I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually answer it in your head rather than out loud, because the out loud answer is always yes.
Are you teachable?
Not are you willing to learn. Everybody says yes to that one. Everybody buys the books. Everybody saves the reel.
I mean this instead. When somebody tells you something about your business that you do not want to hear, what actually happens in your body? Do you get curious? Or do you immediately start building the case for why they do not understand your situation?
Because I know what I used to do. I built the case. Every single time.
Defensive with good manners
I had years where I would have told you I was open to feedback. What I actually was, was defensive with good manners.
Somebody would tell me my team seemed confused, and I would explain why they should not be. Somebody would tell me my pricing was off, and I would explain the market. I had a reason for everything. Every reason was true. And the business still was not working the way I wanted it to.
Being right and being effective are not the same thing. I learned that one slowly.
Why it happens, and it is not arrogance
Here is what I finally figured out about myself, and I think it is true for a lot of owners.
I was not unteachable because I thought I knew everything. I was unteachable because I was tired.
When you are exhausted and holding the whole thing together, feedback does not land like information. It lands like one more thing that is broken and one more thing you have to carry. So you defend, because defending is cheaper in the moment than fixing.
That is not a character flaw. It is capacity. But it has the same result either way.
The part that gets worse as you grow
Nobody warns you about this one.
The bigger this thing gets, the fewer people will tell you the truth.
Your team stops. Not because they do not care, but because they do. They like working here. They need the job. And they watched what happened the last time somebody said the hard thing out loud.
So the feedback dries up at exactly the moment you need it most. And here is the dangerous part. You will read that silence as agreement. You will think things are going well because nobody is telling you otherwise.
Quiet is not the same as fine.
I am still not good at this
I want to be honest about where I actually am with this, because I am not writing from the finish line.
I run a business built around teaching people, and I still catch myself doing the explaining thing. Somebody offers a thought and I feel that familiar pull to justify before I have even finished hearing it.
The only thing that has really changed is the speed. I notice it faster now. That is the whole win. Not that I stopped getting defensive. That I catch it in about ten seconds instead of ten months.
The question to sit with
When was the last time somebody told you something about your business that you did not want to hear, and you actually changed something because of it?
Not the last time you listened politely. The last time you changed something.
If you cannot think of one, that is your answer. It is fixable, and it is not a character problem. But it is the answer.
Jen