How to get constructive feedback

Wes West
Wes West
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read

Getting constructive feedback is a crucial part of learning any skill. Without it we can’t develop ourselves and ultimately succeed in what we’re doing.

Why getting good feedback is so hard

Feedback is something we all need more of, even for everyday activities like how we dress, how we drive or how we make a cup of tea. We all want to improve but we often don’t know how to ask, or we’re too embarrassed to broach the subject with our loved ones or our colleagues.

When we do ask for our friends and family to comment on aspects of our lives, they will often only offer positive encouragement, which is great for our self-esteem, but it won’t help us to better ourselves.

Bosses are a good source of brutally honest feedback. However, the imbalance of power means that when someone more senior asks us to change something, we do it begrudgingly and don’t learn from our mistakes — especially if we don’t agree with the changes we’ve been told to make.

It’s more difficult to get feedback if we feel emotionally attached to the thing in question. Qualities that we’re personally invested in, like our songwriting abilities, how we look, our kissing techniques — might invite criticism that hurts our self esteem. However, to improve we sometimes have to ask the tough questions and get that feedback whether it’s good or bad.

The other reason that we don’t receive useful feedback is that we don’t seek it in the first place or we’ve ignored the feedback we’ve been given because it made us feel threatened in some way.. No one likes to be criticised; especially if it’s about something we deeply care about. It can feel like a personal attack and leave us feeling worthless.

Getting feedback that’s useful

Constructive, honest feedback is often hard to get. But there’s a simple way to receive useful evaluations of your work and life that leaves everyone happy.

Let’s say you wrote a song. Rather than ask someone what they thought of your song, ask the following instead:

  • What did you like about it?
  • What would you improve?
  • What did you think was interesting?

The godfather of lateral thinking, Edward de Bono came up with a version of these questions for appraising brainstorming ideas and we can use them to get feedback on anything, from cooking to creative writing — even lovemaking!

The reason this technique works so well is that the answers we receive aren’t related to whether our critic likes or dislikes what we’ve done, just that they have considered it from two different perspectives. This means that we can’t transpose their answers on to the question that we really want to ask: does our critic like us?


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Wes West

Written by

Wes West

Designer. Animation Director.

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