Have you made a habit of asking for feedback regularly yet? If you don’t know what I’m talking about look back at the post I wrote a few months ago Ask For Feedback Regularly.
Why is feedback so important?
Let’s take an example of something easy to relate to. If you get on the dreaded bathroom scale, you know how much you weigh. You have more information. Before that, you may have noticed your pants were getting a little tight. But once the scale gives you the feedback, you have more information. Even if you know your scale is a little off, you still know more than you did before. You can then decide what, if anything, you want to do with the information.
So feedback is valuable information. That’s it! It’s simply information. If the information is coming from another person, it’s information from the other person’s perspective. In other words it’s what they perceive, their opinion, what they think, how they feel, it may even be their truth.
The really great thing about it is, you have more information. You know what people are thinking. And if you don’t get feedback from people, you can only guess what they might be thinking.
Stop a minute and re-read those last two paragraphs. I’ll wait.
Ok good. Stay with me here. This is really important stuff. Knowing what other people are thinking really matters, because you don’t see yourself in the same way that other people see you. None of us do. It’s like we have a built in spam filter on autopilot in our brains. If we hear information that makes us feel good about ourselves we automatically whitelist it in our brains. After all, who doesn’t want to bask in a little glory?
But if your internal spam filter is too aggressive, it may be filtering out information that you need in order to be more successful. Or it may be filtering out information that you should at least save for later use. In the worst-case scenario, it could be filtering out information that you need to know now! In other words, you’re in the dark about what other people are thinking.
Here’s the coolest thing about whitelisting feedback. You get to decide what to do with the information! You get to decide how you feel about it. And you get to decide what, if anything, you’re going to do with it.
That’s right! Feedback is only a big old scary vampire if you make it that way. If you create a big old scary vampire in your head and let it suck out your self-esteem, it’ll do just that. If instead you think of it as another morsel of information you dig out of a search engine, you can decide to bookmark it for later use, delete it or take action on it now. Either way, you have more information and that alone, gives you the power to make conscious choices and decisions.
If you’re serious about becoming more successful than you are today, whitelist feedback and ask for it regularly. Create your own Google search with real people. Get them to tell you things like…what you’re doing well, what you could do better, what you should change. You want to uncover as much information as you can so you can make the best possible decisions.
Stay tuned for, How To Receive Feedback The Easy Way.
