If you care about personal and professional growth, listening to and processing feedback is one of the most imporant things to focus on. Think of it as advice, but tailored to your situation. We've known about this for so long, but it can still be hard sometimes. Why?

Why it’s Hard

There's the surface stuff about listening to diffucult things, and that makes sense, but I've always wanted a deeper explanation.

It took me a few years to connect the dots here, but I just realized the answer to this question is from Games People Play by Eric Berne:

[...] every individual has had parents (or substitute parents) and that he carries within him a set of ego states that reproduce the ego states of those parents (as he perceived them), and that these parental ego states can be activated under certain circumstances (exteropsychic functioning). Colloquially: "Everyone carries his parents around inside of him."

Visually:

That's for one individual. Let's focus in on 1:1 conversations, and we can frame a conversation like this: