Flailing with Feedback?
Welcome to an Olympian’s Perspective on…
How to approach and utilize FEEDBACK in order to turn “flailing” into “thriving”..
Let’s talk about feedback. I personally love feedback. (Yep, LOVE it! Good, bad, ugly, I love it). But I’ve learned that most people don’t have this relationship with it.
It’s almost as if feedback is the one crazy Aunt that you see at every family get together, who you love yet still avoid as often as possible. If you catch her in a good mood, she is incredibly intelligent, offers a lot of helpful insights on life, and makes you feel like you can accomplish anything. But... in the bad moods, she makes you feel like a loser. She's opinionated, sticks her nose in things that don’t concern her, and nothing is ever good enough for her.
You feel me?
Feedback tends to make people uncomfortable. But, (you may as well wrap your head around this now), if you don’t love feedback you are MISSING OUT.
Ever since I was a kid, I embraced and thrived off of feedback. I saw it as my #1 tool to making improvements to my skating so that I could achieve the goals I had for myself. And because all I ever really wanted was to become better, I learned to make feedback work for me. Simple.
But as I started skating pairs, I began to realize that my relationship with feedback wasn’t shared by everyone. My partner and I handled feedback in two verydifferent manners, and while neither were “right” or “wrong”, throughout the 9 years of working intimately together -every single day- I was able to see first-hand how feedback can either promote growth, or be suffocating.
Here are few things that I’ve since realized, were/are foundational pieces to my positive and productive way of utilizing feedback:
1) Feedback should only be allowed to make an impact on your life if it’s coming from someone that yougive that power to. This is the single most important key to utilizing feedback in a positive matter. You must ask yourself, “is this feedback coming from someone I trust, respect or need to work with?”. If the answer is yes, continue on to the rest of my points, if the answer is no, walk away from it. Unsolicited feedback, especially from an untrusted source, is simply an opinion- and, well, you know the saying... “opinions are like assholes- everyone has one and some of them stink”.
2) Feedback is given to HELP you. If you’ve decided that the person delivering the feedback to you is worth listening to, you must try to remember that their intention with whatever they share with you, is meant to help you. This is important to remember because a lot of people are terrible at delivering feedback. Hell, a lot of people struggle with just communicating well in general! They may use the “wrong” words, say things that are difficult to hear or make you feel emotional.
Feedback’s intent is to make you perform better, but that doesn’t mean it will always make you feel good. Sometimes the things we need to hear are the most difficult.
I’ve found that if I listen to what people are trying to say (focusing on the fact that their intentions are to help me) rather than simply listening to exactly what comes out of their mouths, I can learn a lot (even from the toughest, rudest, most offensive feedback).
3) The power in feedback lies in what you do with it.Feedback is neither good nor evil. Emotions, feelings, and misunderstandings aside, feedback simply is what it is.
If you take nothing else away from this article, I hope you remember this: you get to decide what you do with the feedback you are given.What I’m talking about here, is transforming feedback into “feedforward”. This is when you take what you’ve been told you could do better (AKA what you did wrong), and turn it into actionable steps to make improvements. Rather than focusing on what you did poorly -which is easy to get hung up on- focus on how you can use this information to your advantage. Focus on the future.
Sometimes this involves asking clarifying questions, or asking for further input so you can better understand the feedback. Sometimes this just involves taking your ego and/or emotions out of the equation. The point is, you are in controlof where the feedback takes you, by controlling what you want to do with it.
Thriving with feedback isn’t rocket-science. It’s actually quite simple. It just means that you have to repeatedly make the decision to see feedback as a useful resource, and then treat it accordingly.