In the hot seat

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” Ken Blanchard

This quote has long been associated with leadership guru Ken Blanchard, he actually first heard it from a former colleague named Rick Tate. According to Blanchard, “He [Tate] explained it in sports terms. Can you imagine training for the Olympics with no one telling you how fast you ran or how high you jumped?” Ultimately, just like we need breakfast to fuel us through the day, we need feedback to help us to perform at our best.

We all know that receiving feedback can be daunting. Social evaluation can activate the same neural pathways associated with physical pain. When we are being criticized or judged, it can trigger a stress reaction. Despite the discomfort and pain, it doesn’t mean we don’t want to be told the truth. Research has shown that people welcome constructive feedback even if it can be tough to hear, knowing it will help them to develop and improve.

As my workshop at the Griffin Museum of Photography progresses, we move to the phase of showing our work during each session. Each of us take turn presenting our work on the big screen and taking our seat front and center listening to the feedback given by both the instructor Arno Rafael Minkinnen and fellow workshop participants. Here is the part that I feel uncomfortable as I don’t get feedback regularly for my work. I have yet developed the thick skin to take in the feedback being given, feeling I have no control over how people perceive my work.

As expected, the response was mixed with the images I showed on Monday. I took heart to the constructive feedback I was given though, and I felt encouraged with the response I got. Admittedly my work took a major turn last year, and I often question how the message of the personal work I make nowadays come across to audience who don’t know me personally. Thankfully the response I received was the audience could see a thread being built through my work, though I need to make some adjustments to the nuances, be it the arrangement of the sequence of my images to make the narrative thread more cohesive.

I am grateful for the thoughtful feedback I received from Arno. After our classroom session concluded on Monday morning, we received Arno’s email summarizing the steps we could take to make our work stronger. This feedback was written in response to some of the images I presented during class. I found the way he read my images illuminating and the suggestion was spot on. I took his advice and re-arranged the image sequence.

“A shift of the wishbone--a perfect metaphor in word and image for the fragility of wishes--held by thumb and forefinger to the first position in the triptych makes a lot of sense in retrospect now. It completes it, and transforms what something is in reality to what it can become, a reincarnation back to its being in flight. You might give space between the squares, create a visual sense of "Miyazaki’s" silence, that "ma" word in Japanese.”

This is how I see my experience of receiving feedbacks when attending workshops, instead of dwelling on them and seeing them as a reflection of my ability, I see the mistakes I made as opportunities to be examined and learned from. We cannot change the mistakes we have already made, but we can modify what we do moving forward. Instead of focusing what went wrong, I choose to focus on what I can do better in the future. This is where I see having a growth mindset is helpful when I am given the opportunities to receiving feedback. Seeing my skills as adaptable and believing there is room for improvement makes those tough moments of receiving feedback in the public more manageable, and I learn to welcome those opportunities.