Feedback is Vital

To reach your goals quickly you need to be comfortable receiving both positive and negative feedback.  To succeed you need to be able to see yourself clearly.   That means that sometimes you need to stop and look in the mirror.

It is not surprising that most people prefer the positive —  the want to receive a promotion at work, get paid more, get told they are good at something. They dislike any critique or suggestion to improve.   And it takes work to deliver that kind of message in a positive manner.

Accepting feedback separates the winners from the losers

Entrepreneurs who succeed learn to embrace feedback of all kinds.

I was recently asked how I get feedback and how I use it to shape my success, including how I take negative input and turn it into a positive. The answer?  The mirror is the best feedback mechanism in the world.

There is nothing that anyone can tell me about myself that will be a true surprise to me.  I’ve already seen the cracks, the wrinkles, the need to get more exercise, the need to eat less each time I look in the mirror.  But it is only when I truly do something about what I see (or what I’m told) that makes a difference.  Oh I can mope about it, or I can take action (see my blog on Action).

Walk a mile in my shoes.

The same is true in business.  I cannot think of a single time that someone has given me negative feedback that I didn’t know in my heart already that I hadn’t done the best that I could have done.

The only exception to that is the reaction that I get when I come across people in my work life that are insecure that have taken my security and confidence as arrogance.  Or they look at the things that I have been involved in over the past few years and see all the entrepreneurial exploration as failure, instead of the amazing learning that it has been.

They can’t see back to the days of receiving my magic shoes from my parents, as they told me that I could be anything that I wanted and then seeing it come true with each step that I took in those shoes.

They haven’t seen me literally lying on my face on the floor of a hotel room in San Francisco praying that the investor that I was about to see would give me the money that I needed to keep my company open or looked into my heart when my husband and I walked into bankruptcy court after our spectacular failure, giving up literally everything so that we could now start again.

Those people have ascribed to me an emotion or a motivation that couldn’t be farther from the truth.  But how would they know if they weren’t in my shoes.

What do you see when you look in the mirror?

When I look in the mirror, I see the girl receiving the magic shoes.  And the freedom that I have from any fear of how I will be perceived comes from knowing my gifts and that I am completely and totally empowered to succeed.

I will still be misunderstood.  But I’m ok with that, as I can look into the mirror, into my own motivations and know that I just want to leave a legacy.  And I will.

I love the image of the sunglasses as the mirror.  We reflect what we surround ourselves with.  What are you focusing on today?