Some of you know I recently got married to my favourite person in the whole world...what a day it was (photo shared at the end!).
113 of our closest people in one room, speeches about who we are as individuals and as a couple, stories about moments I'd forgotten and observations about our relationship I didn't know people had noticed.
There was a moment during the speeches when I thought, Wow! Is that really how they've all seen me? Because there was a very obvious pattern.
It was super humbling. Not in the "oh, I'm not that great" way, but in the "I had no idea that's the impact I've always had" way. They reminded me of something I often forget: people are always watching and observing, the good and everything.
Let me tell you why this matters for how you lead.
I see this pattern in SO many leaders, myself included...you're good at giving feedback, you know how to tell people what they're doing well and where they need to grow but when it comes to receiving it, it's even harder. Especially, believe it or not, the positive kind.
Someone tells you you're doing great work, and you immediately deflect.
→ Thank you, but the team really carried it.
→ Thank you, though I could have done better on X.
→ Thank you, it was nothing really.
You justify, minimize and redirect credit. You think you're being humble, but what you're actually doing is rejecting information about your impact.
Here's what I didn't understand until recently: this isn't just a habit of modesty. Your brain is working against you.
The Neuroscience of Why Leaders Do This
Your brain has something neuroscientists call a negativity bias. It's not a character flaw. It's a survival mechanism hardwired into your neural architecture millions of years ago, when noticing threats meant the difference between living and not living.
Your amygdala, the part of your brain that processes threats and negative information, responds faster and more intensely to bad news than good news. A critical comment gets processed in milliseconds. Praise takes longer to register, and your brain often dismisses it just as quickly.
This is compounded by something called loss aversion. When your brain evaluates information, negative feedback registers about twice as powerfully as positive feedback. It feels more important, more urgent, more real. So when someone praises your communication skills, your brain doesn't dwell on that observation. Instead, it retrieves a counterexample. That meeting where you fumbled your words. That email you sent too quickly. It uses these memories to override the positive information.
For leaders, this dynamic becomes more complicated. You've spent years training your brain to scan for gaps. It's the skill that makes you effective: identifying what's not working, what needs to improve, what the next level looks like.
Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for planning and improvement, becomes exceptionally good at this pattern-matching. And when your brain gets really good at finding problems, it starts seeing problems everywhere. Your attention system reorganizes around threat detection and gap closure. When positive feedback lands, your threat-detection system activates. → If I accept that I'm good at X, will people expect me to always be good at X?
→ What if I fail?
→ What if they're wrong about me?
Your brain perceives the praise as a potential threat to your self-concept, and it deflects to protect you.
There's another layer to this. Leaders often operate in what neuroscientists call default mode network dominance. When you're not actively focused on an external task, your brain defaults to self-referential thinking, and that thinking tends to be self-critical. You're running a continuous internal narrative about where you fall short. Positive external feedback bumps up against that internal narrative, and your brain works hard to reconcile them by minimizing, justifying, or reframing the praise. So there's a lot working against us but also for us if we know what to do about it...
What You're Missing When You Deflect
When someone gives you positive feedback and you deflect it, you're telling them their observation doesn't count. They noticed something about how you show up, how you lead, how you make them feel. And you're essentially saying they were wrong about that.
More importantly, you're losing access to critical information about what's working.
If you don't know what you're doing well, you can't replicate it, you can't build on it an you can't understand the full picture of your impact.
That wedding moment taught me something essential - the way people see you, the impact you're having and the strengths you're bringing aren't just nice compliments...they're data about who you are when you're at your best.
If you deflect them, you lose access to that data.
The Advice That Changed How I Receive Feedback
A couple of years ago, I was in a conversation with a wonderful woman named Donna. I don't remember what we were talking about, but I remember what she said to me.
"Kendra, just say thank you. You don't need to justify, this compliment was for you, and you alone."
That's it. Just say thank you.
Not "thank you, but." Not "thank you, however." Not "thank you, though I really should have."
Just thank you.
It sounds simple, but it's one of the hardest things to actually do, especially when you're a leader who's trained to always be improving, always be humble, always looking for what's next, always focused on the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Your neural wiring is pulling you toward justification and minimization.
Donna's advice was simple. The practice is not.
