agreement.

That's something now that you're coming up with. So finding that out is that something that is part of your requirements? Is it something that's a new requirement or is it something that's just completely out of scope of something that you would even do as an employee or as an entrepreneur providing a product or service?

Owning the Requirements That Belong to You

Number three is owning the part that actually belongs to you. So if this really was a requirement on your behalf that you were supposed to fulfill, instead of getting triggered by someone pointing out that you didn't meet the requirement, own it; it's yours.

If it really is your requirement, yes, I know that human nature is to get defensive and to try to protect ourselves. But a lot of times we're trying to protect ourselves from our own feelings. We feel bad when we don't hit our own requirements, we might even feel a little bit of shame.

So then we're trying to protect ourselves from feeling that shame by resisting, owning the part of the requirement that we didn't hit. All this does is create conflict between you and the other person. It also erodes trust. Then when you're an employee, you start to worry about losing your job because you know, it's all the employers fault and you're trying to justify things. But really in the back of your head, you're like, oh my gosh, I might lose my job.

But you know what? If you owned up to the requirement that you didn't hit, and then you take corrective action, the employer is going to really value you. They're gonna see that you can take that constructive criticism and you can go and fix it.

If you are a business owner, same thing. If you own up to the part that you didn't fix and you go and fix it, then all of a sudden that person is willing to give you another chance. Because the only thing that they didn't like about your product or service was that this one requirement wasn't met. But if now all of a sudden you're gonna meet that requirement, they liked everything else about working with you. They're going to come back. They're also gonna feel respected and heard.

The flip side of that is when it really wasn't your part. If the requirement was actually supposed to be met by them, that ends up being even harder to communicate back of, no, this is where the line is. This part is my requirement. Like we're restating the part that we're responsible for. And then communicating that part, unfortunately, is for you to meet that requirement. That one in itself can take a while to build up your confidence and your comfort level with communicating.

But once everybody is aware of who's responsible for what they're owning that responsibility, and they're doing something about it. Things are gonna work so much better.

Evaluating The Extra Communication

All right. Number four is evaluating the rest of the information that they gave you. So you've got the people that are emotional and they're gonna spew a whole bunch of stuff. And then you have the people that are scared to death to give you any of the negative feedback that they're going to just like give you tons and tons of positive stuff. There's a whole lot of extra is what I'm saying.

They really have just tried to communicate probably like one or two requirements that you didn't hit, but they gave you so much extra information. What are you gonna do with it? Well, you can decide to evaluate it, look at it.

Let's start with the one that was emotional. They're gonna share a whole bunch of other stuff. You can look at that line item by line item. Now, I know that you probably haven't written it down, but sometimes it helps to get objective that way and actually write down as one line item at a time. They said this, and then they said this, and then they said this, and then they said this and evaluate it. Is that an actual requirement or is that just them being emotional?

Are they sharing any new requirements that you should consider? Because maybe there's some good ideas in there. Maybe there's things that you've never even thought of before. That it's not necessarily a deal breaker for what you do now, but maybe this is something for how you can enhance your value to either your employer or to your customers.

With someone that has given you tons and tons of positive feedback, you can do the same thing, evaluate it, write it all out. A lot of times they're gonna tell you things that you never even realized were your gems, the things that you're delivering out to the world that are super valuable.

To you, you might have just thought, oh, that's, you know, that's just who I am. That's just how I operate. But if they're bringing it up, that might be something that you are able to do, that other people are not able to do. That might be a strength that has now been presented to you. Because a lot of times we have a hard time talking about what our strengths are. Now, someone has told you what they are. That's pretty cool, because they've recognized it. It's visible. It's noticeable.

Those are now things that you can use when you're talking about yourself. So when I see talking about yourself, like if you're ever going to apply for another job, those are the things that you can put to your cover letter or into your resume to say, Hey, these are things that people have noticed about me. If you are a business owner, this might be some of the information that you put into testimonials or that you put into your other marketing material so that you can highlight some of these strengths because apparently you have them and other people might not. This could be a competitive advantage for you.

