This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: Author Elif Batuman. Plus, our obsession with feedback

Lilah Raptopoulos
Just to know before we start, there is a little bit of cursing in this episode. So you’ve been warned.

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Novelist Elif Batuman was still on book tour for her first novel, The Idiot, when she started thinking about a sequel. She kept getting this response from readers that bothered her. People were mad that at the end of the book, her protagonist hadn’t had sex with the guy she was supposed to have sex with. The Idiot is a fictional account of Elif’s first year in college. Her stand-in in the book, Selin, follows this guy to Hungary. She’s kind of in love with him, but he’s evasive. This is actually something that happened to Elif when she was young, too.

Elif Batuman
It was a very destabilising, um, feeling to be, to be talking to people who had read The Idiot, who had felt that, like, nothing had happened. And I thought, just what an odd way to respond to a book. And then it started to feel sort of familiar. And I was like, what is this reminding me of? And I was like, oh my God. This reminds me of how I felt in my actual life (laughter) when I went back to school in my second year of college and people would ask like, “Oh how did everything go over the summer? Did anything happen? And I would have to tell them, “No, nothing happened”, even though to my mind a lot of things happened.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What does happen in The Idiot is that Selin makes friends in Hungary, mostly with women. The guys unavailable, but the summer is still transformative for her. She learns a lot. She’s growing into adulthood and to Elif, it felt like the critics were missing the point. A woman’s story isn’t only worth telling if it involves a man or if it involves some form of consummation. So she started to write a new novel in response. It’s out now and it’s called Either/Or.

Elif Batuman
So I started Either/Or with Selin getting back to school and people asking her, “So did anything happen?” and she’s having to say like, “No, nothing happened”. And she’s also starting to think of, um, you know, she’s that much further in her path of thinking of herself as a writer and wondering what her books are going to be about and thinking that she has to like, live certain experiences in order to write them. And she’s learning the kind of like, non-negotiable nature of basically a penetrative, like, heterosexual encounter in the life of a young woman to turn it into narrative. Like that’s what she’s getting from her reading. That’s what she’s getting from all the people who she’s talking to. And that was an idea that I really wanted to engage with in the book. I mean, it sounds like an absurd question to ask, but like, you know, what other things could constitute narrative for a young woman other than getting fucked by some guy? Like, you know, any number of things (chuckle). And yet that that isn’t how it’s necessarily framed. And yeah, that’s a duality that I was really trying to play with in the book.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Today I talked to Elif about Either/Or, which is one of the buzziest novels of the summer. Then I speak with the FT’s Esther Bintliff, who recently wrote a piece for the magazine about how to give and receive feedback. As humans, we’re built to hate feedback but our culture is obsessed with it. So how do we manage that? This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Despite its critics, Elif’s first novel, The Idiot, was a total hit. It was shortlisted for a Pulitzer in fiction. Elif is also a staff writer for The New Yorker, and the sequel, Either/Or, is already on best-of-fiction lists, and it’s likely to do well with awards this year too. I read Either/Or recently when I was on vacation and I totally loved it. It felt like one of the best books I’ve read about a woman who’s re-examining a culture that made life really hard for her as a teenager. So I invited Elif to our New York studio. Elif, welcome to the show!

Elif Batuman
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s such a pleasure to have you on. I’m curious to hear how you would describe what Either/Or is about.

Elif Batuman
Um, Either/Or is, uh, it’s about Selin — the main character’s name is Selin — it’s a first-person narration and it’s about her second year of college, and it’s based, um, loosely on my own experiences when I was in college, which was in the ’90s, and I wrote it in the period between 2017 and 2020. So a lot of it was about revisiting the ’90s and my own early sexual history and early education from the perspective of all of the new vocabulary and you know, #MeToo and all of the new ways of describing the past that I had learned through the, those years that I was writing it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The basic premise of Either/Or is that Selin is a sophomore in college who’s grappling with what it means to be a writer and what it means to live a meaningful life. Like many 19-year-olds, she’s searching everywhere. She’s voraciously reading mostly history, fiction and philosophy. And mostly she’s just searching for some guidance on how to get to who she’s becoming. But the books that she’s reading as part of the western canon at Harvard are not helping. Most are written by men for men. They don’t have a template in them for a woman in the ’90s. So the first novel that features Selin is called The Idiot (laughter), named after Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name. Um, this one is named after Kierkegaard’s book, Either/Or. And the central theme there is whether one should live an ethical or an aesthetic life. Um, the book provides pretty horrible options (laughter), but can you explain it? And you know what Selin is trying to get from it?

