Feedback Thoughts

   

The first article I read this week was about 'Silencing the critical voices in your head' by Sabina Nawaz.
    I really enjoyed reading this article for many reasons. The first being, Nawaz talks about how we can get very bogged down in our thoughts and the negative comments we receive on our work. Recently I have found myself doing this more and more, zooming in on the bad things, rather then focusing on the compliments that we receive on our work, the praise for a job well done.
    Sabina Nawaz's writes ' we need five good voices for every one bad voice'. I found this very heart hitting. I felt like I had just been slapped in the face with realisation. Studies show that negative comments stick in our brain much longer and stronger then positive comments do.
   Nawaz's plan for overcoming these critical voices is a very practical one and something that, after some thought, I have seen in my everyday life from the people that I look up to and aspire to be like. These people range from lectures, who will ask you what you found helpful in an assignment, workshop or lecture, to my manager in work, who asked what really helped when I was being rained in, some that she could apply this to the future when she has to train in new staff.


    The second article I read this week was called 'Seven ways to crush self-doubt in creative work' by John Spencer
   
    Self doubt is definitely something I have struggled with my entire school career, having never been very good at taking tests, I began to doubt that I could every actually do the work, because all of the grades I came out with at the end of learning were not usually on the upper side of the scale. I doubted that I actually understood what was going on, and I began to doubt my ability to learn.

    I have noticed that this has carried over into my college education, when I sit down to do assignments and start to believe that I will not be able to finish them, even though the point is to learn as we progress through these assignments.

    Spencer addresses almost all of these points in his article, writing about how to avoid falling into this pit of self doubt. The first way is to stop comparing yourself to others. This is definitely something I have found myself doing. I can clearly remember spending an entire morning for a pitch just the other day, wondering if my pitch was as good as others, if the way I was presenting it was the same or up to scratch in comparison to others. Now that I am aware of this, it is something I can work on in the future and hopefully try and avoid.

    Another point John Spencer makes in his article is about avoiding perfectionism. Perfectionism ha always been my downfall. Although, having studied art for 5 years, I understand the process of creating things with mistakes so you can improve and make the final piece better, I still end up trying to perfect things as I go along. Even as I write this post, I am thinking about another assignment and shooting down ideas because they aren't perfect, even though they aren't supposed to be! forgetting about making things absolutely perfect is definitely going to be something I am going to have to work very hard on.


    I have always enjoyed receiving feedback but I always find myself fishing for the negative things, rather then what I've done right, and what I should be doing the next time round. I hope that having learned these new techniques, I will be able to believe in my work more ad understand that the feedback is to help me, not put me down!

    Signing off
    -Ak

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