You can watch this Meme Lesson on Feedback on YouTube.

Before any feedback conversation, there is a question most managers never ask.

Is this feedback accurate? Is this feedback fair? The question is simpler and more uncomfortable than either of those.

Am I, right now, in a state to deliver this?

You have just come out of a bad meeting.

You have not eaten since 7 am.

You are twenty minutes away from a deadline you are going to miss.

Your own boss has just said something you are still processing.

Your partner said something at breakfast that you are still processing.

Any one of these things will enter the feedback you are about to give — not as content, but as tone, sharpness, choice of examples, the specific adjectives that arrive, and the ones that did not.

The employee cannot separate the noise from the signal.

They receive the whole thing as a signal.

They assume the mood you are carrying is a measured response to their work.

It is not.

It is Thursday.

The discipline is not complicated.

Before you open your mouth, ask yourself honestly where you are speaking from.

If the answer is somewhere you would not want your feedback to travel from, postpone.

The cost of a delayed conversation is almost always lower than the cost of a contaminated one. 

The same feedback delivered on Monday morning and on Thursday afternoon will produce different responses — because it is, effectively, different feedback.

You are not holding your feedback back. You are waiting until the version you can give is actually about them.