The missing magic ingredient

Shut your laptop, sigh a deep sigh of relief – time to unplug 

Time to plunge into a pool, walk barefoot, read that best seller, discover new places & experiences and quite simply refresh and recharge with a well-deserved break 

Then, once we have snoozed, slept, gazed at the pool, danced, swum, read, trekked ….we often start to plan… 

A lot of us use our vacation time to not only refresh and recharge but also gain new perspectives on our lives – we lie back on our sun loungers, or sip our morning coffee, gazing at a new vista - and we start to plan our next steps … 

We create private, internal visons for who we want to be, how we want to live and what we want to achieve – at work, at home, in our whole life

The thing is, whilst we create these visions and make our plans, we often miss adding in a magic ingredient ...

One of, if not the most important, keys to create our futures, achieve our goals, unlock our potential in any area of our lives – is feedback. Yet we often miss out on achieving so much of our dreams, because we can’t bear to ask for feedback, let alone welcome feedback as part of the essential toolkit we need to achieve our dreams 

Welcoming Feedback is about choosing our perspective, engaging in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, finding insight that might help us grow, so we can achieve our dreams. In fact, the new perspectives which welcoming feedback gives us, often means we achieve much more than we dreamed of as we sipped our coffee or lazed on our sun-loungers

Choosing our perspective and responding resourcefully, recognising and managing our resistance, engaging in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, finding insight that might help us grow is a tall ask for the best of us

It’s a bit like how we hold our breath as we open the weather app for our vacation location and desperately hope for great weather – believing that if we get 'bad weather' – our vacation will be ruined. We believe that we can’t possibly have a good time if we don’t have the best weather, just like we believe that if we receive anything but the best feedback, we will be ruined 

Yet being able to choose our perspective and respond resourcefully by welcoming feedback is truly liberating. If we start from the premise that feedback is simply an observation, a snapshot in time, then we can adopt a new perspective - we can take the weather with us – we can hold the feedback lightly

Feedback becomes less emotive, less dangerous, less devasting – the clouds, storms, hurricanes, don’t engulf us! 

Think about taking the weather with you – choosing your perspective – when you receive feedback and you will experience great things, at work, at home in your whole life - not just whilst you are on vacation! 

If you would like to discover more about how you can Welcome Feedback, we have an Upskill (our name for a course/masterclass) to help you do just that – you can learn more about it here