A NEW APPROACH TO FEEDBACK VALIDATION

For anyone who is out there trying to do something, put something out there, create something new, offer out their skills or expertise, feedback can be super alluring and super terrifying. It’s almost like we have this push pull relationship with feedback and validation that means we want it, but it also has the potential to crush us.

I want to talk about what feedback we actually need to get, how we interpret that wisely and how we can build resilience and wisdom about what feedback means.

I want you to scan back in your mind to a time when you received some tough feedback, maybe something that has lingered with you and become a belief you now have about yourself.

MY EXPERIENCE

I can vividly remember being 21 and living on my own in London. I was finishing up my youth work degree and my placement mentor had me over for dinner. After dinner we sat in their living room and they pulled out a piece of paper with a list of things they wanted to feed back to me about how poorly I was doing. They told me:

-        You are struggling to manage your money

-        You are struggling to prioritise your uni work

-        You are struggling with pulling your weight in the centre. 

-        You are struggling to stay grounded with your singing opportunities 

OH. MY GOD.

I was absolutely floored. And devastated. And SO embarrassed. Some of that stuff was probably true, but also I was 21. At university. In placement. In the biggest city I’d ever lived in London. I was getting a lot of singing opportunities at the time which was exciting for me. I was away from my family in Canada. Um, YEAH. Of course I was struggling with all of those things! Yeesh. It stung so hard and I was so overwhelmed by the casual setting and the heavy ‘pulling in’. The feedback was so hard to hear and for many years after, I heard that feedback ring over me in so many other roles I had.

“Am I sucking with money?”

“Am I pulling my weight here?”

“Am I being cocky?”

“Does everyone else think this about me…?”

What was one persons observation into a period of my life actually became a new set of beliefs about myself.

And with that set of beliefs became behaviours to try and counteract them or manage them.

People pleasing

Staying quiet more

Overdelivering

Burning out quickly

Sacrificing myself to the cause

Frugality to the point of punishment.

Does this ring any bells? Can you think of a time in your life or work that you have received feedback and it has become a belief about yourself?

It’s for this reason that I think it’s important that particularly as women, we begin to understand what feedback is, when it’s important, how we interpret it and how we can use it in the service of our own callings or aspirations rather than have it silence us or stop us from doing the things we would really love to do.

The idea isn’t to fob off or be cold and robotic towards criticism – shutting ourselves down. That’s totally unhuman, impossible, and unfair. We cannot deny the part of ourselves that wants to be seen, to be acknowledged, to matter to other people. We should honour that part of ourselves that desires respect and appreciation. And that is why it’s imperative that we begin to speak a new language and develop a new set of behaviours around feedback and validation.

WHAT WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT FEEDBACK AND VALIDATION

There are 5 things that I believe are really key to understand about this:

1)     It really matters who you ask.

Not everyone is important to get feedback from and our expectations around this are everything. The most important people to get feedback from are people who are connected to the success of your work - customers, clients, stakeholders, etc. If we are asking our close family members for feedback on something they have no interest, knowledge or stakes in, we are doomed! Can you think of a time when you have asked the wrong person for feedback on something that was really important to you and you were hugely disappointed or deflated? What would it have meant to ask someone more integral to the idea or work?

2)     You get to decide if the feedback matters, or how you interpret it.

So much of this process is about cultivating wisdom about what feedback is actually important to take on board. Something Tara Mohr talks about a lot in Playing Big is the idea that "feedback only ever tells you about the person giving the feedback, it doesn't tell you anything true about the work itself'. I love this, because it then gives me the freedom and autonomy to decide if the feedback is important for me to consider. I want you to look up your favourite book from your favourite author on Amazon and read the 5* reviews and also read the 1* reviews. You will find both, but neither of them tell you anything true about how good the work of the author is. It only tells you about the person giving the feedback.

3)     It’s perfectly OK not to ask for feedback.

There are times where it is totally irrelevant to ask for feedback. Sometimes what is important for us is to run with our intuition or our gut and not get sucked into the opinions of others. Often what happens is that asking for feedback in those highly intuitive times can halt our traction and we can lose momentum. If your gut is speaking to you about doing something - keep at it. There may be a time for feedback down the road, but when your intuition is leading you - be led. Can you recall a time when you have felt really in your flow and you have found yourself halted by someone else's feedback - either asked for or not?

 4)     Women are more attuned to feedback.

As women we are highly switched on to other more subtle types of cues (body language, facial expressions, tone etc) and so when we are getting feedback, we are taking in the entire situation and person – not just the words. It's not surprising then that feedback often comes far more loaded for women than it does for men. We also tend to laser focus in on feedback and dwell on it longer. This comes from likability being the only currency for women before we had any rights or access to our own finance or laws that protected our safety. We relied on being liked to get us by, so any threat to our likability may still feel very viscerally painful or scary for us - including feedback. What is your experience of likability? Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you have had a visceral reaction to negative feedback given to you because it jeopardized your likability?

 5)     Finally - If you want to do something that sets you apart or is your truest, most important work – it will always be met with both praise and criticism.

