Feedback is one of biggest topics between humans, most important and destructive sometimes. This book is about receiving feedback. The book starts with classifying feedback into different categories and going throw the process of understanding how feedback works, how we receive it, how we should receive each category and how we think about it. The book is a bit hard to read, some parts can be smaller and more to the point.

A life-changing skill. When too many people focus on how to give feedback, this book chooses the inverse approach by focusing on how to receive feedback, and I profoundly think this makes a HUGE difference. As outlined by the authors, the control is always in the receiver's hands. If you don't know how to receive feedback, what's the point in training managers to give feedback? I have read the authors' previous book Difficult Conversations recently. Books are complementary with obvious overlap as giving and receiving feedback are two sides of the same coin. If you must read one book, I would opt for Thanks for the Feedback. It's one of my favorite self-help books. It can really change you, at work, and at home. Everyone must read this book. Rest assured, you can still ignore feedback after the reading. But only if your emotions aren't hiding an opportunity for growth.

This book has quite a bit if useful tools and frameworks to make feedback conversations more valuable whether you are the giver or the receiver of the feedback. Underneath most of the book's lessons is the overarching requirement to swallow your pride because we can all find ways to be more effective in dealing with other people. At some level all of the stories, examples and tools had this at their core, so I found it hard to read the book straight through. It almost felt repetitive toward the end. I see this as more of a reference book that includes a lengthy set of ways to deal with specific situations, assuming you can find the one that fits your specific need.

It took me 6 months to get through this one, not because it's at all bad but because I'm generally just sort of resistant to this sort of nonfiction. So much of it seems like common sense, so I feel like I'm wasting my time reading it, though it was neat to see some of my own evolution at receiving feedback recorded pretty faithfully in the book. In the end, there is a fair bit of pretty practical advice, and it's a useful book, though I think I would have preferred an abridged version. The many scenarios the authors share are useful for illustrating the points they illustrate, but if you already kind of get the point from the simple statement of it, the scenarios feel a little like fluff. Actually I think this sort of book is probably very well suited to hypertext, with a rough outline, more detail on each section, and links to scenarios for further reading. I dog-eared a fair bit of stuff at about the midpoint and then a bunch more in the last fifth or so of the book.