Feedback Thoughts

As a person who is already overly self-critical, feedback can be scary. I have always been told that feedback is just a chance to improve, but it is still difficult to accept that it is not the same thing as negative criticism that implies I have failed. Reading "A Simple 5-Second Habit to Rewire Your Harshly Self-Critical Brain" gave me a wonderful tool to use for dealing with feedback, which is "REBS" (reality-based self-congratulation). It mentions treating yourself for every small step you take, and picking yourself back up after dealing with a setback. I hope to apply this to feedback by not allowing comments to get me down but instead realizing that it is only there to help me. By congratulating myself for the small steps, I feel like I will grow in confidence and be able to better deal with criticism. The other article, "Seven Ways to Crush Self-Doubt in Creative Work," mentioned problems that I struggle with and know I need to solve. The one that stuck out to me the most was that you should not compare yourself to others. This just creates more self-doubt that does not do anything good for anyone. It can make you jealous and arrogant, and it can end up hurting both you and other people.

It can be easy to avoid or ignore feedback. What I have found, though, is that when I do this, I end up missing out on opportunities to be even prouder of my work. Feedback gives us the opportunity to see our work in a new light. Oftentimes we become close-minded with our work because we have spent too much time around it. We become limited to only what our brains allow us to see. Feedback helps us to cut down our time on our work: rather than having to put our work away for a day when we can look at it with fresh eyes, we can instead have someone look at it with their already-fresh perspective.

Over my years as a student, the most productive feedback experiences I can remember are the gentle and inspired ones. Many times, this would be feedback given by a teacher or peer I greatly admire.  Their comments on my writing or project would be encouraging and positive, but they would also add in suggestions that were kindly worded and sounded excited about my topic. They would avoid any kind of judgemental tone or wording, and they would always seem genuinely interested in the subject matter. The most negative feedback experiences I have had were ones that were obviously meant to be hurtful and embarrassing towards me, with harsh words and nothing positive to say at all (it's no wonder I'm so self-critical and a perfectionist after traumatic situations like that!). Feedback that has helped me grow as a learner at work, sports, and hobbies have been very hands-on. Rather than telling me what to do, the person I worked with would show me and work with me until I got the idea.

I absolutely love that this course is set up to separate a number from feedback. As a student, it is so easy to not even care about what feedback says when you can just look at what grade you got. We do not learn and grow from experiences like that, and I am so glad that this course recognizes that. Now I can focus on improving my writing for myself rather than a better number/letter/percentage.


(Image information: The Specter of Failure by Grant Snider)