Helpful creative feedback is encouraging, sensitive, honest, and constructive.
Creating is an arduous process that employs your very heart and soul. It is an act that leaves you, the creator, totally vulnerable to those who experience your creation. Helpful creative feedback comes from honouring this sacred creative space and meeting you, the creator, in it.
Helpful creative feedback is sensitive to the fact that you are doing your best, that your creation is not perfect nor is intended to be, and that what you truly desire is the opportunity to grow, express, and improve.
Helpful creative feedback is not about what I would do if I were you, or about what I want your expression to say or represent. Helpful creative feedback is about helping your creation to grow.
That doesn’t mean my creative feedback can’t share my negative experiences of your creation, but if your expression should anger me, it’s my responsibility to understand why it does, before I attempt to share those feelings with you, the creator, or direct them at your creation. When I do decide to share my feedback, positive and/or negative, it becomes helpful when I share it constructively, communicating in a way I would want to be spoken to should I have chosen to put the time, energy, and love into something enough to birth it into this world. Helpful creative feedback requires empathy for the creator and for the creation.
The amount of help my creative feedback provides to you depends on the depth of understanding I have about my own experience, and about how it’s not THE TRUTH. My experience is simply my perspective, nothing more. It’s just one perspective for you and your creation to learn and grow from. It holds no more weight than that. With this knowledge and humility in hand, I can be truly helpful to you, and provide you with the sensitive, honest, and constructive feedback you really need to grow.
photo credit: Josh Ardle