Seek Truth. Not Praise.

Most people want growth that feels good.

Most people say they want to grow, and I believe they mean it. But growth and validation are not always moving in the same direction.

If you pay attention, what most people want is not just growth. They want to be recognized, supported, and reassured they are on the right track. They want encouragement without correction and support without discomfort. Growth rarely works that way.

There is nothing wrong with encouragement. It matters. But the moment feeling good becomes more important than getting better, something shifts. You stop looking for truth and start looking for validation.

What each one actually does.

Validation protects your feelings. Truth improves your performance.

It does not happen all at once. It happens quietly, over time, in small moments when you choose comfort over correction, agreement over awareness, and reassurance over growth.

The feedback I did not want to hear.

In a meeting, our team was discussing sales strategies we wanted to implement. It was an area I had spent years in, both as a salesperson and a sales leader.

As the group shared ideas, I recognized some of the approaches immediately, because I had tried similar things earlier in my career. They had produced decent results, but I had since found an approach that performed better. So I jumped in, redirected them, and asked the team to go that route instead.

After the meeting, another leader pulled me aside and said something that did not sit easily. Your idea might produce slightly better results, but shutting down something they worked hard on might cost you more than you gain.

My first reaction was not agreement. It was resistance.

In my mind I was helping. I was not trying to take anything from the team, I was trying to save them time. I had the experience and I genuinely believed I was pointing them somewhere better. I thought the conversation should be about the quality of the strategy, not how it was delivered.

The more I sat with it, the more the truth of it sank in.

I started noticing that the moments when people were most engaged were not when I gave them the answer. They were when they were wrestling with a challenge and helping build the solution themselves. Even when their approach was not what I would have done, they took greater ownership because they had a hand in creating it.

I was not helping the way I thought I was. I had taken their energy and their ownership and shut it down, and in doing that I made them question whether I trusted them at all.

Surround yourself with people who tell you what you need to hear.

Not what you want to hear. That is the whole distinction, and most people get it backwards without ever deciding to.

It happens gradually. You share an idea and somebody pushes on it, and it is uncomfortable. You share it with somebody else and they say it sounds great, and that feels better. Over time you find yourself going to the second person first. Nobody chooses an echo chamber. People just keep choosing the easier conversation until they have built one.

The people who will tell you the truth are usually still there. They have just noticed you stopped asking.

And it works both ways. If you want people around you who will say the hard thing, you have to be someone it is safe to say hard things to. That part is entirely on you, and it is decided by how you react the first time somebody tries.

Why the first reaction is always resistance.

Feedback is hard to hear, and it is hardest when your intention was good. If you meant well, your mind treats the feedback as a misunderstanding rather than information.

That is worth knowing in advance, because the resistance is not a signal that the feedback is wrong. It is just what happens first. The useful part usually shows up an hour later, or the next morning, once you have stopped defending.

Which means the skill is not taking feedback gracefully in the moment. Almost nobody does that. The skill is not deciding anything while you are still defending.