Power of Feedback

Whether you read this article or not, whether you understand it or not you will see for yourself that there is feedback. This is my take on feedback at a personal level and I’m sure it makes sense. So what is this feedback that I am talking about, read on to discover it yourself.

“Irrespective of whether you do something about anything in your life or not you will get a result”.
Consider that you have exams coming up and you need to score a distinction, you put in all the hard work, study long hours, make notes, revise and write the exam. You get to know that you’ve scored a distinction and on the other hand one of your friends who studied along with you and put in the same hours of work managed to just scrape through. What happened? The point I’m driving home is irrespective of whether we do something or not in any area of our lives we have feedback. If we do not get the intended result you and I start blaming or cursing others and still be unaware that even this activity is giving feedback.

As you move on your path toward success—Every time you take a step, you’ll get back information about whether that was the right thing to do. You’ll get data, advice, help, suggestions, directions, even criticism that will help you constantly adjust and move forward, while continually enhancing your knowledge, abilities, attitudes and relationships. You’ll discover that every action you take or not take will inevitably produce a result. In fact, some actions will take you absolutely nowhere. Other actions will catapult you forward. Still others will actually divert you from your goal. But be assured that feedback is a necessary and welcome aide to achieving your goals and becoming a more confident, successful person.

One of my favorite speakers and world renowned author Jack Canfield of the chicken soup series fame uses feedback in a very empowering manner. He illustrates in his seminars the power of feedback, all he does is selects a particular participant from the audience and asks him to guide him towards the participant and also instructs that every time he’s headed in the right direction the participant needs to keep saying on course and if in the wrong direction he would have to say off course. He shuts his eyes and starts his walk and gets to the participant.

He simply hears information that helps him re-direct himself toward the goal and arrive at his destination. Does Jack eventually get to his goal? Yes.

Is he on-course or off-course most of the time? Who knows, is the feedback helpful to him? Absolutely

So feedback is simply information.

Perhaps it’s easier to think of feedback as the guidance system on a ship. The ship’s computer constantly takes in information, analyses it and adjusts the controls and other systems. Have you ever tried riding a bicycle, you might have noticed that you were constantly trying to balance yourself, keeping the bike steady and pedaling it to go forward. You were instructing your mind to make the necessary adjustments to keep you going and not falling down. Feedback is what helped you, so that you could adjust yourself and move ahead.

So here’s what we do to understand how feedback works and how we can use it as a tool to move towards our goals faster.
• Consciously be aware of your thoughts, feelings, behaviors and actions.
• Notice what results you got (feedback)
• Are the results (feedback) what you got was what you actually wanted.
• If yes, then keep taking the same action to generate the same result.
• If no then try something different until you get what you want.

Whether you go on to use this system or not, you will get feedback

To your success,