When I arrived at my law firm, I had one primary goal that had nothing to do with the practice of law.
I wanted to blend in.
I had worked hard enough to get there. I had earned the credential. But I also understood, in the way that first-generation professionals understand things without anyone having to say them directly, that there was a set of rules operating in that environment that I had not been taught. Rules about how to dress, how to speak, how to carry yourself in rooms full of people who had been raised for this world. I was worried about restaurant etiquette and place settings. I was worried about the things I did not know that I did not know.
That posture, the watchfulness, the constant calibration of how I was landing, made me very good at reading environments. It also made me acutely vulnerable to a specific kind of harm: absorbing other people’s feedback as though it were the truth about me.
My closest friend at the firm had arrived two years before I did. She was brilliant, Yale-trained, and from Miami, which meant she dressed the way Miami dresses: color, fit, confidence. She had worn a red skirt suit to the office and was told it was not appropriate. The suits were too fitted, too bright, not what the environment expected.
We went shopping together. That was not a question. I was going to support her, and we were both going to show up with the right armor. We bought dark suits, appropriate by any measure, and we moved on.
Looking back, that was a reasonable response to reasonable feedback. Dress codes in professional environments are a real thing. The feedback was worth integrating, and we integrated it without much internal conflict. We observed it, evaluated it, and acted on it.
That is not the same as absorbing it.
What happened next was different.
The Feedback I Did Not Integrate
I was told that I was too friendly with the staff.
My first response was shame. I had done something wrong. I had stood out in a way that was not positive, which was exactly the thing I had been trying to avoid. For someone who arrived at that environment already carrying the fear of being found out, any signal that you have violated a rule you did not know existed lands hard.
But then I thought about it.
I was the most junior person on the team. In those days, getting work out the door required staff. Letters, pleadings, courier deliveries, faxes. I was interacting with the secretaries, the paralegals, the people in the mailroom, the couriers constantly. And being warm and friendly with people you work alongside every day seemed, to me, like a basic expression of the values I had been raised with. I did not think I was better than the people around me. I was never going to behave as though I were.
So I started watching.
I paid attention to how other lawyers in the office interacted with the staff. How they spoke to the people who made their work possible. What they assumed, what they demanded, what they did not bother to acknowledge.
What I saw did not impress me.
Something shifted. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But something shifted.
I took that feedback. I understood what it was communicating about the environment and the people delivering it. I filed it away as information about how that institution operated and what it valued.
And then I did not change my behavior.
I did not stop being friendly with the staff.
Observe vs. Absorb
That distinction, between taking feedback and integrating it, is what SRA™ calls Observe vs. Absorb.
Observation means taking in information clearly, evaluating its source and its context, and deciding what it actually tells you. About the environment. About the person delivering it. About what is genuinely useful and what reflects someone else’s limitations, assumptions, or cultural expectations rather than anything true about you.
Absorption means letting that information become part of how you see yourself. Letting it confirm the fear you walked in with. Letting it change not just your behavior but your sense of what you are worth and where you belong.
First-generation professionals are particularly vulnerable to absorption, and the reason is not weakness. It is context. When you arrive in an elite institution already carrying the fear that you do not fully belong, every piece of critical feedback feels like evidence for a case that was already being built against you. The institution did not have to mean it that way. The feedback did not have to be malicious. The mechanism operates regardless of intent.
The suit feedback was worth integrating. It was reasonable information about a professional environment, and acting on it cost us nothing essential. The staff feedback was not worth integrating. It was information about an institutional culture that valued hierarchy over humanity, and internalizing it would have required giving up something real.
The skill is knowing the difference.
This Is Not About Rejection
This is not about rejecting feedback. The professional who dismisses everything as irrelevant because it comes from a flawed institution or a person they do not respect is not observing. They are defending. That posture has its own costs.
It is about putting feedback through a filter before deciding what it means and what to do with it.
Who is delivering this message, and do I respect their judgment enough to give it weight? What does this feedback actually tell me about the situation I am operating in? Is this something I should act on, something I should note, or something that says more about the person delivering it than it does about me?
Those questions do not come naturally when you are operating from a posture of fear. They require practice. They require having a strong enough foundation in your own sense of who you are that you can hold feedback at arm’s length long enough to evaluate it, rather than letting it land and immediately begin reshaping you.
That foundation is what SRA™ was built to create.
The professionals who advance in demanding environments are not the ones who absorbed everything they were told and remade themselves in the institution’s image. They are also not the ones who rejected every piece of feedback and blamed the system for every obstacle.
They are the ones who learned to observe clearly, decide deliberately, and integrate selectively.
That is the skill. And it is teachable.
