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.

WOMEN, LET'S TALK ABOUT EARNING MONEY

I have NOT always felt excited to talk about this, let me just say that. I know that this topic is not something that is overly comfortable for so many of us to talk about for lots of reasons and I want to preface this episode by saying this has been my experience too.

When I first started running my business, the money stuff was absolutely the thing I buried my head in the sand about the most. Coming from decades of working in the non profit sector, to go from having a set salary and applying for funding for different causes that I worked in to creating products and offers where I was asking people to pay me was a big leap. A really big, uncomfortable, hard leap.

I had to learn pretty quickly because the truth is, if your business isn’t making money, it’s not a business.

More than that, if your business is not making money in strategic ongoing ways, it is not sustainable and that’s a really hard place to operate from – when you feel like things are so unstable. That’s when we feel like we need to scramble, to undersell, to contort what we do to suit what we think people want.

So I want you to know that me feeling comfortable talking about making money in my business is something that has been about 4 years in the making. I took on a coach to help me with this stuff, I started opening the conversation in my community about money and I’ve learned a huge amount about the massive importance of being money literate and assured in my business so I want to share some of that with you in case you’re in that position too – where making money or talking about your work or selling or pricing feels hard. You’re not the only one, trust me.

 Why do we struggle to talk about money as women?

I think a large amount of our hesitation or fear of money conversations comes from women having been kept out of money conversations for many many years. It really is a new phenomenon in western society that women are able to earn good money on their own terms and have economic autonomy. It’s only in the last 40 years that we have been able to have our own bank accounts or mortgages in our names without male signatories. I imagine if you look down your family tree, there are only a few women who have been able to access the opportunities women now have to run their own businesses or work their way up in terms of earning.

So even though we have more access to earning money and having a financial say in our own lives, it makes sense that it still feels really taboo or new for women to be talking about this stuff because it IS still so new in terms of our access.

And when you’ve been kept out of the conversation for as long as we have, we naturally will feel timid about entering into it or feeling like we have any authority to do so.

And many of us have complicated relationships with money; with poverty, with debt, with guilt about our upbringings or privileges. Many of us women likely carry all of those experiences and feelings into our businesses and can recognise that they have an impact in how we show up, how we price, how we ask people to buy from us etc.  In order for us to get more comfortable with all of those things, we have to face them, acknowledge and own them as part of our story and also believe that it’s important for us to be paid for our work and to earn money with autonomy.

And our culture sends women messages about our relationships with money too, right? It plays us off as the spenders, the shoppers, demonising women’s relationship to money in really patronising ways. We also know that women who are financially successful are also scrutinised more, and the conflation rests in our mind that being a woman who makes money means you are going to be perceived as being less likeable. We know how much likeability can be a safety lever for us so we can see how women are likely to shrink when it comes to money because the risk of not being liked feels too much.

We also are managing the reality of seeing how money and power works in the world, and it doesn’t take long to observe that the accumulation and distribution of wealth is so screwed up and toxic. It has resulted in an individualised, patriarchal, capitalist society.

It’s likely that because of what we see now that our associations with money are that it can be detrimental and corruptive rather than being something that allow us freedom and greater opportunities to be generous, to change systems or create new and better ways of working.

And so with all that, it is natural that we fear money, or we fear what having money or asking for money will bring. Will it lump us into the same patriarchal, capitalistic society that we know isn’t good for the world? Will it show US to be unlikeable if we ask for things or desire more?

Women and money

What is crucial to know is that actually women operate really differently from men when it comes to wealth. Research shows women are naturally more generous, better at handling money than men and more attuned to using our money wisely and for good.

We are more likely to give to charity, give to more charities, and give more often.

Households headed by single females give 57% more to charity than those headed by single males.

Men tend to favour charitable contributions for their tax advantages. Women tend to give largely out of empathy and connection to certain causes.

Women in the top 25% of permanent income status give 156% more than men in the same category. 

One quarter of high net worth women support causes or organizations aimed at benefiting women and girls. They say that their number one motivation for this giving is their belief that it is the most efficient way to solve societal problems.

Women tend to view wealth as a means by which to articulate their value set.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS?! WE ARE TO BE TRUSTED. WOMEN ARE TO BE TRUSTED WITH MONEY!