What Changes When You Just Say Thank You
When you stop deflecting and just say thank you, two things happen neurologically.
First, you create a space for your prefrontal cortex to actually process the information your brain would normally dismiss. By pausing before responding, you interrupt the automatic threat-detection response. You give your slower, more deliberate thinking system a chance to evaluate the feedback on its own terms, rather than being immediately overridden by your amygdala's threat alert.
Second, you give the other person permission to keep giving you feedback. When you deflect praise, people stop offering it. They assume you don't want to hear it or won't believe them anyway. When you receive it well, they keep telling you what they see. That's how you build a clearer, more accurate picture of your actual impact. Not just the one you've constructed in your own critical internal narrative.
Over time, as you receive positive feedback without deflecting, something else happens. Your brain begins to update its internal model of who you are. This isn't about becoming arrogant. It's about calibrating your self-perception to match reality. Your threat-detection system starts to recognize that accepting praise doesn't actually put you at risk. Your brain literally rewires its response patterns.
How to Practice This
The next time someone gives you positive feedback, pause. Don't immediately respond with a justification or a deflection. Notice the urge to redirect. That urge is your brain doing what it's been trained to do. You're not fighting weakness, you're interrupting a neural pattern.
Say thank you. Just those two words. Then stop.
Then, if you want to say more, ask a question like, What made you notice that? or Can you tell me more about what that looked like?
You're not agreeing or disagreeing with their assessment; you're receiving the information they're giving you.
This practice works because repetition changes neural pathways. Each time you pause instead of deflect, each time you let feedback land instead of immediately overriding it, you're literally strengthening different neural circuits. Your brain becomes more comfortable with the data, less reactive to the perceived threat.
If it feels uncomfortable, that's not a sign you're doing something wrong. It's a sign that you're working against your default wiring. That discomfort is where the change happens.
Sitting in that room, listening to people talk about us, I realized how much I'd been missing by not fully receiving the feedback people had been giving me all along.
The things people said weren't new observations. They'd been telling me versions of this for years. I just hadn't been listening because I was too busy justifying, minimizing, or redirecting.
When I finally let myself just listen and believe what they were saying, I got to see myself through their eyes. Not the version of me that's always worried about what I could be doing better, but the version that's actually showing up and having an impact.
That's the version I want to lead from.
My Advice to You
When you're given praise or positive feedback, believe it.
Just say thank you.
Not because you're perfect or because there's nothing left to improve, but because the people telling you this are giving you information about your impact that you can't see on your own. And your brain, left to its own devices, will work very hard to make you dismiss that information.
Receive it. Learn from it. Let it shape how you show up next time.
Your neural wiring is powerful and has served you well. But it doesn't have all the data about who you are. The people around you do. When they tell you what they see, you have a choice: let your threat-detection system override their observation, or pause and let their perspective expand your understanding of yourself.
One of those choices leads to better leadership. I think you know which one.
A Question Worth Exploring With Your Team
When a leader struggles to receive positive feedback, they don't just miss data about themselves; they change the entire feedback ecosystem around them. Their teams learn to hold back observations & to deflect praise as well. People stop offering the very information that would help the leader grow. Cultures become more critical and less generative.
If you're curious about how this pattern shows up in your leadership, and what it might be costing your team, I'd love to talk about it.
Whether you're wrestling with this individually or trying to build a culture where feedback actually lands, there's work to do, real work, the kind that changes how your team operates.
Hit reply and let me know what you're noticing. Or if you'd like to explore how your organization's feedback patterns are shaping your team dynamics, let's talk about that too.
Just an email away!
Kendra
Ps. If you want to dive deeper into the neuroscience behind these patterns:
- On Negativity Bias and Loss Aversion: Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). "Bad Is Stronger Than Good." Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323-370. A foundational paper on why negative information dominates our thinking.
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk." Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291. The seminal work on loss aversion and how we process gains versus losses differently.
- On Amygdala Function and Threat Detection: LeDoux, J. (2007). "The Amygdala." Current Biology, 17(20), R868-R874. A clear explanation of how the amygdala processes threats faster than conscious thought.
- On Neuroplasticity and Behavioral Change: Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Neuroscience. Penguin Books. A readable overview of how repetition rewires neural pathways, making change possible.
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