67 to 1

How to stop ruminating on negative and neutral feedback

If you’ve ever wondered, “Is it too late for me to...” the answer’s NO and The Uplifters is about to show you why. This space is for purpose-driven women who want to do big, brave things in the second half of their lives.

We need to slow down like this giant African Land Snail to process feedback in a balanced way. (Also, this sucker was about as outsized as my response to certain feedback.)

Tomorrow is the 3rd anniversary of The Uplifters Podcast! 154 stories of brave, badass midlife women who believe we rise higher together.

68 people have rated the show on Apple Podcasts. 67 of them left a 5-star rating (thank you!). A single person left a 1-star review (thank you?).

I have thought about that single rating way more often than I am comfortable admitting. Did they misunderstand the rating system? Did I offend someone? Am I actually awful at this, and nobody else has bothered to tell me?

I know, I know. This is crazy talk, but it’s what my brain (and maybe yours?) does sometimes, especially when I’m thinking about something I really care about.

I heard it from other women again and again this week. A woman in a career transition told me she’d gotten genuinely enthusiastic responses from three potential collaborators and one lukewarm reply. She was fixated on the lukewarm one, turning it over and over, looking for what it meant about her readiness, her positioning, her worth. A client who just launched her own business has a growing roster of happy clients who keep coming back…and she still lies awake wondering if she’s actually adding value.

This saps our energy to keep doing big, brave things. And it isn’t (just) a confidence problem, or a mindset problem, or something we can fix by making a gratitude list. It’s biology.

Our brains are running software that was designed for a world where missing a threat could kill us and missing a compliment was completely fine. Neuroscientists call it negativity bias — the brain’s tendency to register, store, and replay negative experiences with significantly more intensity than positive ones. Bad feedback gets processed in the amygdala, our brain’s threat-detection center, which is why it feels urgent and sticky and real in a way that good feedback often doesn’t. Positive feedback, by contrast, requires what researcher Rick Hanson calls “active installation” — we have to deliberately hold it in awareness for at least 20-30 seconds for it to move from short-term experience into long-term memory.

In other words, the glowing responses wash over us. The neutral and negative ones take up residence.

This is especially acute for midlife women who have taken real risks. When we’ve built something genuinely ours — a business, a community, a creative practice, a family, a new career — the stakes feel personal in a way they didn’t when we were executing someone else’s vision. The critical voice isn’t just commenting on the work. It feels like it’s commenting on us.

So what do we actually do with this?

First, name the ratio. Out loud, or on paper. 67 to 1 is data. One data point inside 67 is also data, but it is not the whole picture, and our nervous systems need us to say that explicitly because they will not arrive there on their own.

Second, get curious about the source. Not every piece of feedback tells us something useful about our work. Sometimes it tells us something about where the other person is — what they’re ready for, what they need, what they’re carrying. Learning to ask “what is this feedback actually about?” is one of the more useful skills in any reinvention.

Third, actively install the good stuff. When we receive genuinely positive feedback, don’t just note it and move on. Sit with it for thirty seconds. Let it land. Tell someone else about it. Write it down. Our brains need the extra time to file it somewhere retrievable.

And finally, this one is for my client who’s wondering if she’s adding value; look at the behavior, not the feeling. Are people coming back? Are they referring others? Are they implementing the insights? Behavior is data too, and it doesn’t have the same negativity bias problem our brains do.

I’m feeling pretty great right now, thinking about the joy and privilege of sharing 154 women’s stories, and the many thousands of hours listeners have spent with us, and all that I’ve learned from creating this community. That is the best data of all.

Thanks for being here.

Paid subscribers, I’ll see you later this week with a series of reflection prompts to help you slow down and soak in the good stuff.

See you Friday!

Aransas