The Personal Improvement Journey: It Starts with Feedback

In my leadership-development sessions, I like to illustrate a point about feedback by rotating my finger in front of me and asking the class participants, “Which way is my finger going, clockwise or counterclockwise?”

Invariably, someone will say, “It depends – to us it’s going counterclockwise, to you it’s going clockwise.” Quite correct, but I like to drive the point home (and, I admit, ham it up a bit) by marveling at my finger as it whips through the air and asserting, “No, no, it’s going clockwise! A perfect circle, if I do say so myself! Yep, I am doing one tremendous job of communicating clockwiseness!”

My intent, of course, is to show how misguided and even absurd it is to be so wrapped up in our own perceptions of our actions that we become oblivious to the people whose perceptions really matter: Our audience. Only by tuning in to the feedback from our environment can we answer the question: Are you receiving me?

Now, each of us probably knows at an intellectual level that feedback is good for us – that we need to see ourselves as others see us in order to identify areas for improvement. If we “know” about the benefits of feedback, though, why do so many of us still resist it? Why do we argue with it, rationalize it, minimize it, or – worse – question the motives or perceptions of the feedback-giver?

I’ve come to believe that the reason starts with a basic self-limiting belief: Because we don’t think we can do anything about it!

Certainly when it comes to simple matters (“You’ve got a burnt-out headlight”), we’re more open to feedback because the issue is easily corrected. But when we hear feedback about behaviors that we feel are hard-wired deep within us, we commonly treat the feedback as an attack on who we are. In response, we tend to circle the wagons, revert to defensive mode, and block ourselves even further from feedback that could help us improve.

So how can we reverse this downward spiral? First, we need to question the belief that our behavior is unchangeable. As I pointed out in my article on Carol Dweck, we need to cast off a fixed mindset and adopt a growth mindset in its place.

But just believing that we can change doesn’t tell us how to change a particular behavior. And this is where another barrier to our development presents itself: The belief that mastery of the behavior is somehow innate and natural and can’t really be learned.

As we’ve seen with Dan Klein’s work, however, even an “innate” performance of a task can be analyzed and broken down into its component behaviors. And if the task’s component parts can be identified, they can be taught.

But even if you believe Dweck and Klein, you might still say: Yes, I can change, and the skill can be learned – but there’s a big difference between knowing the steps of a task and actually performing them.

I’ve addressed this issue in a number of articles – mostly focused on the themes of engaging in targeted practice (as developed by Matthew Syed in his book Bounce), unlearning of old behaviors, and implementing strategies such as stealth learning that make the new behaviors a natural part of one’s everyday life.

In very simple terms, then, what I've described above is the journey to self-improvement. And, as with any journey, it starts with a single step – called feedback!


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POSTSCRIPT: Many if not most of the pictures I use in The Daily Improviser are just random shots intended to lend a little visual appeal and break up the text. Rarely do they actually illustrate any of the content in the article. However, the day after I wrote this article, I realized that the picture I posted - a shot I snapped of the Neil Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio - actually echoed the last paragraph. So, I guess you can also think of feedback as "one small step for a person, one giant leap toward what the person can be."

The Daily Improviser Keeps on Smiling through the Changes

The name Art Clokey might not ring a bell with most people, but I’m sure the smiling, pliable green character he created would.

Yes, I’m speaking of Gumby, the subject of a series of film shorts produced by Clokey (rhymes with "Pokey") starting in the early 1950s. Using a painstaking process called Claymation, Clokey would bend Gumby and other plastic figures to form a series of poses and then capture each pose in a single movie frame. When the frames were spliced together and played back on a movie reel, Gumby and his pals would magically come to life on the screen.

These days I’m sure there are many times when the Daily Improviser feels like Gumby – bending, stretching, being pulled this way and that, either of his own volition (out of necessity or preemptive choice) or at the hands of an unseen animator called Continuous Change. And as Dan Ariely points out in his book The Upside of Irrationality, we humans have a remarkable capacity for adapting to change – more so, perhaps, than we often recognize. 

As Ariely demonstrates, our ability to go with the flow is not a matter of our acting as human supercomputers, inputting and processing all of the data that surround us and spontaneously kicking out the right response. Rather, our internal “change machines” operate in a very different way:

"We only have a limited amount of attention with which to observe and learn about the world around us – and adaptation is a very important novelty filter that helps us focus our limited attention on things that are changing and might therefore pose either opportunities or danger.  Adaptation allows us to attend to the important changes among the millions that occur around us all the time and ignore the unimportant ones. If the air smells the same as it has for the past five hours, you don’t notice it. But if you start smelling gas as you read on the couch, you quickly notice it, get out of the house, and call the gas company."

Ariely’s example provides yet another instance of a useful structure that the Daily Improviser employs to come between him and his environment in order to make sense of the world and deal with it appropriately. As I’ve pointed out in earlier articles, just as the performance improviser doesn’t sketch in his performances on a totally blank slate, neither does – or should – the Daily Improviser interact directly with the raw stuff of his environment, process the millions of changes that occur every second, and make up a new response on the spot every time. Rather, as Ariely, Steven Pinker (in his book The Blank Slate), and several other recent researchers have demonstrated, we humans are hard-wired to utilize intervening structures (or “novelty filters,” as Ariely calls them) to come between us and our world to help focus our attention and guide our actions.

In fact, as Ariely’s example illustrates, if we didn’t use these intervening structures (which I’ve previously described as The Layer), we would be incapable of making in-the-moment adaptations to changes in our environment. Instead – like the performance improviser who tries to run through all possible scene options in his head before making his next move – we would be frozen in place by Analysis Paralysis. 

Unlike Art Clokey, we don’t have the luxury of freezing reality second by second so we can sculpt each moment as we might like it to unfold. Fortunately, we can draw on The Layer as a short-cut to help us get in touch with our Gumby Nature.