On Feedback as a Radical Labor of Love

a conversation with the Queen of Boundaries

Art by A. Cohen

Last Monday’s post left off with: Should POCA Tech (or any acupuncture school) be guiding students toward working on themselves? And if so, what should that look like? Here, as promised, is a conversation with the leader of POCA Tech’s Student Circle (otherwise known as the head of student government — which at POCA Tech is more than a symbolic position, there’s real work involved). Let’s call this person “the Queen of Boundaries” because they’ve earned it.

In the most recent meeting of POCA Tech’s General Circle, you brought up what I thought was an excellent, thoughtful suggestion about something the school could work on, based on your prior experience in art school.

My art school worked on establishing what I would call “a culture of feedback” where students were expected to give each other critiques of their work. In a critique setting, all the students present their finished pieces (usually by hanging them on the wall) and the rest of the class responds to the work in the form of open conversation. This aims to addresses if the artist is meeting conceptual, aesthetic, and/or material objectives that they set out to create.

It's not a time to just plaster compliments on each other, it's time to really tell people what you think. Artists can have an intention — be trying to do one thing, but the execution can really flop! Even a painting made with intentions for purely aesthetic value can be extremely political in certain contexts. It's super important to have these types of conversations in art school, because most art is trying to achieve something...So, does it??

It's a unique type of gauntlet that is necessary in order to become self critical and objective about the ideas and craft you're bringing to the table. Without those conversations, the environment would be much less challenging and produce far worse artwork. It can be rather brutal, but I'd rather know that my drawing reminds someone of a turd than be deluded to think I'm doing a great job. Art school keeps you pretty humble I think, even though it can be a nepotistic bubble at times. It keeps most students from believing they're ultra geniuses and puts you though a rock tumbler of do-better, try-harder. It was pretty awesome to see how students committed to stepping up their skills and effort.

As a student, you’ve given feedback to your peers and also to faculty about interactions they’ve had with you. And I know there have been challenging moments — I’m thinking of one example where you were a patient in the student clinic, and the intern that you saw didn’t respond appropriately in the moment to some things that came up. You could have taken the easy option of just not booking with that intern again, but instead you invested the time and effort to talk to them about what happened.

We’ve spoken a lot in our Leadership Praxis classes about how being a leader is just a role that has specific tasks. Likewise, being a punk has its own set of tasks with their own logic. Being a skilled, trauma informed community punk consists of practicing a set of concepts which translate into a million big and little tasks. The way we practice community acupuncture is akin to a ritual, with variables — pretty much always the same order to how and why we do what we do, with options along the way according to what the patient needs as long as it's within our scope of practice and safety parameters.

The way I see it, as acupuncture students, we have a unique vantage point. When we sit as patients to receive treatments from our classmates, we can identify where the holes are in the treatment ritual — where there may need to be more consideration given in specific areas. As students, we spend so much time with each other, and I think it can be easy to forget or disregard the need for POCA Tech's standard of trauma informed care, to treat everyone as if they potentially have trauma, to be able to adjust treatment as necessary, and to be fully present and believe the patient no matter what they tell us about their experience. Just because you know someone and are friendly with someone doesn't mean you stop practicing safety. But it happens, and things can go unexpectedly sideways.

And usually, the only remedy for that is to talk about it. (Which, by the way, is a subset of practicing leadership.)

As the head of the Student Circle, and as someone who has encountered my own boundary hardships, I have had multiple students come to me with issues that were resolved with the solution "You need to directly tell the person that what they did was not OK with you, and why."

It makes sense why we would all be hesitant to lead with that solution, even though it's the one that makes the most sense 9/10 times when dealing with boundary issues. Most of our American culture, and I think maybe even more so Pacific NW culture, does not encourage direct communication. People want a compliment sandwich and to be told, "Well it's good but this part needs improvement." Why not just be able to say, "Hey that wasn't great for me!" or "I'm not so sure about if that thing you did actually aligns with the ethics of our organization, let's explore that" without much fear that the receiver is going to turn to dust with denial or deflection.

Most people are not taught how to receive any kind of feedback or criticism with emotional resiliency, because any time we are told we did something wrong there is always so much shame attached. That at the core we are bad, or stupid, or inept. Most of us cannot separate our actions and decisions from our core being. Like, How dare you notice I did something wrong!

Personally, I tend to get punished or labeled as a problem just from expressing my honest thoughts and feelings, or even observations. It's disheartening. That conditions us all to be quieter and discourages peer learning. It makes people like, scared limp vegetables... I'm just not a cheerleader for that kind of culture. How are we going to become better practitioners in a learning-centered environment if people are too afraid of each other to give honest feedback? Our school is so small that I have a lot of faith that the culture can shift in an intentional way and we can implement a structure to give and receive critical feedback. We can't rely on our patients in clinic to directly tell us if something in the treatment was kind of weird, they just won't come back.

My vision is for POCA Tech to learn and practice how to give and receive feedback with tact and compassion, as a radical labor of love for each other's growth and learning goals.

Art by A. Cohen

I think this is a fantastic suggestion. It’ll take work to implement but it will be worth it — particularly in terms of preparing people for either having their own small business or working in somebody else’s.

