Make Me Better — Using Feedback To Orientate Our Next Steps
By: Rowan Blair Colver
Tags: Leadership, Feedback, Communication, Mentorship

We had a great idea and we put it into practice, things are moving along pretty well. We’ve done a lot of hard work and made a lot of good connections. It feels like we’ve made great progress and yet there is still a tunnel with a light we are trying to reach. Sometimes we can’t see the light and we don’t know where to turn. Often the problem isn’t big enough to immediately know and your ideas and effort are really worthwhile. This can be where we get lost because we have been listening to ourselves for so long. Perhaps it’s time to start listening to others for a change. We had to ignore them as we heard catastrophism and detraction from all sides. Now though, it’s clear that our achievements are real and we have results better than many expected. We have to try again with this ask the audience principle we gave up on not so long ago.

Ask your circle about you and your work, invite them to flex their muscle and show what they are made of. You can try opening the door on subjects such as these.

Out with it! What are you dying to say but worried I won’t like it? If we can be prepared for cutting remarks and heartless comments by inviting them in, it’s a shortcut to vital improvements. Even if we don’t agree it can be certain that at least a fraction of people thinks it about you. This being said we can make contingency plans or improvements to minimise these unfair appraisals.

Word association games really help. What other people think of when you are the subject, no matter how strange, can be a useful insight into your particular symbolism and image. We can draw on these iconic and abstract principles as well as the matter of fact adjectives people make use of to design what we pay attention to and how we deliver our work.

What do you feel I am not aware of or not paying enough attention to? Sometimes we have vocational and personal blind-spots where we either avoid or don’t sense the value in particular aspects. These can be vital or imperative things that make our focus and direction the most effective. It might be that no-one ever told us or that we have an affiliation for a particular style that’s not working well in this new situation or without the intricate knowledge required to pull it off, sometimes we can’t see the obvious or the essential. Others often can, especially those in the same line of work as you.

What am I good at? You already know these answers but finding out from the perception of another might be surprising. You could find that people can put into a phrase a skill you have that you had never truly defined before. People might see a skill or strength in you that you hadn’t even considered. Then again, you may never hear the magic words that belong to your training and expertise. What if, despite your best efforts, no-one knows you’re great at those things you spent a lot of time and probably money on being great at?

This leads on to communication. How am I at putting my skills and abilities across? You might have been given a clue with your previous question about skills. Communication doesn’t go as far as skills, though, it goes much further. The way we communicate determines who can make the most of what we have to offer. It also determines how we get the most out of what we offer, too. If communication is not your primary role then it will be a major one, no matter what you do. Getting the point across in a way that encourages positivity and results is a skill in itself.