Today, we’re going to talk about some useful ways of getting feedback and why it’s so important for our creativity.

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What’s so cool about feedback is that you’re essentially borrowing somebody else’s value set or belief system so that you can see your creation through the eyes of someone else. In creativity, it’s so difficult to get good quality feedback. Getting an objective perspective on your creative idea can be incredibly useful, but also very difficult.

When you’re creating your ideas, you need to be passionate enough to be motivated and inspired, otherwise, nothing gets created. But once you create your idea, you have to be objective enough, to be honest with yourself. The passion you use to create your idea cannot be used to evaluate it. This is why feedback on creative ideas is so important.

Feedback gives you the best of both worlds. You can be passionate while creating, but get fresh perspectives from others while evaluating your idea.

As creative people, our main goal for feedback is to internalize the rules of the industry that we’re working in. We want to learn the best practices so that in the future we can give ourselves feedback, which allows us to stay in a flow state during the creative process.

Think of using feedback as building your internal “map of success.” Feedback teaches us what works and what doesn’t. When we’re new in an industry, we have to learn the obvious rules. As we get more experience, our map of success gets more and more detailed.

This feedback impacts all three major components of our creativity.
1- Feedback contributes to our domain-specific knowledge
2- Feedback helps us figure out which creative strategies work in each situation
3- Feedback motivates us to improve.

Let’s talk about a few of the issues that come up with getting good feedback.

Early on, the big struggle is how little feedback you tend to get. This is a really big issue because it’s not only the time when feedback is the most important, it’s also the time when it’s hardest to get. Early on, a little feedback can go a long way. It can drastically change the entire direction of your project. So getting early feedback should be a priority. Don’t wait for it. Actively search for it.

My personal feedback strategy is to use Concentric Circles. You are in the middle.
1- The first feedback you give to yourself
2- The second level of feedback is from your family and close friends. These people will be supportive, but also biased.
3- The third (and most important) level of feedback comes from your peers. Nothing beats getting quality feedback from someone who does the same work you do.
4- Paid help (cheap). Get cheap help first! Don’t pay for expensive consultants the first time you show someone your idea. Iron out the major, obvious problems using cheap consultants (such as on Fivver)
5- Paid help (expensive, but high quality). Once you’ve fixed all the obvious problems with your idea, let an expert take a look at it. They’ll be able to offer you a better analysis once the major problems are fixed.

So when you’re viewing a radical idea from old land from an old perspective of course it’s not gonna work but that’s not the point of it.

All right so we’re gonna wrap up this episode with some ways that you can apply this and get good feedback for your creativity.

The number one takeaway I want you to have is that feedback happens throughout the creative process. it is not something that you completely build your idea you said your garage for a month tinkering away and then you bring it out to somebody and you see what they think that’s not how you should be looking at this because that’s going to be there’s gonna be a lot of wasted effort if you do that.

What is way better is to get feedback before during and after a creative project. There was a study done on whether it was better to get feedback after the fact which is a more convenient way that we do it or whether getting feedback before, during, and after would lead to improvement and what they did is they took a group of school children and one group they use the debriefing method where they wait for the child to finish the problem finish everything and then they give feedback and the other one they give feedback before during and after and of course what they found was that the children that. We’re given instructions throughout the process they were given feedback while they were going they were much better able to solve problems. So yeah, it turns out that feedback throughout the process is far superior to just simply debriefing.

I always feel bad for the parents of the control group children in these studies it’s like you you drop off your child they do these studies and they find that all these children are now 30 percent better problem solvers and the mothers like what about my child and they’re like well he was in the control group. He’s just as dumb as when you drop them off yay science. It’s just really weird it’s like saying. Your kid was so bad at problem-solving that humanity has now learned something new.

Okay so what about one more tip before we leave this is really good for getting quality feedbacks we’ve talked about where you get feedback and how important it is but this is a really good tip on making sure that the feedback you get is objective and actionable.

So this comes from somebody I follow on Twitter he is an organizational psychologist named Adam Grant. You can find him on Twitter at Adam M. Grant. I’ll make sure that I leave a link to his profile in the show notes of the show.

So here is the advice that he gave. He says when you are trying to get good, honest feedback instead of just asking like we normally do ask for the person to give you a 0 to 10 score. when you do that you say can you how my doing on this on a scale of 0 to 10 how is this going. And nobody ever says 10. What that does is it allows you to take a step back and then say what once they say like okay that’s a 7 it’s an 8 from there it’s really easy to say okay how can I make it a 10 or how can I get closer to a 10? And what’s great about this is that it motivates people to start coaching on how to close that gap.

So there are a couple things I really like about this strategy number one is that it makes it really easy to offer feedback. Whenever you are there’s actually been some studies done on this as well when you ask somebody for generic feedback, it’s been shown that those people get more stressed right they get stressed out. People don’t like being asked for really generic feedback. you say something like how my doing or how’s the project going? That’s a really generic question and it’s really difficult for the person that’s going to be giving the feedback to answer.

Asking for a 0 to 10 score it’s much easier for the person you’re asking for advice. it’s much easier for them to open up the channels for communication. so what you’re doing is you’re making it easy to start this conversation all they have to do is create some kind of generic scores was probably be like a 7 or an 8.

From there that follow-up question how do I make it a 10. I want you to think about 2 ways of structuring this question. One way would be someone says you’re an 8 and then you say why isn’t it a 10. That question feels like it’s an attack right now as the person who just said 8 you’re on the defense and you have to explain why it’s not a 10?! But when you phrase it as how do I make it at 10 now it’s more of an aspirational thing it’s easier for the person who is giving the advice to give you advice that’s more objective and it doesn’t feel like a personal attack which is good for both you and the person giving the advice.

So there you have it we have covered a lot in this show we talked about why feedback is so important how you use feedback to refine your mental map of success. we’ve talked about how your feedback can be about so there’s the mental map which is the outcome you’re after. but also when you’re getting the feedback you can get feedback on the house all right not just where you’re going but how do you go how do you take the actions that I need to take we talked about peer to peer feedback which is way way better than any other type of feedback.

Get good feedback from people that are doing the thing that you’re doing.

We also talked about getting feedback throughout the creative project and not just at the very end. so getting good feedback before during and after. We also talked about the concentric circles where you’re starting by giving feedback to yourself and then you slowly expand that sphere until you’re getting feedback from your family, from your friends, then from other peers from cheaper people maybe on Fiverr, and then finally finishing up with those more expensive people that the more expensive consultants that can really dive down and give you great information… but as we said you want to be ready for that when it happens. And lastly, we took the advice of Adam Grant and we talked about using the 0 to 10 strategy to get good feedback from people.

Adam Grant Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdamMGrant

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