Retaking Your Pen: Learning to author your worth
Among the new additions to our revamped Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue course is a skill for receiving feedback we’ve dubbed “retaking your pen.” This skill—which has become THE key takeaway from the course for some learners—handles how to avoid letting negative or poorly delivered feedback upend your sense of self-worth.
The importance of feedback isn’t new to Crucial Conversations. For the last 30 years, we’ve taught skills like State My Path and Make It Safe to help learners share their meaning without provoking defensiveness. But as we looked at how to enhance the curriculum, we found a gap in how to improve people’s ability to hear hard things, no matter how those are delivered.
When someone brings a Crucial Conversation to us, we instinctively prepare to defend ourselves against the unknown, especially when the feedback is not delivered well. On our worst days, we hear the feedback and melt down in hurt, shame, or anger. That’s when it’s time to retake your pen.
What does this new term mean? Think of your “pen” as the power to define your worth. When you hold your pen, you get to author the terms of your story: is your worth intrinsic to you? Is it about how you look? Is it contingent on what you achieve or how many people admire you?
