A speaker describes practical techniques for giving difficult feedback in mentorship: ask permission before being candid, open with a self-deprecating story of personal failure to normalize and disarm, and use pattern-recognition (e.g., comparing against many prior cases) to show where someone ranks and offer to help them improve. The speaker frames these as three repeatable "hacks" used in mentorship workshops.
But for me, when I give feedback to people, I do think about the best times I've received feedback. And he did something that I've replicated. He asked me permission to be completely candid and told me that I wasn't going to like what I heard. And so he had me mentally ready. Like I walked in and I'm like, this is like, I look forward to the feedback. This is going to be validated. And then he opens with this and I'm like, oh, this isn't what I was expecting. And then boom. And I actually use a bit of that in current era. So I always say to people in mentorship, when you, one of our jobs as a mentor, skip feedback. And I say, don't be destructive, destructive ever. But when you're giving difficult feedback, I always ask for permission. But 10, I've got something you're not going to want to hear. I won't. If you don't want to talk about this, we'll back it off. But I want you to be ready for what I'm going to talk about and I want you to allow me to talk about it. It is the most powerful and disarming to give difficult feedback if we want to talk feedback, to go a little further with it. There are actually three techniques that I talk about and there's a principle in the mentorship workshop we do about giving feedback and the, I call them the three hacks. Hack one is asking for permission, which completely changes the conversation. You recognize that number two is tell a self deprecating story of personal failure that relates to the issue. I have plenty of those. I've been at this for 30 years. I've done 97% of things wrong. Right? One or two worked and then third is, and this came from Patrick Lohr. I don't know if you have Patrick Panache. He said he's been around the block, he's got so much pattern recognition and so many deals that what he'll say to a founder is he'll say, look, you know, out of 150 deals, this issue that we are talking about, you are in the bottom decile of the 150 as it relates to this issue. And I want to work with you to get you up to the top decile and I, I have seen the top decile and I want to work with you. He said that has worked very well for him. Sam.
