If you are aiming for perfection in your feedback conversations —good luck! Feedback conversations are often messy and imperfect. Your armour gets in the way! Emotions complicate things. Feedback conversations involve humans trying to communicate while experiencing human emotions and they occur within a variety of complex contexts and degrees of relationships.
Think of Feedback Fit conversations as a series of ongoing conversations in which, ideally, both parties have discussed and agreed on the process beforehand. Feedback is not a speech, or something you write a script for or rehearse and have only one chance at delivering perfectly. There is no perfect script.
Be kind to yourself when it comes to feedback conversations. Most feedback conversations, especially challenging ones, occur in private. Therefore, it is highly likely you have not been modelled any skills for having challenging feedback conversations (unless you were the recipient of the feedback and, in that case, you were probably not observing the framework used by the person offering that feedback)!
When your self-talk about offering feedback is not useful (for example, ‘Don’t stuff it up! Don’t stuff it up! This is my one chance to get this feedback right. It must not go badly!’) it is normal to experience fear if you perceive offering feedback to be dangerous. This type of thinking takes you into ‘all-or-nothing thinking’: ‘If I can’t offer this feedback perfectly, I won’t offer it at all.’