Reply To: Exercise 12: Feedforward
Feedforward to improve my communication skills
I talked to nine people and and got more than three pieces of advice from almost everyone. I decided to ask for advice on improving my communication skills. Ironically, a handful of the people I talked to asked me to clarify what I wanted advice on. You’ll see below that I received a few pieces of advice about specifying and being clear about what I want to communicate. I enjoyed this exercise and feel like I got a lot from it. The practice of asking for advice brought me back to the exercises from Initiative, which I loved and learned from.
If you’re interested in reading the full list of advice I received, I included it in my blog post.
I really liked all of the advice I got. I think the challenging part is acting on it. It was all different from typical feedback but still not clearly actionable. I think what I need to do is study my list, rewrite it a third time, and highlight my favorite bits. Then maybe choose a couple of those to turn into something active. In the future, I’ll know to ask the person giving me advice to share if they have experience acting on the advice they gave me.
Did I notice differences from feedback I might have gotten?
Yes. I think if I just asked for feedback based on my own communication skills, it would have felt more like they were judging me instead of sharing helpful advice. It wasn’t so awkward like performance evaluations at work, or a meeting with an advisor. I almost always left those meetings feeling like a lot was left unsaid and that the person was sugar-coating things a bit.
Who is the leader in feedforward?
Me I guess? I lead whoever I’m talking to to give me advice in a specific way on a specific thing. That said, I think the people giving advice feel respected and like they get to be an expert for the conversation. And they often took the invitation in directions I didn’t expect which were usually helpful.
How did others seem to feel during feedforward?
They seemed to enjoy giving advice and the resulting conversation.
How did I feel?
I felt slightly awkward and uncomfortable at the start but quickly felt very grateful for the unique advice from each person. I also felt excited to try implementing the advice. Probably my favorite part about exercises like these is that they serve as an excuse to have meaningful and interesting conversations with people. Sort of like playing board games, yes we’re here to play the game but we’re also here to have fun connecting beyond the game.
Did I get any useless advice? Was that a problem?
I don’t think any advice was useless. Some of it was repetitive or not new but it was still helpful to hear it again. Even when my gut thought was “oh yeah, I know that” it was good to be reminded that others think it is valuable.
Where and how might I apply my experience in the rest of my life?
I want to continue to proactively seek advice and feedforward instead of waiting for someone to give advice. People are genuinely interested in helping others, they’re just waiting for the invitation. Without a deliberate ask for this type of advice, I think I’ll almost always get judgments like “you did great on x” if anything at all. I may try to specify what aspect of communication to improve and ask for more advice or think of something else I want to improve with feedforward.