8 - Why is working with feedback so hard?
episode 8 - Why is working with feedback so hard?
So, you got up your nerve and asked for feedback on your work...now what?? It can be so hard to process someone else's thoughts on how, where, when, and why your work should change, and balance their suggestions with your own vision. This episode has strategies to help you move through that a little more efficiently, a little more gently, and hopefully with just a dash more empowerment.
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
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If asking for feedback is one of the more vulnerable things that you can do as a grad student, receiving and processing and moving your work forward based on that feedback? Well, that's even harder. So this week, let's talk about some strategies, some experiments to try some places to reflect around what your process is for taking other people's ideas on how you should do your work and incorporating them into your own scholarship.
One of the things that's so hard about processing feedback is that most of us push toward some sort of submission. We use that to monitor our energy. We say, okay, I'm going to get this chapter ready to send to my advisor by the end of the month. You push you get that chapter ready.
And then you're it feels done. You feel like you can take a break and switch to other projects, but then the feedback comes back and then you are very much undone. You have things to address and it can really sort of make you feel like you're going backwards. Processing feedback can be really uncomfortable because what you thought was up to a certain point is not at that point anymore through no fault of your own.
And a lot of the changes in that feedback can be more substantial than you're used to. I know that when I started grad school, I was really only used to copy editing my paper, checking things over for spelling mistakes, maybe a grammar mistake here or there. I'd never actually changed much of anything that was more substantial than that. I definitely hadn't done any major restructurings.
I hadn't paid attention to citations. I hadn't thought about my voice really in any substantial way. So the kind of feedback that I was used to was much more quickly addressed than the kind of feedback that I was now working with. And that made me feel like I just wasn't a good writer which may into processing that feedback even harder.
One of the things that's really hard for scholars in grad school and even further along in the field is that the feedback are based on what other people think that you should do with your work. And it can be really difficult to balance what you envisioned for the project, the directions you want to take it in, the way you want to write it, the way you want to research it, with all of the people who have more or less power depending on the situation to make you do it their way. Some suggestions are really great and you're excited because they move the project forward into a way that you couldn't have imagined and it feels even better than what you could have pictured. And then some things really don't feel like they're in line with the kind of work, the kind of scholarship you want to do.
So processing feedback can be this very tricky dance where you're trying to balance your own voice and vision for the project with the feedback from people who have the power to get your dissertation passed or get that article published or give you a book contract. It's certainly not as straightforward as checking for any typos.
This is a sensitive topic. So put your feet on the floor, take a deep breath and think about these questions. You might want to get a journal. You might want to go for a walk and think about them, but let's dive into what feels salient about the way that you already interact with feedback.
Question one. If you were to write out the steps of how you process feedback - so you get a draft back it's covered in feedback - what would you do? What are the steps?
What is the order? Sometimes we don't have a good understanding of our own system, or we've never really done that before. So it can be hard to imagine a different way.
Question two. What role does feedback play in your professional ecosystem? Is it given regularly and constructively? Infrequently or less than generously? What are the constraints that you're working with? Does your advisor take forever to get feedback back to you? And then you're really in a rush to integrate it? Do they want to see a draft every single week? And then every single week you have things to change and you feel like you're revising the same 10 pages over and over again? What are the constraints that you maybe feel like you can't change? You might not be able to reach into your advisor's brain and make them better at feedback. And what are the things that you could imagine working differently?
And then lastly, how does feedback work with your brain and emotional landscape? Are you working with rejection sensitivity? Or do you seek out a lot of extra feedback for validation that you're on the right track? So often our human stuff comes out to play during activities that feel tied to our worth and performance and feedback on your writing is nothing but one of the most intense versions of that kind of experience. So it's worth looking at what your overall relationship is to things like feedback or criticism or suggestions that you could or need to change.
But let's get into some of the experiments that you can try now that you've received some feedback.
The first one I'm calling, working big to small. I know that the first couple of times I got substantial feedback on a piece of writing. I opened it up and I started to address the comments from the top of the draft to the bottom. Unfortunately, this often meant that I changed the introduction of a chapter or an article so substantially that I almost lost track of what the chapter was supposed to do, what things I was changing. And it got really frustrating and confusing in the middle, trying to change things at all of these different levels at once.
