FeedBack Thoughts

What is Feedback?

"Feedback is defined as a return of information about a result or the returned portion of a process. An example of feedback is a judge in a dance competition giving constructive criticism after a performance". I think feedback can be both good & bad, I think it really depends who is giving the feedback and what your own opinion of your work is. It’s the worst feeling ever when you believe your piece of work is the best that you have ever done and then someone gives you negative feedback, but that is all a part of life.

When you look back over your many years as a student, what are the most productive feedback experiences you can remember? 

As a college student the best feedback experiences that I have had would be when we either had one to one feedback sessions, this makes it more personal and lets you understand why you are been given certain feedback and also when we would give peer feedback.

The first article I read was "Seven ways to crush self-doubt" - 

http://www.spencerauthor.com/seven-ways-to-crush-self-doubt/

I am definitely guilty of self-doubting myself especially on my design work, not thinking it is good enough and that it could be better. This was an interesting read for me because of this and I found it very useful! The seven ways to crush self-doubt according to this article are as follows;

1. Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

2. Abandon Perfectionism

3. Be Vulnerable to a Trusted Community.

4. Embrace a Growth Mindset

5. Set Goals that are within your control.

6. Treat Your Work Like an Experiment.

7. Trust Yourself

These are amazing ways to learn how to not doubt yourself, I will be looking back on this blog post to remind myself of these. It’s so hard sometimes not to compare yourself to others especially with college, without us even realising we compare our work to others work at presentations or when a lecturer is showing someone’s work off. But it is important that we try not to compare ourselves to others as everyone’s work will be different. Number 2 is my favourite as I believed for too long that perfection was real and now know that there is no such thing as "perfect". In school I used to try to be perfect, have all of my work be perfect until a teacher told me that I was striving for perfection and that this wasn’t achievable. I know remember this while doing any type of work that it does not have to be perfect to be good. All of these ways are equally important when doing work inside or outside of college especially the last one to trust yourself!

The next article that I read was "Why it’s so hard to hear negative feedback" -

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/smarter-living/why-its-so-hard-to-hear-negative-feedback.html

Giving negative feedback can be hard enough but when you are on the receiving end it is even harder !! Even if it is constructive criticism no one wants to hear a bad word said about their work but it’s important in the process and we learn from this. In the article it says the key to giving and receiving negative feedback is to trust that everyone is participating in good faith, no one wants to upset you or talk about your work in a negative space, they are only giving you feedback to help you, this is important to remember.

The article reminds you that feedback is only there to make you work harder and to improve from this feedback & to not sulk and moan when you get this negative feedback, alternatively hold your head up high, take on board what feedback was given and move on and improve ! I think we all take negative feedback badly from time to time and this article has definitely helped me and reminded me that the people who give you that negative feedback are only doing it to help you out.

Image Sourced Online From Pinterest- https://www.pinterest.com/pin/482377810076204039/
Image Caption- The image is of a bunch of keys with a quote written in white on top, the image reads, Feedback is the Key to improvement.