Feedback

Feedback is said to be the food of champions.

It’s a key to successful practice and an essential part of how any learner actually improves, that’s why higher level performers in almost any field actively look for feedback. Not because they enjoy being told what’s wrong with them, but because they’ve worked out that without it, you’re flying blind. You can put in the hours, the effort, the commitment, and still plateau, because you don’t know what you don’t know, you can’t fully reflect and you can’t improve without feedback from others.

There’s a difference between reflection and feedback, reflection is you remembering an event and trying to learn from it. That’s valuable, but it has limits, because you can only see what you can see, feedback is someone else’s eyes on your performance. It’s the gap between your internal experience and external reality, it’s the mirror that shows you the parts of yourself you can’t see, and with this extra information your reflection is much improved.

The Bridge Between Where You Are and Where You Want To Be

Without feedback you’re working in a vacuum, completely unable to understand why you’re not improving.

With feedback you get another set of eyes that can help you bridge the gap between your current level and the level you want to reach. It helps you maximise your potential. It identifies both what you’re doing well and where you need to work. This is exactly why having a coach, a trainer, a mentor, or being part of a peer group that takes performance seriously can be so valuable.

The important thing is to find people who know more than you, people with the knowledge and experience who know what you don’t know. People who can give you valid, timely feedback based on evidence rather than opinion, delivered in a way that’s honest without being destructive.

Without Feedback You Hit a Ceiling

Without feedback, you’ll never know what you don’t know. Your performance will plateau, frustration sets in, and motivation slips. Because you’re putting in the work but not seeing the progress, and you can’t work out why, because the thing that’s holding you back is invisible to you. You need feedback to fuel your reflection, to allow you to assimilate new skills and knowledge, to break through the ceiling you’ve hit.

Asking for feedback is genuinely difficult. It requires a degree of humility that a lot of people struggle with, the willingness to be told you’re not as good as you think you are, as sometimes feedback is more honest than you were hoping for. The truth does sometimes hurt and discomfort doesn’t make the feedback wrong, it may just be giving you what you need.

The Problem with People Close to You

Sometimes the people closest to you won’t give you real feedback.

They lie to you, not maliciously, they just don’t want to hurt you, so they tell you what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear. They collude with your blind spots because pointing them out feels unkind, and in the short term it is kinder but in the long term it costs you.

Even top trainers delivering feedback as carefully and constructively as possible can leave you with a bitter taste. That’s not a failure of delivery. That’s the nature of honest assessment. The bitterness doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Don’t confuse discomfort with inaccuracy.

When You’ve Hit a Wall

If you’ve hit a wall, go and find someone who can tell you how to break through it, or jump over it.

The best performers in any field have coaches, they’ve got mentors, they actively seek feedback and treat it as one of the most important tools in their development. This isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of seriousness. The people who think they’ve got nothing left to learn are the people who stop improving, and usually stop improving well before they reach their potential.

So if you’re stuck, if the progress has stopped, if you can feel the ceiling above you, it’s probably time to find someone who can open your eyes and help you face the music. That conversation might not be comfortable.

The Feedback Loop

Here’s what most people don’t understand about feedback. It’s not a one-time thing. It’s a loop.

You get feedback. You adjust. You perform again. You get more feedback. You adjust again. The tighter that loop, the faster you improve. That’s why video feedback works so well, the loop is nearly immediate, it’s showing you the truth, you see the problem within minutes of making it, while the context is still fresh and the adjustment is still possible.

Compare that to an annual performance review, once a year feedback on a twelve month loop. By the time you get the information, the moment has long passed, the context is gone, and the opportunity to adjust has been missed eleven times over. The format was designed for HR administration, not improvement.

Seek shorter loops, more frequent, more specific, and more actionable. If you can get feedback on something the same day you did it, you’ll learn faster than almost anything else can make you learn. Get in the habit of having ‘speed-back’ sessions, these are short feedback meetings after meetings, events, interviews, or presentations. Write some notes, give yourself a quick appraisal, do the same with others and learn when the information is at its best.

Good Feedback vs Bad Feedback

Not all feedback is created equal.

Good feedback is specific. It’s timely. It’s actionable. It focuses on behaviour rather than personality. It comes from someone who actually knows what good looks like in your field. Bad feedback is vague. It’s late. It’s personal. It comes from someone with an agenda or no real expertise.

Learning to distinguish between the two is a skill worth developing, because if you can’t, you’ll either reject all of it or accept all of it.

The key is to take good feedback seriously even when it stings, to be careful to disregard bad feedback even when it feels valid, and to remember the feedback that feels good in the moment is often the least useful.

The Trap

Here’s the trap most people fall into with feedback, they only use it to identify weaknesses.

You need balanced feedback. Yes, work on your weaknesses. But also double down on your strengths, because that’s often where your biggest gains are. Playing to your strengths can help you become exceptional, playing to your weaknesses may only help you become adequate.

If Lionel Messi had spent his career working on becoming a better goalkeeper because that’s where he was weakest, we’d have lost one of the best football players ever to play the game. Instead he focused on what he was already exceptional at, got feedback on that, and made it better still.

Find out what you’re genuinely good at, get serious feedback, make yourself exceptional. That’s how champions are actually made.

Further reading

• Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112.
• Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254-284.
• Pendleton, D., Schofield, T., Tate, P., & Havelock, P. (1984). The Consultation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Buckingham, M., & Goodall, A. (2019). The feedback fallacy. Harvard Business Review, 97(2), 92-101.
• Stone, D., & Heen, S. (2014). Thanks for the Feedback. New York: Viking.