I took Seth Godins Marketing Seminar last year. His online courses are set up so that all participants are strongly encouraged to interact and help each other by posting your thoughts and then providing feedback to others.
Seth Godin preaches that it’s more important to “ship” your work than to obsess about it being perfect. (Shipping in Seth’s world means to finish your project and release it to the public). If you aren’t shipping, you aren’t showing up.
Brene Brown would say I “armour up” with perfectionism. I obsess to make something perfect so that I can avoid criticism because it is the worst. I spiral into hot embarrassment and shame. Perfectionism is a form of hiding, it’s driven by ego and it’s paralyzing because perfect isn’t possible, so I just remain in a feedback loop of “never good enough”.
In the seminar we would listen to a lesson, do our assignment, and “ship” by posting in the discussion board. Seth isn’t teaching easy concepts and most of the time most of us didn’t “get it”, but we would still be expected to post our thoughts, and then have to give feedback on others.
Giving good and helpful feedback is really hard. Our ego immediately wants to be involved because of the dynamic it comes with. When you are able to keep your ego in check you immediately run into the next issue… worrying about how your feedback will land on the person.
I started to dance around my issues projecting them on to the other person in an effort to avoid making them feel the shame or embarrassment that comes up in myself. Each time I would give any type of important feedback I would start to sweat and feel a lump in my throat.
But I learned a few things…
The purpose of feedback is to help each other level up. First you need to know that the other person wants to level up, otherwise it’s unsolicited and almost always lands wrong.
The very best feedback you can give is to help someone gain clarity on their goals, their beliefs, and their process. Sometimes this is a well thought out question, sometimes it’s a push back on their opinion, and sometimes it’s a helpful tip (but only if you have one). I like to share my story and how I see things, but this isn’t helpful in a feedback scenario because it muddies the water… I learned that the hard way.
The very worst feedback you can give is critical and ego driven because it shuts down all of the creative outlets and puts someone on the defence. The best work always comes from a confident creative person, so shutting them down takes away all of their spark, it’s not helpful at all.
“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” – Bill Gates