Feedback

Good Morning Brilliant and Excellent People,

I look forward to sharing with you Brilliant and Excellent tips for attaining your goals and fulfilling your Purpose.

Today, I will share a thought on the need for feedback.

I had an experience one time in which I bought an expensive shirt. The shirt was not just expensive but very fashionable. I wore this shirt from time to time as it was one of my very best.  Of course, the regular washing of the shirt made it faded and I had no idea until one day, I wore this shirt to a friend’s place. He observed it and said to me, ‘why are you wearing an “expensive faded shirt”?’

As usual, we joked about it and laughed it off. But when I returning home, I gave it a thought and decided to give the shirt to my guard. When my guard wore the shirt the next day, I suddenly realise that the joke was true.

What was interesting was that I didn’t realise this for so long until it was out of my space.

Lesson Learnt?

First, we need to give people the opportunity to give feedback on us. Just by ourselves, we don’t see the shortcomings we need to work on.

In this experience I gave, it is a shirt, other times, it is our performance that is faded, our character strength, our work performance and in some cases our relationships.

Think about it, what is the single most important thing in life closely linked to personal development? Feedback. Yes, feedback. Feedback is critical to improving performance and increasing productivity. Within our space many times, we don’t see the corrections that needs to be made. I often proofread documents and sometimes I still read over the simple errors again and again because I projected my mind into it.

Effective and timely feedback is very important to growth. Timely because some errors cannot be undone. Imagining having to re-write several pages of an article or re-do a presentation because of what was or wasn’t omitted. Imagining losing a contract for simple errors that can be avoided, Imagining projecting yourself poorly for a faded character strength that needs to be updated. For many reasons we need feedback and we need to give people the opportunity to give us feedback.

It is true that it matters who is giving the feedback. Human impression is mostly based on perception, experience or exposure and as a result can be biased. You don’t expect your junior colleagues to give you the same appraisal as your professional colleagues, in some cases, even your friends won’t give objective feedback.

The person who gives you feedback must be objective and sincere with his thoughts no matter how bad or good you may feel. The feedback must be aimed towards your development and not some get back word antics. It’s not a game of words or a competition of who does better or worse. It is an appraisal of strength and weaknesses, what has been observed, what can be done differently, what is working and what is not.

The second moral of the story is never to get attached to a phase in one’s life. In the experience I gave above, the shirt represented a phase in which everything was good and so good that you don’t want to let go. By phase, I mean a present condition in a person’s life. Often, we don’t realise how hanging on to something, no matter what it is, ruins us. We hang on to positions, to money, to prestige, to knowledge sometimes, to personal items, to a one time experience and refuse to let go and move ahead.  By refusing to let go, we close our eyes to the opportunities and better days that lies ahead.

The two lessons to take to heart in today’s write up is to learn to receive feedback and never get attached to a phase in which all you can see is yourself and nothing else. To increase your performance, you should take these things to heart.

Have a lovely week.