Elif Batuman
Yeah. So Selin and her friend, um, Svetlana come up with this framework for, um . . . Svetlana actually comes up with it. She’s like, you know, you Selin are trying to live in aesthetic life and I’m trying to live an ethical life and that’s the difference between us. Selin is really taken by this dichotomy and then she finds this book by Kierkegaard, which, um, actually seems to be a book about how to live your life, which is all she ever wants to know is how to live your life and like, nobody’s talking about it. And for Kierkegaard, the ethical life seems to be, um, he’s only talking about men. So for the ethical life, you have to find a wife and get married and have kids. And it’s gonna be really boring and really hard, but it’s also going to be this like, noble undertaking that is gonna give you an understanding of like, historical duration. And if you’re living an aesthetic life, then your model is Don Juan or Don Giovanni. It’s a series of seductions of women. Um, and you sort of like abandon the women after each one and they go crazy or kill themselves (laughter). Um, and, you know, Kierkegaard didn’t actually think that either of those was the right way to live. Um, but, you know, Selin is really, uh, reads it extremely literally (laughter) and she really throws herself into it and she thinks, you know, I don’t want to necessarily get married and have kids. Not really sure. Do I seduce young girls or do I get seduced? But then, you know what if I go crazy and kill myself? Okay, I guess I’m gonna have to just have a lot of adventures and do everything I can to not go crazy or kill myself. And then at the end, write a book about it and that’s gonna be the aesthetic life.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Selin knows that something is off about the lessons she’s getting from these great books, but it’s 1996 and she doesn’t have the language to question them yet. So we’re just muddling through it with her. The way she sees it, the world is presenting her with very strict binaries, either/or. And not just around living either an ethical or an aesthetic life, but around most things. Take, for example, how she thinks about Picasso.

It’s interesting to watch Selin sort of look for answers. And often she’s looking in books written by men as sort of part of the canon. Usually, ultimately, the women in them are like disposable objects (chuckle) or just happen to be there. She can’t seem to find books that inspire her by women. And you watch her in this scene sort of convince herself that she likes. Even in art, she likes Picasso, you know, although he sort of horrifies her in many ways that, you know, like to be a thinking person who’s serious at Harvard, you know, one has to like Picasso.

Elif Batuman
Well, yeah. I mean, all of these things that I see as liberating ideologies now, like, you know, queer theory and feminism and, you know, these new ways of looking at history, I knew about. It’s not like they didn’t exist in the ‘90 (right). It’s like I wanted to stage the missed encounters, the reasons that those things didn’t seem appealing to me at the time. And I also wanted to show, like, I think the Picasso is a great example, like the, the choices that Selin makes. And she kind of grudgingly is like, okay, I guess I’m on team pro-Picasso (laughter). And the reason that she makes that decision is because the people who are like, oh, Picasso was a monster who destroyed women are sort of lumped together with the people who are like, I want a drawing of a tree to look like a tree. And so she thinks that she has to, that’s the choice that’s on the table (yeah). And now I see many more choices. Actually, the inspiration for that scene was, um, there was a Picasso, uh, sculpture show in, I think, at MoMA in New York in 2016 that I went to, which is where I had the idea to, to have Selin think about Picasso. And it was, I just remember walking around this hall and just like, looking around the walls and it just felt like I was in the spaceship in Alien. Like where the like (laughter), you know, the like, ossified people are stuck on the wall being like, kill me! It just looks like these splintered, fragmented women. And I was like, wait, why is this great art? Like, why is this the greatest art ever? Um, is it really that great?  And I was just looking around and everyone’s just, like, looking with these, like, rapt expressions. And the text was like, Picasso is such a master. He’s a magpie genius. Look, he went to the garbage dump and (laughter) found this old, you know, rusty saw and used it to make the breasts on a pregnant woman (laughter). And this is a punishment for his wife who wouldn’t bear him another child. And everyone’s just looking there with this, like, delighted, smile, like, wow, this is art, I’m in New York city. And it just. . .Yeah, I felt this dissonance that I was excited to explore.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. It’s true that Either/Or is not an action novel, though things do happen. Like Selin does end up having sex and a lot of it. But ultimately, this is a novel about Selin’s internal life. And like any work that fictionalises its author’s real experience, it’s also about that writer today. It’s about Elif looking back at herself. I related to Selin’s feeling of being a college student where you’re just trying to make sense of how to live a quality life and like how the world works. And, uh, so every book you read and class you take feels like it kind of blows your mind. And there’s this very sweet moment where she goes to a lecture and she gets so excited about, like, an ethics lecture that she has to leave (laughter) not because she didn’t like it, but just because, like, the ideas that she was learning was so overwhelming.

