How To Get Good Feedback

Something beautiful about our lives and world is that we have the freedom of choice. However with choice comes multiple options to select from, and you don't know the full potential and consequences from certain decisions until they’ve been made. If we want to get better at life, we need to get good at receiving feedback so that we can have more information to make a better decision next time. When it comes to getting good feedback here are a few rules of thumb.

First, don’t ask one person about everything, ask many people about one specific thing. The more narrow and targeted the feedback is the better, because it controls for the circumstances different people are coming from and keep things from getting too complicated. For example if you wrote an article, don’t ask one person “Hey what’d you think?”, instead ask a few different people “What do you think is the core message in this article, and was that clear to you?”

Also, pose questions in a way that are unbiased. There are different ways you can present a question that prompts people to validate a certain thought instead of reflect upon a certain thought. For example, and using the article example again, instead of asking someone “Do you think my article is too long?” you can ask “What do you think about the length of the article?” That way they aren’t primed in any way to respond and you get their genuine feedback, which will ultimately be more useful. 

There’s definitely an art to getting good feedback, and these are a few ideas to keep in mind as you go about asking others about their thoughts on different decisions you’ve made.