I recently finished reading Thanks for the feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen and I can’t recommend it enough, especially now that it’s performance review season at many companies.

I’ve taken many lessons from this book, but I want to focus on something that was super insightful when trying to understand people’s interactions.

All of us have blind spots. Things that we don’t see and don’t realize that we don’t see them. One of the causes is that we judge ourselves differently than other people judge us.

We judge ourselves based on our thoughts, feelings and intentions which others don’t see.

But the big one is that others judge us based on our behaviors, our impact on them and their interpretation of our thoughts and feelings.

People perceive your emotions first. You may think that your emotion is irrelevant, others will double down on them.

The Gap Map: How you see yourself vs how others see you

For example, you may think you shared objective inputs in a design review, but other people perceived you as angrily destroying someone else’s idea.

So what to do about it?

Good question, what I have been doing (or trying to) is when a situation is stressful:

  • Understand first, then be understood
  • Don’t judge
  • Don’t react

The book itself has more to say about that, but this was crucial for me.

-JV