Elif Batuman
Too much. Yeah. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Can you talk about that age and why it was interesting to you?

Elif Batuman
Yeah, so now I’m in my forties, which has been, um, I think it’s kind of a novelistic age. I think, like, a lot of . . . I don’t know if you think the first novel is Don Quixote. It’s like, um, it’s someone who’s middle-aged, who’s looking back at the ideology of a past time, like of knight errantry and trying to revisit it and understand what it was about. And I think it’s like when you’re in your twenties, you think that you’re just living in the world, you’re not perceiving the things that are happening in the present as being historical. And by the time you go another 20 years, you see how many of those ideas have been outdated and now seem, um, you know, really benighted or funny or just, you know, seem very other. And also, as you get to be, uh, in your forties, which is something that I was really afraid of, things do stop, um, registering with the same emotional intensity. Um, that’s something that I heard a lot, and of course I started to experience that also. So part of writing the book was about recapturing that also.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. The other thing about that time that resonated with me about college is, Selin and her friends, um, they don’t seem to have the information to know that, like, life doesn’t have to be separate (laughter). Like, you watch them interact with the world with this kind of earnestness. Um, and that makes the book very funny. And I guess I’m curious sort of like, what’s unique about that time?

Elif Batuman
Yeah, it’s a really interesting question because, um, it’s hard for me to separate what was unique about the ’90s from what is kind of just a fact of being in your twenties. That’s the same for everyone. I actually think of this as a book about trauma, but it’s also, it’s . . . I tried very hard to make it funny because Selin doesn’t know that she’s going through trauma and she doesn’t really know that she’s suffering. She’s telling this story to herself about life being, um, exciting and being an adventure and being all of these hilarious developments happening. And of course the hilarious things that happen aren’t, like, necessarily super comfortable or super fun, but she’s, like, that’s what makes life interesting. So that I think is an idea that got outdated. And also, I think being in the ’90s and being before the internet, um, I think Selin and her friends are able to be in more of a bubble and to know a little bit less about what’s normal and what’s expected. And I don’t know, there was like a little bit more mystification of young people that I think was possible before the internet.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Um, I was thinking about just being in the ’90s for the course of your novel, um, and it was really interesting. You know, I feel like culturally we’re thinking a lot about the ’90s now (yes). We are asking ourselves whether the way, for example, we treated Monica Lewinsky (exactly) or Anita Hill was okay, you know, and, uh, Disney’s remaking all these ’90s movies. So there’s all these sort of ’90s elements sort of bubbling around me. But then being in your novel was interesting because we were in the past as if it was the present (uhhmm), knowing what we know now.

Elif Batuman
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And so what did you feel like you could do by doing that?

Elif Batuman
Oh, I’m really happy that you had that experience of being and feeling like the ’90s was the present, but with your current state of knowledge. That was, like, the trick that I was really hoping to pull off. Um, and it came from, I mean, I was living through those years that involved so much going back to the ’90s, you know, the #MeToo things that you mentioned with Monica Lewinsky and then Anita Hill and also just the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the fall of the Soviet Union. And this idea that there was the end of history, which was this Francis Fukuyama book that was very, um, influential when I was growing up. And I think that that ideology of history being over and of, um, I think it was actually a kind of depoliticising ideology. At least that’s how it worked on me personally and on a lot of my friends. Um, I don’t think that I considered myself a feminist at that time. It’s not something that I thought about. I thought that sexism was over and we just have to kind of wait for the last, you know, benighted people to die and then everything’s gonna be fine. And I think that a lot of people thought that, and part of the revisiting of the ’90s comes from the realisation of how wrong we were and of looking back at those movies and seeing how really appalling they are, and not in the same way as in the ’50s when people were kind of laughing at it. But with this idea that, you know, universality has happened and we just have to wait for the freedom and the free democracy to, like, penetrate all of the edges of the world. And it’s just the waiting game from now on, which it turned out to be so mistaken.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So Elif you’re saying that in promoting the book, you’ve talked to a lot of people who are college age now in their late teens, early twenties. How do you feel about the kind of, you know, early-twenties experience they’re having versus the one that you had?