I was a creative freelancer for 10 years before I started at POCA Tech. In that time, I learned to pay close attention to boundaries and to never to immediately say yes to a project. When someone approached me with potential work, I would send a whole bunch of questions first! How many hours, indoors or outdoors, what's the budget, dress code, lunch breaks, who provides transportation, will the materials be ready on site or do I need to shop for them and if no will you be paying my hourly for sourcing? How long after job completion do checks get cut and what is the address of the office for the employer, is there overtime, is the space heated? if I'm using my car are you paying a daily rental or just gas mileage? And on and on. I learned not to get myself into situations without getting lots of information first, because it was easier for people to take advantage of me and my labor.

Nobody was going to advocate for me, because I was my own HR.

That is such an important point. In most small businesses, especially micro-businesses which are the most common in the acupuncture profession, there’s nothing like a formal HR department. You really have to be prepared to have clear, honest, sometimes difficult conversations with people you work with — which includes your employer (if you have one). Not to mention, sometimes your patients too. There’s no avoiding the need to navigate boundaries and so the more we can support people to learn and practice these skills while they’re in school, the better.

A majority of my freelance work was based on relationships and networks of community. Reputation is really important. It could be scary to stand up for myself, because what if they regarded me as "not a team player" or "adversarial". There was always an element of precarity there. Both knowing and communicating the bandwidth of my skills, energy, and time, I was able to forge a good reputation for myself (hard working, reliable, quality craftsmanship, communicative). It was pretty important not to overextend myself in those ways, because it could mean over-promising, being too tired to do good work, etc. I think the key word here is integrity, which I value and try my best to model for others.

It takes a really long time to build up the skills into know-how to exert your boundaries in a professional way. I'm certainly not perfect at it and I've definitely made some mistakes along the way. And I continue to learn every day, but it gets much easier, the more I practice. I work from a place that assumes that everyone is trying to be on the same page, but we can never truly know what is going on in somebody else's head — so alongside asking a lot of questions I show and tell people how to treat me by using boundaries. That doesn't just consist of gossiping to my coworker about how a boss treats me badly, I put my money where my mouth is and if the boss is treating me poorly, I let them know. Then if I have to, I quit. My tolerance is pretty low for mistreatment, and I think everyone’s should be. That's not to say I'm hyper vigilant at all time or ultra reactionary, but if I communicate a boundary to someone more than a couple times and they continue not to listen, I'm checking out. I have the privilege to do that, to not stay in abusive situations — but I understand a lot of people don't. It can be really hard and tricky to advocate for ourselves in both work and interpersonal relationships — unfortunately a lot of it comes down to personal resources. Not just financial but emotional, too.

Art by A. Cohen

In any case, I think future acupuncturists need to learn to take up space in this way because if we are working for ourselves and creating our clinics, there will always be people who want to test the boundaries in the limits of the container that we have created.

I can testify that this is true for every acupuncture clinic I’ve ever heard of. It’s human nature, so it’s inevitable.

Being a student, too, leaves space to mess up and be able to have more open learning experiences that are maybe lower stakes than glaring business mistakes in the day and age of cancel culture. Likewise, students practicing boundaries and consent is just a great muscle to build and helps with emotional resilience to have hard conversations. To not just hide from the hard stuff because it's heavy, scary, unpleasant. To get ultra nerdy for a second it's a real deep dive into embodying the concepts of yin and yang. There can't always be ultra positivity — that's fake.

Personally, I've become a real fan of establishing protocols and keeping to them. One of the tenets of trauma informed care is treating everyone the same, nobody gets special treatment. So in my book that means not making exceptions, because all of a sudden you could be making exceptions all over the place and before you know it, I imagine that you could no longer have a firm handle on your practice or are expending a lot of needless energy doing all sorts of bespoke dances for anyone who walks in the door. No thanks, I don't do chaos. Some people thrive in it, but chaos is not conducive to safety.

It’s also not conducive to inclusion. The more inclusive you want your practice to be, the more structure and organization (and boundaries) you need to have. I think this is often a surprise to people about community acupuncture — it looks informal, in some ways it is, but it doesn’t work at all without tons of structure and boundaries and intentionality.

At POCA Tech we’re taught to create and uphold the container for creating a space for healing with acupuncture, and 1000 bespoke dances is not part of that repertoire. Like, somebody who comes over an hour late to every appointment even if we have a packed schedule. Or somebody who always brings 5 family members with them at the very end of the shift without scheduling, when you're expecting to leave. What are the boundaries there? You've told us about how patients would say all the time, Well this place is great EXCEPT FOR this little thing I don't like... Or Why Don't You Just... Or I wish you guys would.... But they don't see behind the curtain and know how the sausage gets made, they aren't considering the big picture or the structural elements of implementing the Little Thing — but we do know! It is really important to decide who I am going to be; who I am; what I'm doing, and stick to it.

I think that’s a great answer to the question of whether POCA Tech should encourage students to work on themselves — when it comes to practicing skills that are crucial to small business success, like navigating boundaries and giving and receiving feedback, absolutely yes. Also making peace with inevitable mistakes and learning curves — other people’s as well as your own. I’m looking forward to exploring this further.