Not as advice, but more an inspiration..

Being straightforward with feedback is most often helpful to both parties than beating around the bush to make the person feel okay.

When I started my masters program I was trying to find interesting research projects to work on to eventually write my thesis about. My advisor is a pleasure to work with because he listens and tells me what I _need_ to hear to my face. He once said “You’ve spent too much time on this and the results show they are close to useless or if no value towards your goal. I think you should stop spending your time on this and look at X instead.”. I felt sad and disappointed for two hot minutes, but then I clearly moved on to what eventually became my masters thesis.

Halfway into the program, my advisor quit and I took up another advisor, and he was the opposite wherein I always get soft feedback and spend weeks more effort only to realise that he meant to say it was not worth it.

I took that as a lesson to always be straight with my feedback for people I work with.