Elif Batuman
I mean, I, uh . . . I feel really encouraged after talking to younger readers. I’m trying to think of specific examples of . . . encouraging things that I heard. I just feel like . . . They don’t seem signed up for a certain kind of, like, receiving culture that I was signed up for at their age. It’s not that they’re questioning more because I, I mean, I feel like when I was in my twenties, I went to school. That was like, we teach people to think Socratically and you have to be sceptical and you have to question everything. And it, you know, it produced this kind of thinking that we talked about, like, “Oh, either I like Picasso or I hate him”. And I just feel like there’s a lot more room now like that young people aren’t really looking at the world that way. They’re kind of navigating through this, like, huge spectrum of choices, like much bigger than what was on the table when I was younger (yeah). And there are things that are enviable about that. And then there’s also things that are really scary about it. Like, I think, I think we might be at a point where the idea of a canon is . . . I, in the past few years, the conversation about the canon has been like, let’s expand the canon. But I think after a certain point, like, it’s just not gonna be feasible to think that all of the different people who are in the world could find the same body of texts useful. And that was an idea that we really took for, that I took for granted when I was younger. And you do miss some certain sense of community, but you also don’t have that needless toil of like beating against things that feel like they have nothing to do with you for no reason.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Elif, thank you so much! This was really thought-provoking.

Elif Batuman
Oh, thank you! Thank you for your wonderful questions.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
About a decade ago, my colleague Esther Bintliff had a bad day at work. So she went home and she told her husband about it over dinner.

Esther Bintliff
I had an experience of some negative feedback at work, and I went home and was complaining about it and being upset about it. And he told me this thing that he’d heard, which was about the three stages of feedback that we go through.

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is not a scientific theory, by the way. Esther’s husband heard about a comedy podcast from the actor Bradley Whitford. You know that guy from The West Wing? But he stood by it and Esther loved it.

Esther Bintliff
The first stage is that you sort of think, “Fuck you,” apologies for the language, (Lilah laughs) but, uh, you tend to have that visceral response of feeling quite angry at the person who’s giving you the negative feedback. Then the second stage is, “I suck”, which is where I tend to go. It’s sort of like, “Oh yes, I’m actually terrible. I’ve done really badly. This person is right”. And often I end up then feeling, what’s the point? You know, I can’t do this thing. And the third stage is, “Let’s make it better”. And the idea is, how can you get Stage Three quickly? Because Stage One and Two are really normal, but the Stage Three is where it’s productive and you can actually start to move forward. And I found that super helpful in that moment because I immediately realised I was in Stage Two, but that was okay. I could get out of it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Esther is the deputy editor of the FT Weekend Magazine. She just wrote a cover story about feedback because we live in a culture that’s become obsessed with it. In the workplace, we have regular performance reviews. There’s this new thing called 360 reviews where bosses and employees and colleagues all give feedback to each other. There are courses, bestselling books. It’s become a multibillion-dollar industry. But not all feedback is created equal. And actually we’re biologically hardwired to hate receiving it. We often have these visceral responses, like a drop in the stomach or sweaty palms. So Esther went on this journey to talk to feedback pioneers and find out what the best way to give and receive feedback actually is. Esther — close friend of the podcast — welcome to the show!

Esther Bintliff
Oh, thank you, Lilah! It’s great to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So I’m curious how we got to where we are with feedback, like, how are we now this culture that’s obsessed with it? When kind of recently we were a culture that sort of put our heads down and did what our bosses told us. Is this a start-up culture mentality thing? Is this Google’s fault? Like, what happened?

Esther Bintliff
Yeah, I think it goes back before that, actually. So I think that some of it comes from this move into mass manufacturing and the efforts to speed up factories and to get workers to work more and more efficiently. So I think part of it is this drive, um, in sort of 20th century capitalism to become more and more efficient. And I also read something about how psychological management becomes more and more important, whereas a lot of the jobs pre-20th century were physical and manual jobs. As we get later into the 20th century, a lot of our jobs are sitting in offices and computers. And actually, it really matters what state of mind someone’s in. If they’re not engaged with the job or they’re bored or whatever, it can actually affect their productivity.

Lilah Raptopoulos
One of the most influential theories of recent years is called radical candour. It was coined by the feedback guru Kim Scott, who wrote a bestselling book of the same name. And the idea is we should be giving feedback in the workplace that’s brutally honest, tough love. Here’s Kim Scott talking about it at a conference in 2016. She’s telling the story about a time when her boss, Sheryl Sandberg, told her to go see a speech therapist because she said “um” too much.

