Whenever I look at old photographs of my sisters and me, I am reminded that some of my earliest lessons about feedback came long before I had a career to receive feedback about. My sisters have always been among my most honest critics. They have never been particularly interested in protecting my ego, and they will tell me when they think I am wrong, sometimes with considerably more enthusiasm than I would prefer. Yet they have also consistently encouraged me to take chances, pursue ambitious ideas, and recover when those ideas did not work out as planned.
As I have gotten older, I have come to appreciate the value of that combination. Honest criticism is useful when it comes from people who are genuinely invested in your development. They are not criticizing you because they need to justify a decision or manage an uncomfortable conversation. They are telling you something because they want you to become better. That distinction becomes much harder to recognize in professional life, where feedback and rejection are often packaged together.
Rejection is unavoidable in business. A proposal is declined, a client chooses a competitor, an application goes nowhere, or an opportunity you believed was a natural fit simply disappears. For ambitious people, the instinct is usually to understand why. We examine the explanation, replay the conversation, and search for the variable that could have changed the outcome. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Reflection is one of the ways experience becomes judgment.
The problem begins when we assume every explanation accompanying a rejection is an accurate diagnosis of what went wrong.
Professional communication is rarely that precise. People have legitimate reasons for being diplomatic. A hiring manager may not want to explain every consideration behind a decision. A prospective client may simply feel more comfortable with someone else. An executive may have internal political considerations that would be inappropriate to disclose. Sometimes the person making the decision cannot even articulate precisely why one option felt preferable to another. Human decisions are influenced by experience, incentives, relationships, timing, emotion, and bias, much of which never appears in the carefully worded explanation that follows.
This becomes obvious when enough feedback accumulates. One person thinks an idea is too ambitious while another thinks it is too conservative. One client wants more detail while another finds the same level of detail overwhelming. One organization considers your experience unconventional while another sees precisely that difference as an advantage. If every rejection becomes an instruction to change direction, eventually you are no longer improving. You are simply reacting.
That does not mean feedback should be ignored. Quite the opposite. Good feedback is extraordinarily valuable, but it has to be weighted rather than merely collected. I pay particular attention when the same observation comes from several credible sources, when it comes from someone with relevant expertise, or when it comes from people who have demonstrated that they are invested enough in me to tell me something I may not want to hear. A pattern deserves investigation. A single polite explanation may not.
There is also an opportunity cost to endlessly decoding rejection. Time spent constructing elaborate theories about why someone said no is time that cannot be invested in the next client, proposal, relationship, or idea. At some point, reflection stops producing insight and becomes rumination. Knowing when that line has been crossed is an important form of professional judgment.
Perhaps that is what my sisters taught me without either of us realizing it. The objective was never to become immune to criticism. It was to develop enough confidence and self-awareness to know which criticism deserved my attention.
Some feedback should change you. Some should challenge you. Some should confirm something you already suspected.
And sometimes, a no is simply a no.
Wisdom is knowing the difference.
I am a Canadian insurance and investment professional and the President and Chief Executive Officer of Chazz Financial Inc. and Chazz Capital Assets. I write about leadership, markets, insurance, investing, and decision making, with a focus on how structure and incentives shape outcomes.
I hold a business degree and I am a Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute (FCSI®), a Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU®), a Chartered Financial Planner®, a Certified Health Specialist and a Mutual Fund Investment Representative.
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