It still sucks to be on the receiving end of genuine surprise. I found the most helpful reframing is to replace the words and emotions with ones that encourage

It still sucks to be on the receiving end of genuine surprise. I found the most helpful reframing is to replace the words and emotions with ones that encourage learning and question-asking. For example you can try being excited instead of surprised, or say something like, "that's a great question, let's figure it out together." Going through the Fermi estimation in the xkcd comic Ten Thousand also helped me to be a lot less genuinely surprised when someone didn't know something: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/