Kim Scott
She says to me after we, after a little bit of praise, she says, you said “um” an awful lot. Were you aware of it? And I sort of breathed a huge sigh of relief, and I kind of made a brush-off gesture. And I said, “Yes, I know, I do. That’s kind of a verbal tic. No big deal, really”. And she stops. She looks right at me and she says, when you say “um” every third word, it makes you sound stupid and insecure. Now she has my full attention.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Kim Scott. Tell me about her and her theory of feedback.

Esther Bintliff
Yeah. So Kim Scott is an amazing woman. I actually loved speaking to her and she is basically all about being kind but telling the truth about people’s performance. And she thinks that if we hold back and we don’t help people when things are going wrong, then actually that’s not kindness. She calls it ruinous empathy. When we’re too empathetic, when we’re so empathetic to a person that we’re afraid to tell them something that actually would help them and would help them improve and develop and grow.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Here’s Kim again talking about Sheryl Sandberg’s feedback.

Kim Scott
And some people would have said that it was mean of her to say that, but in fact, it was the very kindest thing she could have done for me at that moment in my career, because when I did go to the speech coach, I realised she really wasn’t exaggerating. I did say “um” every third word. And the weird thing about this was that I had been giving presentations for my entire career and nobody had told me how often I said “um”.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Radical candour became huge in Silicon Valley, and then it quickly became a trope like leaning in or disruption. Briefly, I’m curious about the criticism Kim Scott got for this. It was made fun of on Silicon Valley, right?

Esther Bintliff
Yeah. So the TV show Silicon Valley had an episode where there was a character who actually talked about “RadCan”, uh, which was obviously about her kind of ethos. And it turned out the problem was he was a complete manipulative bully.

Clip from ‘Silicon Valley’ TV show
You want candour, Richard? I’m a world-class COO, OK. And your heavy metal friend, I mean, he’s obviously a dick. And you know what else, Richard? You’re 20 or 30 lbs underweight. It’s gross.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Kim had no idea she’d be made fun of. And when she heard about it, she was mortified.

Esther Bintliff
The episode aired and she was on a plane and she landed and just had all these messages. And she said to me she was devastated by it because it’s not at all what she intends. But she sort of admits that if you take it the wrong way, you could imagine radical candour to be an excuse, to be quite mean to someone and to tell them how bad they are. And that’s not her aim. So she very much emphasises compassion. And it should only happen in a relationship where you are regularly showing the person that you care about them and their wellbeing and also where you’re praising them when stuff goes right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right, right. It reminds me of an old boss of mine once. Um, I showed her an email that I was going to send to somebody very senior, and she said, “It’s full of great stuff, really interesting, really good. No one’s gonna read it. It’s like (huh!) eight times too long” (laughter). Like if you want people with very, with no time to read something. Like, it’s got to be three sentences. I actually really loved that piece of feedback. I think about it a lot. But you heard Esther. She gasped when I told her about it. And that’s the thing about feedback. Different people like it different ways. There are some people who think feedback doesn’t work at all, including one academic who’s pioneered the field of feedback. His name is Avraham Kluger. He’s been researching workplace feedback for more than two decades, and now he identifies as a feedback sceptic. Here he is talking to Esther about why he thinks it doesn’t work.

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Avraham Kluger
Why do we care about feedback, to begin with? Why do we want, why do people want to give feedback? So I’m coming to . . . later parts of my career, of my present work. And I think that we often want to change the behaviour of the other person. Paradoxically, it’s often ineffective. And one way to do it that we don’t think about is, is to listen to the other person, to let them change on their own.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Avraham’s argument is that feedback is relational. There are two people in any feedback-giving scenario. It’s not just top-down. So you need trust. But bosses often don’t think of it that way. They see it as this way to improve efficiency. So feedback, it might work in a partnership where two people trust and respect each other. But it rarely works in a rigid corporate hierarchy.

Esther Bintliff
If the person feels cared for, they’re much, much more likely to take the, um, feedback on board and to act on it. Whereas, um, in the absence of that, I think that’s when it often becomes problematic.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Avraham didn’t start out as a sceptic, but in the ’90s his research started to indicate that feedback didn’t work. One of his studies found that in more than 30 per cent of cases, people’s performance after getting feedback actually declined. So he changed his mind.