And the only way we can turn things around in terms of how money is shared in the world is if we harness our courage and are brave enough to ask for what we want. To put our hands up and say, I’ll have that. I can trust myself to earn this.

We have an opportunity to reimagine how the world could look it we had more women earning money, creating new solutions to the worlds problems and getting paid for it. But to do that have to be willing to step into our own space and ask for what we want.

And even better, by doing this, we can begin to show younger women coming up in the world how women can earn money, have autonomy, shift inequality and use their earning power for good.

If we continue to shrink around money, neglect to offer our work out and keep our heads buried in the sand about this stuff It’s going to be harder for us to create a new collective narrative of the importance of women having equal earning power.

Why do we need to talk about money?

Here are some other REASONS WHY IT’S IMPORTANT for us to care about money and getting paid:

+ So we can offer the best and maintain your integrity.

When we get paid for what we do it allows us to bring ourselves to our work in a different way or energy. We show up differently when we feel like our work is valued well. Always doing stuff for free or discounted is going to lead to resenting your work and losing steam.

It’s also important because women need to be more integrated into economic spheres.

We need more women in boardrooms, making decisions for fairer worlds, investing in good, sustainable ways, having a seat at the table. We need more women using their money to create change, to even things out in our unbalanced world and enconomy!

+ So we have sustainable businesses to offer

Another reason it’s important for you to care about money and get paid for what you do is this reality: if you don’t, you will not have a business or offering to enjoy and serve. Plain and simple. If you continue to undercharge, not ask for what you want, not be clear about your money situation, you wont be able to continue doing the work that you love because you wont be able to afford to!

We also need to remember that when we offer our work out to people, we are giving others the opportunity to invest in things that might solve their problems or help them. Someone out there really needs and is ready to invest in you and whatever product or service you have to offer. Shrinking from money conversations is actually denying people the opportunity to get the thing they might really need from you! Don’t patronise people by playing small with your gifts and skills, assuming they won’t pay for them. You may have just what someone needs.

 + Because women can be trusted with money

And finally, this conversation is important because you are absolutely to be trusted to earn good money. You can trust yourself to remain the amazing, generous, creative person that you are if you ask for what you want. Selling what you do, offering your products out to people, pitching for business, calling in clients, earning money in ways that you never imagined does not change your goodness. You can be trusted to do that. In fact, we need you to do that.

I wonder if any of this is stirring something in you right now, or if you’re feeling a shift with how you’ve been feeling about earning money or asking for what you want in your business? I hope it injects a little courage into your soul today and I’d love it if you’d pass it on to a friend who needs that too.

5 WAYS TO CULTIVATE YOUR INTUITION

What do you think of when you see the word ‘intuition’? I wonder what preconceived ideas or experiences you have with intuition.

Maybe it’s not something you’ve explored? Maybe it’s something that has felt a bit woo to you? Maybe you have had experiences where you’ve not trusted your intuition and regretted it? Maybe it’s something you really believe in and want to cultivate more – whatever it is, cultivating your intuition is an ongoing process but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Learning how to access my intuition or my own inner wisdom or my gut sense is something that has transformed my approach to my business and my life and I want to share with you why it’s important. I also want to discuss what we can do to nurture it and use it to help us make decisions when we come up against that tough stuff and in every day life.

I believe intuition is a superpower.

We all possess it – a gift within us that is our most sacred, trustworthy, brilliant internal guidance system. Like a compass that we can use to understand ourselves more deeply.

And yet most of us dismiss it, or forget about it or override it because we live in such a fast-paced, quick fix society where we want other people to tell us the answers to all of our problems and how we should live.

Our rational brains are absolutely brilliant in their ability to help us find logic and make sense of things, but the place of intuition in our life means that it can be called on for a deeper connection to the world around us and most importantly a deeper connection to ourselves, our desires and our boundaries.

Most of us are familiar with our inner critics, I talk about that a lot – the voice that tells us our limitations, that quashes our enthusiasm, that tries to keep us safe from any risk, that works to pull us back in when we contemplate change or stepping outside our comfort zone.

If our inner critic is the voice of limitation, our intuition is the inner voice of wisdom and curiosity– the one that tells you that you should move towards the things that light you up, or avoid the person who seems great on paper but makes you uncomfortable. It’s that sense of knowing or feeling in your gut. And it's something we should all be not only paying more attention to but be learning to nurture and grow into.

