Defend your strategy, just not while your blood pressure's up
Nobody lists “got hard feedback and didn’t get defensive” on their LinkedIn.
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My eyes start to burn.
Dry and hot, like an allergy attack rolling in. It happens in one very specific situation: someone is giving me feedback I don’t want to hear, and part of me has already decided they’re wrong.
If you lead a growth team, you know the triggers.
The exec who questions your strategy in front of everyone. The CEO who asks you to “look into” why a number dipped, in a tone that says they’ve already drawn their own conclusion. The board member with a “quick question” that derails everything. Your heart picks up. You’ve got the rebuttal loaded before they’ve finished the sentence.
For years I thought the goal was to control that reaction. Get calmer. Keep a straighter face. Become the kind of person who doesn’t flinch.
I had it backwards.
I got into this with Rex Gelb on the podcast this week, and it’s probably my favorite 5 minutes of the whole conversation.
Rex has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads. He runs a paid media agency called Summit Chase and builds the performance marketing team at Cursor. He’s scaled teams from “just me” to dozens of people.
And along the way, he’s been on the receiving end of a lot of feedback.
And he described his own version of the burning eyes feeling. For him, it’s his blood pressure. He can feel it climb. Somewhere along the way he stopped treating that feeling like a problem and started treating it like information.
Watch the full conversation here:
When Rex feels his blood pressure rise, he runs the same play every time. Shut up. Listen. Say thanks for the feedback. Then come back 24 hours later.
Instead of trying to win the moment, or defend his point of view, he gets himself out of it.
After he sleeps on it, he usually still thinks he was right about part of it. But there’s almost always a piece they got right too. The trouble is you can’t tell which piece is which in the moment while your blood is up. Because when you’re in the moment, you’re 99% sure you’re right about all of it.
Rex told a specific story that stuck with me.
Before working at HubSpot, he came from a hardcore direct-response world where the only thing that mattered was return on ad spend. So when he started running ads at HubSpot, he assumed it would be the same playbook.
He ran a paid ad campaign with a headline he described as not illegal, not unethical, but maybe pushing it a little bit.
And that headline crushed. He was smashing his goals.
But later, his boss looked under the hood of the campaign, found that headline, and called a “we need to talk” sit-down.
The feedback was simple: we can’t do that here.
That feedback is hard to take because the ad worked… really well! The numbers were great. And he was still getting pulled aside and told to stop. But the note wasn’t really about that one headline. Rex was learning that HubSpot cared about brand in a way his old employers never had. Where he came from, the only scoreboard was return on ad spend.
At HubSpot, the wrong headline could become a screenshot on TechCrunch with the company’s name on it.
So he had a choice. The fast, decisive move was to dig in and explain why he was right. Instead, he took the note and retooled how he ran ads to fit the culture of how this company made decisions. And he got better for it. By the time he left HubSpot, he was the one giving the presentations on what they do (and don’t do) in ads. The feedback he could have fought became something he taught everyone else.
Most of us learn these lessons the hard way.
Being right isn’t the whole game. If the way you operate is out of step with how your company makes decisions, you can be completely correct and not be effective. The win comes from slowing down long enough to hear what you’re being told, not from proving your point on the spot.
And you can’t slow down while your heart’s pounding and your blood pressure’s climbing.
When your first move is to fire back, the person across from you stops hearing your point. As Rex put it, their read shifts to “okay, so he’s not hearing me,” and then to “okay, so I can’t work with this guy.”
Even when you turn out to be right, fighting in the moment marks you as hard to work with.
The room remembers how you reacted long after it forgets whether you were right. And being hard to work with is its own ceiling: it caps people who are otherwise excellent at the job, and they rarely find out that’s the reason.
It’s not just live conversations, either. Rex gets the same feeling from email. A message lands that makes his blood boil, the tell kicks in, and he types out the furious reply he wants to send. Then he doesn’t send it. His rule, in his own words: “Rex, don’t hit send when you feel like that.”
So here’s the takeaway I keep coming back to, and the thing I’m still practicing. The feeling is the cue.
Your body flags the feedback worth sitting with before your ego will let you near it. Most people spend years trying to suppress that physical reaction. It might be the most reliable early-warning system you’ve got. Learn your tell. Then build one rule around it: when it fires, you don’t respond today.
So now, when my eyes start to burn, I try to remember it’s not an allergy. It’s the signal to close my mouth and open my calendar for tomorrow.
The full episode with Rex is live now. We also got into how he scaled himself out of being the bottleneck on his own team (and had to do it twice), and the strange little mind game he uses to make tough money calls. If you’re sitting in any of that right now, it’s worth the listen.
And if reading your own tell is the kind of thing you’re working on this year, that’s a lot of what I do with the leaders I coach: the unglamorous skills nobody teaches.
Learn more here.