Esther Bintliff
He basically said, rather than, like a performance development review or 360 feedback, he prefers this thing that he developed called the feedforward interview, which he offered to do with me. So I did over Zoom and I was quite nervous because I didn’t really know what would happen. Um, but he basically asked me to talk about a time in my job when I was really happy, when I felt really alive and interested. And I talked about a reporting trip I’d done, and he asked me in great detail about it, and then he would repeat back to me, you know, the things I was saying and say, “So what I’m hearing is this and the things that you needed in order to make this happen. What were they?” And at the end of it, he said, “OK, this is what I understand. Um, this is the code for Esther to flourish at work”. And it sounds kind of weird, but in the moment I actually felt quite powerful and I could really visualise it. And I did sort of give myself some critical feedback in the process. And his argument is, if you are sort of enjoying your work and you feel alive when you’re working and you feel that you are using your abilities, then you are more likely to perform well. And we want to be helping people get to that stage.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So that’s, like, it’s almost like a career coach or a manager style, right? Like instead of me telling you what I think, you should be doing better to do this job, I’m gonna find out from you what you actually wanna be doing.

Esther Bintliff
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And maybe in that process, interestingly, you end up saying, I don’t wanna be doing this at all.

Esther Bintliff
Well, I think that is the risk, because I think it can be quite unsettling. And I think there are lots of jobs that don’t really have much inherent joy in them, I suppose (laughter). And is it a bit like, is it a bit unfair to expect, you know, that people would have that? And also, it might be that as a boss, you might not actually want that person to change what they’re doing and to want to do something else.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So Avraham says that if you aren’t sincere about wanting employees to be more fulfilled, just skip the feedback. Esther, I’m curious about the other side of this, like the receiving of feedback and what you learned about that. What are some strategies for getting from the “fuck you” stage or the “I suck” stage to actually being able to take it in and make some changes based on it?

Esther Bintliff
So I did learn some really useful strategies, I think. One of the things is to have what’s called a growth mindset or a mindset of improvement. Basically, starting off from a position before you get the feedback, just try to hear it with the idea like, this is something I’m gonna learn from and I’m gonna be able to grow from rather than, “This is something that’s gonna hurt me”.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Esther Bintliff
And the other thing that everyone I spoke to recommended was pausing. So don’t immediately respond. Try and just sit with it and hear it out the person and think to yourself, “I’m not gonna respond right now. I’m just gonna take this in”. And also, Kim Scott also talked about kind of observing your emotional response with curiosity. So don’t be afraid of having the emotional response, which I think is where I was coming from, where I was sort of ashamed of even having these big emotions.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Esther Bintliff
Actually, it’s really normal and human to have an emotional response when you get bad feedback. That’s fine and just try and sit with it and observe it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Esther, my very last question is, um, do you feel like you’re better at receiving feedback now?

Esther Bintliff
Yeah, I hope so. I do feel like I have come to terms with the fact that having an emotional response to feedback is normal and it’s human. And actually the thing you don’t want to do is to try and squash that and pretend it’s not there. Just, like, acknowledge it and be like, it’s okay, I’m going to get through this. So I feel like in that sense, I’ve kind of made peace with it. And I hope, like I say, I hope I would be better at giving feedback as well.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Esther, this was such a pleasure. Thank you for giving us so much to think about and thanks for being on the show.

Esther Bintliff
Thank you so much, Lilah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times! If you have feedback for us on this episode, I don’t wannna hear it. I’m just kidding. We love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@FT.com. You can find the show on Twitter @FTWeekendPod, or you can find and message me on Instagram or Twitter @LilahRap.

Next week, we talk about reclaiming the foundational role of African-American cooking in American cuisine. We go to Savannah, Georgia, to meet Mashama Bailey. She just won outstanding chef at this year’s James Beard Awards. And she’s doing this work out of her restaurant, The Grey, which exists in a formerly segregated Greyhound bus station. I also speak with Stephen Satterfield. He’s the founder of Whetstone Media, which is dedicated to telling food origin stories like this one.

Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT, including 50 per cent off a digital subscription and a really good deal on FT Weekend in print. Those offers are at FT.com/weekendpodcast. If you wanna find those deals, make sure to use that link. Just a reminder that the FT Weekend Festival in London is coming up soon. It’s on Saturday, September 3rd at Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, and it really is wonderful. You can come meet me and Esther and all the other colleagues you hear on the show. Buy a ticket at FT.com/ftwf. That link with a discount code for £20 off is in the show notes.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my wonderful team, Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our assistant producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and special thanks go as always to Cheryl Brumley and Renee Kaplan. Have a lovely weekend and we will find each other again next week.

This transcript has been automatically generated. If by any chance there is an error please send the details for a correction to: typo@ft.com. We will do our best to make the amendment as soon as possible.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024. All rights reserved.
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