A wonderful colleague of mine from Uganda gives me incredibly valuable feedback when I’m veering off-course with my podcast. These little things could pertain to complaining instead of inspiring, side stories, repetition of the same word (happens often), short-stories at the beginning of important episodes. With all that feedback, I’ve been able to create a “ramble of positivity” sideshow whereas I can talk about the vast array of enjoyments that my life is offering.
With getting feedback, help, advice, suggestions – it helps steer you in the right direction. Some of this could be labeled as criticism, but it will help you adjust and move forward while continually enhancing your knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and relationships.
Two types of feedback
We, as human beings, love to be pampered. We want the praise from people, the money in our pockets, the raises or promotions at worse, the content students (relative to me), awards, happiness, inner peace….you name it. It feels great….but does it actually help us?
Negative – lack of results, little or no money, criticism, poor evaluations, complaints, unhappiness, inner conflict (happens to me too often), loneliness, pain. However, in those is valuable information.
Look at it this way, if you get criticism from not holding the suctioning tube correctly as a dental assistant, you would like to ask for help, right? If you’re a bore of a teacher and do everything by the book, you would much rather start taking developmental classes to increase the in-class experience for your students, right? Even if people are envious and jealous of you because of your opportunities, that certainly makes you think that you’re going in the right direction….RIGHT?
To reach your goals more quickly, you need to welcome, receive, and embrace all the feedback that come your way – and don’t let the relationship between the person who’s giving the criticism change.
I want you to look at it this way, put a blind fold on and have someone spin you around 5 complete turns. You’ll then become dizzy; and following that state, five people at the front of the room will guide you to the front of the room – they also represent the goal. So, you would slowly make your way to the from too the room and they would yell out “on course” or “off course” to help guide you to your goal. However, we often can’t take criticism, would give up and start hurling expletive adjectives at the people who hypothetically are trying to help us.
- Caving in and quitting – as most of us do.
- Getting mad at the source of the feedback.
- Ignoring the feedback.
Back in 10th grade of high school there was a girl name Oneida. Oneida was my Mexican born friend, and one day she critiqued my essay and gave me some feedback I didn’t want to hear, but needed to hear.
“Hey, your structure isn’t very good. You need to vary your words, too.”
This, coming from a girl whose first language was Spanish, hurt. How come I didn’t have a grip of the English language and I’m American? After taking that to heart, I past my State Writing Proficiency Examination by almost a perfect score a year later.
Feedback helps us…..almost for the absolute best.
Arsenio's ESL Podcast 
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