I know that the world is noisy. Our social media feeds feel noisy. Opinions of others feel noisy. Our minds are noisy. We need to see getting connected to our intuition as an opportunity to retreat from that.

Your intuition is the most wise, accurate, deep part of your true self and I want to share with you ways that we can begin to hone this part of who we are, to allow it to have a stronger presence or prominence in our lives and see how amazing, calming and discerning we can feel when we give ourselves space to understand it more.

Like courage, intuition can be cultivated. It can be strengthened with practice so I want to give you five tips that I know have helped me and I know will help you to amplify your trustworthy inner voice of intuition.

1.     The first thing that’s important is to identify which voices are NOT yours.

Before you can hear your own voice, you need to sift through all the ones that are not yours. Being selective about the type of content we choose to consume and being mindful of the amount that we consume helps to keep our own thoughts from drowning out.

The less unnecessary information we absorb on a regular basis, the more it can amplify our own voice and our ability to hear our own thoughts and the more meaningful it will become. The same goes for other areas of your life where there are many opinions filtering in – be aware of whose voices you hear when you think about the things you would love to do or how you want to move forward. It’s really important to have good boundaries around whose opinions matter to us and what we are prepared to engage in so that we can make sure we don’t lose our own voice and thoughts in the midst.

2. Secondly, honing your intuition is so much easier when you align with your values so get to know where you stand on things and what is of utmost importance to you as a person.

Your mind can often steer you away from your integrity in sneaky ways, but your intuition will not. We have all had experiences where we have or have been tempted to betray our values. Learn what it feels like to behave in alignment with your values, and you'll start to sense your intuition more clearly. The more that you connect to your core values, the more you will sense your intuition guiding you towards or away from things.

It might be worth spending some time writing down 5-7 values that are most important to you in life or work. What do you want to anchor your intuition? When you know what your values are, your intuition is more able to function - you can discern more easily what is for you and what is not.

3.     The third thing is regular journaling.

It doesn’t have to be long, It doesn’t have to be hard, but even setting five minutes at some time during the day and sitting down and writing out what is going on in your head, how you are feeling, what you are struggling with and what you want to feel or do to move forward is POWERFUL. It allows the brain to slow down – even the act of writing with a pen and paper nowadays is significant in helping us to slow down because we’re so used to fast typing or texting.

So many of us are resistant to this practice because we might not know what to say or write, but there are no rules and that’s the point. It’s about slowing down, allowing your brain to release some of the things swirling around and seeing what comes up.

To get the most out of journalling, the focus must be on self-expression through sustainable practice. So, how it feels rather than how it looks, and realistic consistency determined by you. There is immense power in habitually making time to listen to your thoughts, which only serves to strengthen the connection with our intuition.

4.     On a similar vein – the fourth thing is finding quiet space for ourselves.

Quiet space can be in the form of meditation or just taking five minutes outside with our feet on the ground or lying down for a couple of minutes, doing some deep breathing, feeling each muscle release and sending breath around your body.

Finding a few moments a day for quiet space, allows for an opportunity to quiet our mind and what's going on around us. These pockets of quiet can bring us back to the present and keep us focused on what we can do in that specific moment, which is so often all we have control of anyway.

There are some great free apps for this – I’ve been using Simple Habit for a while which allows you to really tailor your meditation for whatever time of the day or situation you’re in and whatever time you have. I did a 2 minute meditation before I started work today and it was a great way of just stopping, getting quiet and observing my breath before I began my day.

5. Finally, a really clever, simple but powerful tip for tuning into your intuition can be simply CHANGING THE "WHY" QUESTIONS TO "WHAT" QUESTIONS. 

When you come to the point of struggle or resistance or feel the urge to shame yourself (Hello, inner critic!) you can begin to return back to your intuition by framing your inner dialogue. So instead of asking "Why am I struggling with this? Why do I always do this? Why can I never get this together?" a more intuitive way to approach yourself might be to ask "What is it about this task that I'm struggling with? What is it that is keeping me stuck in this situation? What am I worried about here? What is it that I need to move ahead here"

Often when we ask why, the question is framed in a way to bring shame. But when we ask what – we are searching for deeper reasons to connect to and that can reveal some powerful answers if we are willing to listen closely to ourselves.

So – 5 ways that we can nurture our intuition and access the guidance, self-trust and wisdom that we want.