A Mason's Work

[00:00] In the episodes we've done so far this week, we've talked a lot about pushing boundaries,
[00:06] finding opportunities to grow and develop, and creating stuff.
[00:11] And when we look at the kind of one of the next steps here, and we need to be really
[00:18] mindful and careful about the next steps we take, one of the next steps that's going to
[00:23] happen most likely is you're going to pursue some level of feedback.
[00:26] You're going to look to friends, colleagues, family members for feedback on the things
[00:36] you make or the risks you've taken or the experiences you've had.
[00:41] And this is a place of great danger, not because you can't get valuable insights from other
[00:51] people, but as a practitioner, as somebody who's trying to grow and develop themselves,
[00:58] it is very likely that you will be sensitive in the feedback process to a couple of different
[01:05] things.
[01:06] So I want to go through this.
[01:08] We'll kind of go through it piece by piece so that you understand kind of what you're doing
[01:14] when you're soliciting feedback.
[01:16] First things first, let's be quite clear.
[01:21] Are you looking for feedback or approval?
[01:26] Those things are different.
[01:28] When you look for feedback, you're looking for some level of insight about the outcome,
[01:33] some level of understanding that the protocol that you followed or the process that you executed
[01:41] or the choices that you made along the way created an outcome that was both favorable and that
[01:49] those choices made sense in context.
[01:52] What you're not looking for is, did you like the brownies?
[01:57] Like to understand this even further,
[02:00] the way we ask for feedback is a good indicator of what we're actually looking for.
[02:10] This is kind of tough because we socially in the United States, if you're listening to the
[02:16] United States and probably in other English speaking cultures, it is very likely that the
[02:22] way we ask questions is, did you like this?
[02:24] Or what do you think of that?
[02:26] Or how did it go?
[02:28] All of those lead to largely positive and negative answers.
[02:33] It was awful.
[02:34] It was great.
[02:35] This tasted wonderful.
[02:36] It was horrible.
[02:39] Though that kind of feedback is not useful for the most part.
[02:44] What you're really looking for is nuanced feedback.
[02:48] And so the way you get to more nuanced feedback, to more useful feedback for you as a practitioner,
[02:52] as somebody who's looking to grow and develop is, um, by asking questions that, um, that are a little
[03:01] bit more engaging.
[03:03] So we'll use cooking, cooking again, as an example.
[03:07] Um, rather than, did you like it?
[03:09] You might ask, what flavors did you taste?
[03:12] No, that changes everything about the nature of that response.
[03:19] Um, or, uh, what was your favorite part about the texture or what was your least favorite
[03:26] thing, uh, about the color?
[03:29] Right.
[03:30] When you ask these specific questions in a specific way, you get answers that potentially
[03:36] are actionable.
[03:36] Now I say potentially because not all of these things are, uh, guaranteed to be things you
[03:43] can walk away with.
[03:43] But if you change the nature of the questions you ask in general, um, you get, uh, much,
[03:50] much more effective, uh, responses from the mirrors that you ask these questions to these,
[03:56] every person that's giving you feedback, every person who's getting involved in giving you an
[04:01] answer is acting to as a mirror on that process.
[04:06] Uh, so, so that's sort of caveat one.
[04:08] If you don't ask good questions, you're not going to get to a feedback and that's really,
[04:12] really important.
[04:13] So what does a good question look like?
[04:15] Uh, it's usually process related.
[04:16] How, um, what you're, you're never really asking, um, overall, like, what did you think
[04:22] questions you're asking, uh, questions about, uh, the experience you're asking questions
[04:27] about, um, uh, the things that people would notice about the craftsmanship or, or what have
[04:35] you.
[04:35] Um, so I, you know, I just told you about my, my day long trip in the mountains.
[04:40] Uh, what, what would you like to do, uh, in the future?
[04:44] If this was your trip, what would you have done differently?
[04:46] Or if this is, uh, something that we try and go do together one day, uh, what about this
[04:52] trip was most attractive to you?
[04:53] Again, all of these little feedback sort of mechanisms provide tons more useful insight.
[04:58] Um, then what did you think?
[05:00] Or did you like it?
[05:03] So the other thing to remember in the feedback loop here is that a good amount of the feedback
[05:11] in almost every situation will very likely be minimally, uh, flavored by the person providing
[05:20] the feedback.
[05:20] Oftentimes the feedback provided is entirely about the person providing the feedback.
[05:26] So if you ask your spouse about, you know, did you like the food, they're only going
[05:31] to be asking from a place of their preferences, not a place of sort of objective value, because
[05:37] again, we can only resonate from the subjective experiences we have.
[05:42] So what this means is when you ask for people's perspectives or opinions, be prepared that they
[05:48] will not be able to separate their opinion from their observation or from the answer to the
[05:53] question.
[05:54] And because of that, you have to be careful with other people's feedback, because if you
[05:59] take that and use it as a way to drive your own behavior, um, you may find that you are,
[06:04] uh, operating sort of at the whim of a thousand different perspectives.
[06:10] Uh, and that creates a nightmare scenario where the feedback you're soliciting doesn't really
[06:15] give you value.
[06:16] It just actually sends you further adrift.
[06:18] So, uh, we'll get more into feedback in other episodes.
[06:21] It's a very important, uh, conversational piece and very difficult to get right.
[06:26] So there's tons of nuance to it.
[06:28] And so we'll explore that in further episodes.
[06:30] Thank you.