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.
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” – Daniel Gilbert (@DanTGilbert)
You’ve got plenty of room to grow. We all do. No matter our position, we are each a work in progress. We are doing it badly until we are doing it well. The real point is that we are doing it at all.
Your feedback can help me to do it better though. To do so, your feedback does not need to be complimentary but it does need to be respectful and acknowledge that I am a work in progress. I am complete in my imperfection.
Human beings are creators and we need to acknowledge and respect the unique creative process each of us has. And our individual journey to (re)discover it. Like you, I am in the process of creating myself and becoming takes space. So let’s do ourselves a favour and remember that it’s hardly ever a finished product we’re providing feedback on, rather we’re perceiving something or someone still in the process of becoming.
A wise woman asked me recently after I received a hate-full comment on my blog if I would stand in front of an arena of people and sincerely ask for them to tell me what they think of my outfit, or better yet, my self.
My answer was no. Absolutely not. I would not do that. The opinions of total strangers are not something I want or value.
Next, she asked me if I would stand in front of a group of people I respected and ask them what they think.
My answer was yes. Absolutely I would. The feedback of people I respect, and that respect me, is something I value very much.
No place for commentary in my world.
Feedback, to me, is thoughtful communication intended to support my growth and improvement. It helps me close the circle. It’s love-full.
An opinion, commentary, requires none of this.
Feedback, I am learning is something to love and receive. Commentary, I am learning is something to leave.
Too exposed.
I write to understand how I feel, think and act, and to challenge myself to express it in words.
I write for me. I do it because I need to.
Any other opinion of my expressions does not matter. It does not benefit me to attach to them. Only I can determine if my choices are serving me.
Leaving commentary behind.
I have permanently removed the option to leave comments on my articles. It’s a brave decision to create, and to share it publicly, and I must honour the sensitivity of my brave heart.
I have never been comfortable with receiving comments on my expressions, and that’s okay.
I realize in my desire to connect and to be accessible, I was inadvertently allowing something that wasn’t filling my need to create and share in a safe, supportive space.
Befriending feedback.
You, dear reader, who respects and loves who I am and/or what I do, I love you and your feedback is invaluable. I always want to connect and hear from you.
To support this feedback friendship we’re building, I’ve created the Word Explorers. By granting me email access to you, I will send you early drafts of my latest work, and in return, if you feel so inclined, you can share your feedback with me.
I’ve also created this Question & Answer space to keep our dialogue open too. Here you can ask me a question and/or make a suggestion, and see my answers to past questions.
I love you.
Thank you for reading and for your love-full support. You help me to be my best me.
