Feedback Thoughts

Feedback is a very important factor in order to improve ourselves. However, giving and getting feedback may be hard for some people to do. For me, getting feedback is my weakness. After reading two articles, "Silence the Critical Voices in Your Head" by Sabina Nawaz and "Why Rejection Hurts So Much - And What to Do About It" by Guy Winch, I learned a little more on how to deal with receiving negative feedback. In Sabina Nawaz's article, she suggests about focusing on the positive feedback and magnifying and believing in it to overpower any negative ones. In Guy Winch's article, he discusses on the tendency to feel rejected at feedback. No matter what we do, many people tend to focus on small negative comments whether they came from other people or came from our own minds. If we force ourselves to hear out positives instead, we'll be able to focus on improving as well. In terms of giving feedback, the two articles I read over that are: "7 Key Characteristics of Better Learning Feedback" by Grant Wiggins and Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback" by Marshall Goldsmith. In Grant Wiggin's article, he discusses and expands his seven characteristics of good feedback to help improvement. The most important one, in my opinion, is that it must be "actionable," meaning that the feedback must have a specific, manageable points for improvement. It cannot be "good job!" or "you did that wrong" because those do not provide any helpful information at all. In terms of usefulness, Marshall Godlsmith's article is my favorite. He talks about the benefits of giving feedforward instead of feedback. By giving feedfoward advice, you do not criticize a person for what they have done; rather, you talk to the person about what they could do in the future, eliciting better, more positive reactions and more effective results.

Feedback