There is no escaping it, so we neeeeeed to get super comfortable with accepting that it’s going to come and sometimes it’s going to feel real good and sometimes it’s going to sting but ultimately, having a firm footing in our own sense of pride and commitment to our idea must be at the centre because that’s the only truth that we know about the work. Then we can hold both the validation and the criticism that may come more lightly.

THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS

In this post I want to talk about success and feelings.

Ultimately, the idea of success is so subjective. How one measures success is not going to be the same as the next person.

Most of us are so disconnected to our own desires and needs that we end up defaulting to ascribing to the measures of success that seem easy and palpable:

-        Hitting a certain number of followers

-        How many people buy from you or sign up to your thing

-        How much money you bring in

-        How busy or in demand you are

By all means, these can contribute to the idea of being successful and in some ways – it feels really good to know that people are desiring our products, or connecting with our work or interested in what we have to say or share. But this can’t be it. This can’t be all we have been given as a measurement tool.  What if we are absolutely missing a critical metric here: How we are feeling about what we are doing?

So often, when we are bringing ideas into the world, creating a business or something we feel excited about, the focus is on these metrics as guideposts for how we are doing. We tend to bypass the ‘feelings’ stuff and cross our fingers that if the metrics add up, the feelings will follow. Unfortunately, that’s usually the opposite of how it works.

I have several clients who, on paper are hitting all of those measures of success that I talked about a minute ago. They are booking clients, taking in a lot of orders, super in demand for their products and services and yet when we get into the coaching space and really reflect on how all of that is feeling, successful isn’t a word that comes up. Tired is. Frazzled is. Unclear is.

Often what I hear is that their work feels out of control, that it has taken on a life of its own. It’s like they work for their business instead of their business working for them amongst the other usually very complex and busy demands of their whole life.

There is little to no connection between the standard measurement of success and the feeling of success.

In the work that I do, I feel like my job is often about pulling my clients back to themselves. Dusting off the road that has been littered with expectations, arbitrary rules and measurements and shining a light back to the centre of who they are and asking

“what of this isn’t working for your energy right now?” “What do you want less of?” What do you want more of? What feels misaligned?

These aren’t the questions that come up in a downloadable business plan; but they hold the most power. Because when we are asking and answering these questions; when we make space to get quiet about our real desires, about how the work we once loved is making us feel, about what we really want this work to look like within the context of the rest of our lives, then we can gently course correct and strategize to make them a reality and rebuild a path towards it.

Maybe, if you’re feeling stuck in the zone of setting metrics for yourself based on numbers and figures to identify success, or you’re feeling detached from how you want your work to feel and just cruising along in autopilot it would be helpful for you to sit down with some of these questions today

These are the questions and the metrics that help me to unpack if what I’m doing is really fulfilling. If you want to write these down and check in with yourself, feel free.

-        What kind of impact is my work having with the people it’s for? Are they really feeling the intended shifts that they’re here for? Are they trusting themselves more, feeling supported?

-        How is my energy towards my work? Am I excited for it or dreading it? What am I dreading and why?

-        How is my business allowing me to live your life outside of it? Do I feel like I can’t switch off, have I given myself so much to do that I’m taking it into family time, have I made up arbitrary rules for myself that are limiting my ability to experience joy or pleasure?

-        What is the quality of my relationships? How connected do I feel to the people that matter in my life?

-        Do I feel like my reputation is holding up? Am I in integrity with how I’m communicating my work, how I’m selling my services, how I’m showing up for my clients?

-        How do I feel about selling this service? Am I delighted to let people know about it? Am I grounded in the value of it or am I feeling some scarcity and fear?

-        Do I feel momentum in my work, like I am finding space to grow deeper in my knowledge of how to help my clients?

-        Am I feeling supported? Do I need to check in with my business support system (for me that’s other coaches or my supervisor)?

I want you to be careful not to listen to these questions, contemplate your answers and dip into shame. Shame will keep you stuck in the mire. If you’re contemplating these things and lots of them feel hard to answer, that’s OK. You’re not doing things wrong, you’re doing your best. Try to welcome this as an opportunity to reset, without shame lingering, but as a way to take some power back and inject the priority of how you are feeling as an integral part of your work.

Without these as thresholds to reflect on, I am likely to overwork, load stuff onto my plate, numb out or disconnect. I am likely to overthink, to fixate, to be easily hurt or offended and take things really personally. I’m likely to be emotionally up and down because my validation has been built on the wrong metrics. 

These are the metrics that matter to me because I know that when these things are prioritised, my work becomes a joy. It becomes regenerative, a pleasure. Most of us start with the opposite metrics and hope that the rest will fall into place, or we believe that the outward “success’ will somehow morph into feeling like we are thriving. When the opposite is actually true. When we realign our work or business to take into account our whole self and put structures in place to honour that, that’s when the magic happens.

I hope this gives you permission today to start to measure what you’re doing from a different angle. I hope you feel courageous enough to be honest about the impact of what you are doing on how you are feeling and are willing to take whatever steps you need to shift things around.