So I really recommend that you work through all the feedback and decide what are the really big changes that you need to make on down to the smaller ones. So if there is a suggestion that you might want to restructure things, it's better to do that big restructuring and then work with all of your transition sentences. Otherwise you're going to be polishing transition sentences for transitions that no longer exist.
You get the drift, but this can be counter, intuitive. Especially, if you are used to a more copy editing style of feedback, where you kind of go through and you address the typos, you address the changes one by one. If your doing something that's much closer to revision, which almost all of us are that strategy can really backfire. So work from big to small and see what happens with your overall sense of flow and understanding of that piece as it changes.
Experiment two is categorizing and sorting feedback into three different categories. I love a three column list. If you hang out on this podcast long enough, I'm sure I will suggest. Uh, other three column lists that you can do. But this one is one of my favorites. Especially if you're processing feedback from someone who gives you a lot of feedback, they write down every thought, or this can be really helpful if you're revising a substantial amount of writing, more than three or four pages.
You make a list of all the things that you're going to change or that are suggested that you can change. And you sort those items one by one into three different categories. The first category are the things that you're definitely going to fix. They're good suggestions. You think they need it? They make the piece stronger. Automatic Yes From you. Those all go in column one.
Column two are the things that you might do, but you're not really sure. They could be a good idea, but it may be depends on a restructuring or if you've changed some of the literature. There are things that you want to come back to later. You haven't ruled them in or ruled them out yet. And you've maybe guessed it, but column three are the things that you absolutely will not do.
I really like to empower grad students to make this third column, because many of us feel like we can't. Then, if our advisor says that we have to change something, then you have to change it no matter what. And to be clear, some advisers do expect you to implement every single one of their changes and that's a different situation.
But if you're getting feedback from somebody, maybe from a writing group member or a committee member that doesn't know the whole project or somebody that's dropping in and giving feedback without all of the context, then there can be a list that you make that's called, "these are great ideas, but not for me."
And then once you have your three columns, that's the order in which you do the revisions. You start with this stuff that you're definitely going to do. And then you move things in that middle column into, yes. This is a good suggestion in this new world. I'm going to work with that or, no, I don't think this one applies anymore.
I also love this strategy because it can help you get out of the mindset that every suggestion is one that you need to take. This way you have a list of the suggestions that you considered and the reasons why, whether you wrote them down or not, you decided not to use them which can help you feel really empowered as a writer that you don't need to do every single thing that every person on earth suggests because it's your project.
Experiment three is for all of my people out there who feel a lot of sensitivity and vulnerability around feedback. I count myself among you, by the way. One strategy that can be really effective that I suggest that you experiment with is having a friend, a colleague, this can even be a non-academic person read through the feedback and summarize it for you. So if you have a draft that's covered in red ink and you just can't bear to look at it and you have a friend in your corner.
Sometimes it can be really helpful to send it to them and say, Hey, can you summarize like the top five most important things that this person thinks I should change? And then you work off of a clean copy of your writing to make those revisions.
If you get the kind of archetypal. Reviewer two who just sort of slashes through your work in a way that's not helpful or constructive at all. This can be a really excellent way to kind of soften some of the blow of that. Have it be translated into more actionable language by a person that cares about you and cares about the work.
And then you work from the translation and not the unfiltered, deeply ungenerous reality. Or the unfiltered completely overwhelming reality. There is no rule that says that once somebody gives you feedback, that becomes the most important copy of your work.
Sit down with that list of things that you could do, the list of things that your friend has sort of summarized for you. And work from that version as opposed to the one that's covered in some useful, but a lot of not useful feedback. Whether that's overwhelming ungenerous or both.
I really want to encourage softness with this particular week of experiments and overall with the process of processing feedback. It can be really difficult on our nervous systems on our heart and even on our kind of scholarly identity to feel like somebody thinks that this piece needs to actively change, but....
I'm here to tell you from the other side of that particular moat, that all academic writers revise their writing heavily. Many of us are moving through multiple rounds of feedback, multiple rounds of revision, different editors, different reviewers revises, and resubmits committee feedback. Start from the drawing board. That's all part of the kind of very complex writing that academic work generally tends to be.
So if you're finding it difficult, you are 100% not alone. And I hope that some of these strategies help make it feel a little bit more doable and less overwhelming. See you next week.
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