Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 3 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: How to give yourself good feedback
— From What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
Marshall Goldsmith, author and success coach to top CEOs, talks about the importance of receiving feedback. While feedback usually comes from others, in What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Goldsmith shares a simple technique by which we can give good and reliable feedback to ourselves to create lasting change.
Sounds too good to be true? Wait until you see how easy—yet how profound—this technique is. It’s all about completing a sentence. Here’s how it works:
Pick one thing that you want to get better at. It could be anything that matters to you—from getting in shape to giving more recognition to lowering your golf handicap. Then list the positive benefits that will accrue to you and the world if you achieve your goal. For example, “I want to get in better shape. If I get in shape, one benefit to me is that…” And then you complete the sentence.
It’s a simple exercise. “If I get in shape, I will… live longer.” That’s one benefit. Then keep doing it. “If I get in shape, I’ll feel better about myself.” That’s two. “If I get in shape, I’ll be a better role model for my family and friends.” And so on until you exhaust the benefits.
At this moment, you are probably wondering what makes this so special. Goldsmith points out that the interesting part of this exercise is that, “as you get deeper into it, the answers become less corporately correct and more personal.”
You start off by saying, “If I become better organized, the company will make more money… my team will become more productive… other people will enjoy their jobs more… and so on.” By the end, however, you’re saying, “If I become more organized, I’ll be a better parent… a better spouse… a better person.”
And so it is that by digging or peeling layers (quite similar to the 5 Whys), we get to the core issue, that is, what is really important to us. Only then, can we find the real reason—the one that motivates and inspires us—to change for the better.
Goldsmith recalls a story of a general in the U. S. Marine Corps who wanted to “become less judgmental.” At first, his resistance was obvious as he completed the first instance cynically by saying, “ If I become less judgmental, I won’t have so much trouble dealing with the clowns at headquarters.” The second answer was quite sarcastic too. By the third one, he had diminished the intensity of the sarcasm. Goldsmith says that by the sixth sentence he was tearing up: “If I become less judgmental, maybe my children will talk to me again.”
When you go deep is when you know that this exercise is working. In the words of Goldsmith: “As the benefits you list become less expected and more personal and meaningful to you, that’s when you know that you’ve given yourself some valuable feedback—that you’ve hit on an interpersonal skill that you really want and need to improve. That’s when you confirm that you’ve picked the right thing to fix.”
ACTION
TODAY: Set up some time aside in your calendar to do this sentence-completion exercise. It will give you important feedback as to what you need to change.
FUTURE: Keep this exercise handy so that you can do it when you need to give yourself good feedback. That way you will be able to change a habit or a behavior that is no longer serving you.
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