I once worked for a psychologist who specialized in learning and cognition. He trained Olympic gymnasts, and he used to push back hard on the popular idea that expertise requires 10,000 hours of practice.
His point was simple: it’s not 10,000 hours of practice that makes you great. It’s 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is practice informed by feedback. Repeating the same flawed tennis backhand for ten thousand hours won’t improve your game. You have to know what’s wrong with it and adjust based on what you’re seeing, feeling, or being told.
Growth requires data.
And yet, when it comes to our work, most of us struggle to use feedback the way athletes do. Even when feedback is about our ideas or performance (not our character) it can feel personal. Our projects seem like an extension of our identity. Our work reflects our competence. So when someone critiques the output, our nervous system often hears, “You’re doing this wrong,” or worse, “You are wrong.”
When feedback feels threatening, we defend, explain, justify, or shut down. We stop listening and start protecting. And in that moment, we risk losing all of the benefits we could get from this feedback.
One of the most helpful reframes I’ve found, both personally and with clients, is this: Feedback is just data.
Data doesn’t tell you what to do. It doesn’t define you. It doesn’t even have to be correct. It’s simply information about how something landed, how someone experienced it, or what effect it had. Someone tells you your presentation was confusing. That’s data. A colleague seems irritated by your idea. That’s data. A client stops responding. That’s data. You don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to act on it. But you do get to notice it. And that’s where the power is.
When you treat feedback as data, you move out of drama and back into agency. You’re no longer in the business of defending yourself or fixing other people’s feelings. You’re simply collecting information and deciding, consciously, what to do with it.
This also applies when you’re on the other side of the conversation. If you give feedback and the other person reacts emotionally, that reaction is data too. It tells you something about their experience, their fears, or the meaning they’re making. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, and it doesn’t mean you need to rescue or retreat. It’s just more information.
Seeing feedback as data doesn’t eliminate discomfort. But it changes your relationship to it. Instead of asking, “What does this say about me?” you start asking, “What can I learn from this?”
In the next post, I’ll explore why we get so attached to our ideas and identities in the first place, and how that attachment quietly distorts both giving and receiving feedback. For now, just notice your first internal reaction to feedback. That initial surge of defensiveness or justification? That’s often the moment when the most useful data appears.
Photo by Usman Yousaf on Unsplash