Feedback Strategies

Why Do So Many Managers Avoid Giving Praise?:
The statistics of the article are interesting.  I think it's strange that managers who believe that they have good feedback are usually the ones with negative feedback.  It's kind of like a loop.  Generally, managers are the leaders over their employees.  One of their main jobs is to give feedback to their subordinates.  But it's interesting that for a manager to give good feedback, that they also need to receive feedback from their employees.  Without feedback from employees, they have almost zero clue whether or not their feedback is even helpful or not. 


The Trouble with “Amazing”:
I can agree with the reasoning for the dislike of the word "amazing".  For me personally, I correlate the word "amazing" sometimes with sarcasm.  In my opinion, the word "amazing" is used usually in only two ways: sarcasm and pure awe.  Both of which don't contribute much to anything.  Sarcasm is just in bad taste.  Pure awe sends off the message that "nothing needs to change".  In both cases, there is no feedback that aims to improve the work of the other person. 

Similarly to the manager-employee example, feedback should also be a loop.

Feedback Thoughts

Seven Ways to Crush Self-Doubt in Creative Work:

I completely agree with point #2.  There's a point where you have to abandon perfectionism.  My philosophy is that if it's something that you don't have a passion for, then it's completely okay to be so persnickety with it.  Where's the joy in life if you spend so much energy on something you don't care about only to be left feeling exhausted and burnt out.  Instead, find hobbies that you're more passionate about and immerse yourself in the perfectionism of it.  In some of my hobbies, I enjoy doing them so much, that I spend hours chipping away aiming to be perfect in it.  When you aim to be perfect at a tedious task, you lack confidence in it.  That's self-doubt.  However when you aim to be perfect at something you're passionate with, you end up having pride in it.  That's confidence. 
I also like point #5: "Setting attainable goals".  It's always the same story where somebody aims for the stars only to be let down so hard.  I hear about a few different methods of applying attainable goals.  One is: while you have an overarching large goal, keep sub-goals with it.  Make it a step by step process that makes that unattainable large goal into something that seems possible.  Another method is to just have an additional goal to be less discouraged.  While you have a difficult large goal, also set a separate achievable goal.  When you feel like you don't get anything done, it's very discouraging and easy to quit.  But when you have a large and small goal simultaneously, you always have that simple goal to fall back to and keep confidence.  Meanwhile, as that's going on, you can  always chip away at the large goal. 

Silence the Critical Voices in Your Head:
This is also a interesting thought. In a sense, criticism is always a form of persuasion.  It's a persuasion to have a change of thought.  We as humans, for some odd reason, also seems to have a pessimistic viewpoint when dealing with criticism aimed at ourselves.  However, persuasion always has its positivities and negativities.  When dealing with criticism, we just have to filter out the negativity that we can't deal with.  There's always a way to frame a negative as a positive.  We just have to rewire our brain to think that way.  It's like a glass half empty is a glass half full. 

A Glass of water can be either be half full or empty depending on your mindset