Feedback Thoughts

Feed back, in my opinion, is critical to the learning process. It is important to know what things you do very well and what things you can improve on. Having both positive and negative feedback help you evolve and adapt as in individual both in your work life and personal life. Positive feed back is great because it makes you feel more confident in your abilities and lets you know that you're on the right track. Negative feedback and constructive criticism are equally as important as positive feedback if not more so. Receiving constructive criticism gives you the opportunity to re-evaluate yourself and work on changing something to become a better version of yourself within a specific environment. Having grown up in the world of competitive sports until college, I've grown accustomed to constructive criticism and learned to use it to my advantage as best I could however that does not mean it is easy to hear. Sometimes the criticisms were hard to deal with but it's important to keep reminding yourself that if you use the feedback constructively then you will reap more benefits.
Here I have found a couple articles that I felt were very helpful for me to consider regarding feedback:

Rewire Your Harshly Self-Critical Brain by Joel Almeida
Often when you're striving towards a goal and you happen upon a setback or a failure we dwell on that shortcoming for longer than we should. This article talks about resetting the way you perceive failures during your journey to complete a task. Instead of thinking about that time you screwed up, the article says you should instead focus on congratulating yourself for getting back up to continue on your original path to success. The author calls this process reality-based self-congratulation or REBS. Its goal is to help increase your respect for yourself and diminish the intensity of your inner critic. If you practice this method enough, you will begin to spend more time focusing on the  next important thing that exists in the present rather than on a mistake you made in the past.

Silence The Critical Voice In Your Head by Sabina Nawaz
As you may have guessed from the title, this article deals with deafening the criticisms that exist in your head. While I'm sure most of us have heard that we need to spend more time focusing on the positives and that the self is the hardest critic, this article said a couple things that I was able to really connect with. One thing that the article mentioned was that we should look for the positive. Immediately I thought: yeah, obviously, but what the article meant is that focusing on increasing our strengths is just as important as focusing on minimizing our faults. A second piece of information that I found particularly enlightening discussed the way in which we receive feedback. It said that often times when receiving feedback we don't start taking notes until we begin to hear the negatives but it is important to remember that taking notes on what went right is just as important. After reading that, I knew it was something I have been guilty of numerous times.

I hope you all have found some things in your research that were just as beneficial to you as these couple of articles were to me! I plan on implementing these strategies in the future with the hope of decreasing stress and increasing self-respect and productivity.

A visual representation of your inner confidence. Found on flickr.