For years I thought you showed your intelligence when you knew the answers. Then, I hired Baine Strickland as my coach. He told me your answers do not show your intelligence, but your wise questions do. He probably said that seven or eight times before I bought it.
That was important and powerful feedback. It was one of many pieces of feedback Blaine gave me that improved my business and my life.
Effective Feedback Changes Lives
Effective feedback can be a terrific, life-changing gift. Effective feedback can help you and those you care about live a life worth imitating. Effective feedback can help you improve your self-awareness. It can promote continuous learning, encourage accountability, and even improve relationships.
Feedback works when both the person who receives it and the provider of feedback are focused and motivated to benefit and improve the receiver.
Give Good Feedback
When done well, feedback does not condemn or demean but tells or reminds of a way to achieve better results. Unfortunately, many of us have experienced or done feedback as a reprimand or a punishment.
Give feedback on both good and bad things. Praise is a form of feedback and one of the strongest motivators.
Give feedback right away. That way, memory is fresh, and any change will come sooner.
Describe the behavior that should change without using adjectives. That lowers the emotional temperature and will help the recipient hear and evaluate the feedback.
You must include specific details about what could be improved and an example or demonstration of what could be done or said to bring better results. Feedback can inspire if it points to how better performance can matter. The receiver must believe that improvement is or can be within their capacity.
When You Get Feedback
A song by Tim McGraw describes how I often think when I get feedback. The title is Better Than I Used to Be, and it includes these lines.
I ain’t as good as I’m gonna get
But I’m better than I used to be
My pride can get in the way when someone tells me how I can improve. I want to throw those lines back at them. I m thinking, Leave me alone; I ve already progressed a lot. It s hard to benefit from feedback if you think that way.
A friend likes to say, All feedback is a gift. Some is useful. You can t tell what feedback is useful if the feedback has an emotional sting.
All feedback is a gift, so say, Thank you. Don t argue. Don t lash out. Just say, Thank you. Sort out the useful parts later when you re not emotionally engaged. Then, you can use the helpful feedback to get better.
It’s a Lifelong Quest
You re never done improving. Too many of us stop improving too soon. As a kid, I read stories about people who stopped just a little too quickly and walked away from a mine. Another person became independently wealthy by going just a bit further. It would be a pity to settle for mediocrity when excellence might be so close.
You can almost always improve in any area you choose. Don t believe you re as good as you can get. A better attitude is I am not great at X, YET. Feedback is a challenge to stretch.
Sometimes, people come to you for advice or counsel. That means they recognize your progress. In my vanity, I have gotten swell-headed and paused from getting better. Maybe you ve heard the saying, If you re green, you re growing; if you re ripe, you re rotting. Feedback from others can help you get back to growing again.
It s a potent risk. Many of us are delayed, distracted, or have stopped on our improvement journey because of our self-image or identity.
Be Realistic and Pursue Progress
The point is not that we should aim to be the best in the world at everything. Only a foolish egotist would have that delusion. But we can improve by giving ourselves feedback.
Ben Franklin developed a system to help himself improve. He identified thirteen things to work on and recorded his performance every day. Every week, he chose one of his improvement areas for special emphasis.
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, takes a more reasonable approach. Aim for tiny improvements each day. You decide which few things are worth extra effort for now. Next year, you may seek different targets. Let s remember to have worthy targets.
Billions of people can be fabulous at tasks that are hard for me. My job is to fulfill my calling. We need each other. None of us are entirely independent, and we don t want to let down the people who count on us.
Cut yourself some slack. Go for steady, sustainable improvement. We don t need to be perfect.
To have a significant legacy, we only need to be the person we can become.
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So, what are a couple of ways that your life is far better because of loving feedback?
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Terry Moore, CCIM, is the author of Building Legacy Wealth: How to Build Wealth and Live a Life Worth Imitating. Read his “Welcome to My Blog.”