Keep or Release New Requirements

So then that brings us to number five is once you've evaluated it, and you've seen some stuff that they weren't requirements that you had for yourself in the beginning, are there any of those that you think would enhance your value to whoever you're working with? Is something that seems like a logical add to your requirements list? If so, why not go ahead and add it. This is great. They've they've shown you an opportunity.

The more valuable that we can make ourselves in the world, the better. Now you of course do not wanna overload yourself. If you give yourself way too many requirements to hit and some of them are gonna require a ton of extra effort or extra development, and it's not gonna give you a good return on your investment. It might be something to just release.

But anything where the time investment or the effort on your part is worth it to either develop that skillset or incorporate new features into products and services or even job function that might be worth it to you. Because we're all trying to make a living in this world. We all want to be able to create some income so that we can keep a roof over our head so that we can go and do the fun things in the world, or be able to donate to our different philanthropies that we love course.

The more value that you can put out in the world, the more that's gonna come back and reflect on your income. The more you're gonna be able to do in this world as a result. Decide if you want to incorporate any of those new requirements into what you do. And then how would you set about developing yourself or developing your products and service so that you meet those requirements. And how would you communicate that out to the world that, Hey, here's a new thing that I offer.

Now as for all of the rest, if it's something that takes a huge amount of effort, it's not a good return on investment or it's just completely outta your scope. Maybe this is not your wheelhouse and somebody else needs to do it. That's okay too. You don't have to take on everything. You can definitely scope down what it is that you do and be really, really good at it. And if someone's telling you, Hey, I didn't hit the requirements for this, that, the other thing can say, that's okay, here's a referral to somebody else that does do that part of it.

As an employee, that's why there's multiple employees within a business. Everybody has their different strengths. So if there's something that you're not good at and somebody else already is good at maybe shine a light on them, let them know no that's the person that you go to. They can help you with that part. That's not my strength. It's okay for you to not be good at things.

As a business owner, if that's not part of the scope of your products and services. And if that's not something you wanna incorporate, that's okay too. Communicate that with them. You want the best for client, so go ahead and let them know. Nope. Sorry. That's just not something that I provide. Obviously it's something important to you. It's something you need. Here's some alternatives. Or if you don't know alternatives, that's okay too. You can just be honest and let them know. I don't know alternatives for who can help you with that part. I'm sure that there are some out there.

Because then it will get them thinking that, oh yeah, my needs are important. These requirements are important. And I do need to look elsewhere. In the end, everybody wins. Everybody gets their needs met. We're all able to communicate with each other. What's important? What's not important? Who does what? And we're are all taking ownership for our own individual part of it.

With that you'll have success. They'll have success. Things will run smoothly. It doesn't have to be a huge emotional storm. You'll be able to spend your non-working time with a peaceful mind because you'll have taken responsibility for what you could do and release the rest. Everything will feel nice and tidy. Things will be peaceful.

That's what I want for you, my friends! I want you to have peace of mind. The world doesn't revolve around all things work. It's okay to let some stuff go. If you find yourself struggling with any of this, know that I am available. You can reach out to me at any time and we can talk about this.

I recently had a new client take me up on the single session offer. Usually, I use that for returning clients because after we've worked together for, you know, three months or six months, they might just need a session here or there. But I had a new person decide she just needed one single session. And you know what, It worked out pretty darn well.

So if that's something that you think would help you too, because maybe you just need one little spot thing. You don't need a whole full three-month commitment or you don't need to be in a full membership environment and having courses to support your development. Maybe you just need help with one thing one time.

I'd like you to consider that you can use those single session appointments for that. You'll have to give me a lot of details so that I am prepared and ready to coach you on things, but know that that's available to you. And you can find that on the work with me page under the one-on-ones.

All right, my friends, I hope that you have a great week and I will talk with you next week. Bye-bye. 

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships, and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out Unshakable Men and Unshakable Women. The unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, coaching, and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to my MyFreedomGrove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.