The Art of Egoless Feedback

“We can’t take or receive feedback if we are incapable of or uninterested in hearing from outside sources. We can’t recognize opportunities—or create them—if instead of seeing what is in front of us, we live inside our own fantasy.”

— Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

There comes a time in every creative endeavor where the product of our labor we’ve carefully grown and carried in our womb needs to come out and meet the lights of the outside world. Receiving feedback and criticism is an essential part of the creative cycle, and for those who are professional, it can be a daily occurrence. What we’ve built with effort and long hours/days/months of work can be raised or destroyed in a few minutes or seconds. Subjecting our work to other people's judgment is often one of the scariest things we can do. And yet we need it to grow, to learn, to improve our craft. What we don’t need, is to suffer because of it.
For some people, feedback seems to be simply detached information, for others, getting feedback feels like betting your head on a coin flip, every time. The difference lies in the fact that sometimes we get our ego involved too much.
If we get our ego too involved in our work, we make sure that every critic directed to our product bounces up directly to us. “This drawing is not good” becomes “I am not good”, but we theoretically know that those two things are not the same.

What is the Ego then? And why does it get in the way?

Simply put, the Ego is the story you tell yourself about who you are, it is the collection of ideas that make up your identity, the way you see and understand yourself. “I am rich”, “I am beautiful”, is Ego. But “I am poor” and ”I am ugly” are also Ego.
As we grow up, we naturally build our ego through a process of identification, to identify with something means to make it “the same as...”. So if we come to identify with money or artistic skills, both those things become part of us, and a core component of who we are. The unfortunate side effect of this process is that, as those external things fluctuate on a day-to-day basis, so does our self-image. If I identify strongly as being a good artist and my art gets critiqued for being “not good”, then my whole being becomes “not good” as a consequence, because, at least in this perspective, there is no difference between who I am and my work. Having an ego is a natural part of psychological growth, and everybody has one, including yours truly. Especially yours truly.
But we don’t need to let our ego take full control of us. Building too big an ego can have its side effects.

Often, people who in their youth are praised too much for a particular ability are exactly the ones who don’t make it very far. The reason is, for as good as they were in the early days, feedback and criticism targeted to our weaknesses is the way for long-term growth. If everything you’ve done has been praised and you don’t develop a skillful way to absorb criticism, the hurt and indignation can make you distance yourself from the field.

There are no “tips and tricks” or “3 easy steps” that I know of to remove one’s ego and get the best out of feedback, but there are practices and ideas that are worth sharing:

• Recognize your value as a human being. In some cultures, people matter simply because they live, in others, you have little value unless you are a “success”. The first practice is to separate who you are from what you do (Angela makes the same point in her interview). You are not your work, your work is only one part of you, and your value as a person goes beyond that.

• If you’re filling a specific position, it means that your work is probably good enough. Most of us are our worst critics. Even though we generally all know more about ourselves than other people know about us, there are two things we are certainly blind to: objectivity and perspective. Sometimes we should really listen to what other people have to say and recalibrate on that. When somebody says they like something, do you actually embrace it? Or do you just brush it off? Our ego can be recalibrated more in a more objective way the larger the sample of the feedback we receive. Maybe we are not as bad as we think we are.

• Focus on performance, not outcome. Things can change all the time for reasons that go beyond our control, trying to get “this thing right” or “done” can become frustrating and depressing, especially when suddenly things change direction. If anything, we should identify ourselves with the effort and hard work we’re putting into what we do. “Done” is something that happens, “try” is something we do.

• Beware of excessive praise. The easiest way of getting trapped in the ego is when we receive too much praise for our work. It feels good to internalize it and build your ego around it, and it’s easy also. But we can’t always be perfect, and if we identify as “good” because we do good work, who are we when we inevitably do bad work? Be careful about how perfectly you think of yourself. Building your self-esteem too high in a tower of glass is dangerous, and the fall can be painful.

Learning to receive feedback can be a skill that requires practice.
Putting our ego aside from our work doesn’t mean not caring about it. On the opposite, it means putting ourselves more in the shadow, it means serving our craft instead of using it to build us. The old root of the word “passion” is actually “to suffer”, it is to do “that which must be endured”. That’s a different kind of love for what we are doing, one that is not self-centered.
We do what’s best for our craft, we choose to let our work speak and take the spotlight, not our ego.

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