Cultivating a Growth Mindset: How to Receive Feedback for Habit Change

Cultivating a Growth Mindset: How to Receive Feedback for Habit Change

A quick internet search will reveal numerous books elucidating how we can alter our habits, rewire our brains, and grow into more successful human beings, both personally and professionally. Powerful bestsellers have guided many people to make drastic improvements over time through the consistent repetition of tiny changes, whether it involves working out, writing a book, or performing better in a specific skill. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, states that “if you can get 1 percent better each day for a year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” Thirty-seven times—that’s amazing! But what if you don’t know how much you need to improve in an area, or if you need to improve at all, to be successful? What if you don’t know where you need to start with that initial 1 percent?

The Importance of Feedback in Growth

This potential blind spot highlights why feedback is crucial for our growth as humans. Positive change often relies on external feedback to reveal the need to start the improvement process. If we only see ourselves through our own individual lenses—which are clouded by our own beliefs, experiences, and moods—then we are limiting the information we can collect about our potential areas for growth.

Navigating the Emotional Challenges of Feedback

Gathering data on how others see us and experience our behavior is essential to becoming more effective. But gathering data through feedback can be difficult and, sometimes, downright painful. Whether we want to admit it or not, when we receive positive or negative feedback, we experience an emotional response. With negative feedback, our feelings may be hurt, and research shows that physical and emotional pain activate the identical region of the brain. A literal or metaphorical punch to the gut is neurologically the same to all humans.

The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Feedback

To overcome this neurological challenge, we must use emotional intelligence and adopt a growth mindset when receiving feedback. We must manage our emotions to focus on the message (or data) the feedback delivers, instead of simply reacting based on how we feel hearing that message. Success in our performance and in our relationships hinges on our ability to seek out and receive feedback with a growth mindset. We need to let go of whether we agree with the feedback (or even if it is right or wrong) and focus on the benefit of understanding others’ perceptions of us to identify those 1 percent per day improvements.

Giving Meaningful Feedback

Receivers of feedback have some work to do, but so do givers of feedback. The givers must also use emotional intelligence skills to identify their own biases and communicate in an effective manner. Too many managers use a fast-paced environment as an excuse to overlook opportunities to give feedback. These missed opportunities potentially result in lower employee engagement, which can have a ripple effect on productivity, morale, and retention. In a Gallup study, “80% of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged—regardless of how many days they worked in the office.”  Meaningful feedback is delivered in a timely manner and states the behavior observed, the result of the behavior, and the expectation going forward. Each moment of meaningful feedback helps create a culture open to organizational development and individual career growth.

Tools for Growth: Self-Assessments

Assessments are great tools for creating such a culture. Self-assessments can provide insight into how our own behavioral tendences create or limit our productivity and effectiveness with others. These assessments are often an optimal place to start in an organization that has not yet engaged in much feedback. They help individuals ease into feedback and identify room for improvement without adding any potential resistance to outside opinions. Additionally, self-assessments provide a common language for employees to use as they start to discuss their results and share room for individual improvement. Development plans based on the results of a self-assessment can be created that set everyone on a path to greater effectiveness. Additionally, retests can reveal growth and continued challenges, both of which increase self-awareness.  Explore our Emotional Intelligence Appraisal – Self Edition to gain insights into your emotional intelligence skills and uncover areas for growth.

Expanding Feedback with Multi-Rater and 360° Assessments

Multi-rater and 360° assessments then build on this new self-awareness by introducing crucial external feedback into the discussion. Such feedback reveals gaps between employees’ perceptions of themselves and how others perceive them. These gaps highlight those necessary habit changes that may not be as apparent through the individual’s own lens. As personal and professional growth are ongoing processes, gradually adding more depth and layers of feedback will unearth new habits and behavior changes for focus. Discover the benefits of the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal – Multi-rater and 360° Editions for comprehensive feedback and identifying perception gaps.

Fostering a Growth Mindset and Feedback-Friendly Culture

Equally as important as the use of assessments as feedback tools, is a shared cultural understanding of feedback. Fixed mindset cultures struggle with feedback, while growth mindset cultures embrace feedback as a tool for continuous improvement and emotional intelligence development. People with a fixed mindset will tend to be elated or devastated by feedback as they do not see feedback as an avenue for growth, but simply as a tool to communicate success or failure. On the other hand, cultures that encourage innovation, view failure as a steppingstone to progress, and believe in supporting employees’ development will find individuals more open to feedback. Team members in these cultures will see feedback as necessary data to discover their own areas for growth on the path to becoming a stronger individual and contributor to the organizational mission. Wherever your team’s culture falls on the spectrum between these two extremes, however, you will benefit from having a shared understanding of what feedback is, how it should be delivered, and what the goal is of such information sharing.

Growth Mindset and Feedback: The Key to Personal and Professional Development

Targeted feedback, combined with a growth mindset and emotional intelligence, is the catalyst for implementing habit changes and rewiring our brains for success. Feedback sheds a light on our blind spots and opens our understanding to perceptions beyond our own limited lenses. We cannot be thirty-seven times better at the end of a year if we cannot first identify where to start applying the 1% improvement per day.

For more information on how to assess and improve your emotional intelligence (EQ) skills, please check out our assessments.

 

Sources Cited:
Clear, James. Atomic Habits. Random House. 2018.
Eisenberger, N. The pain of social disconnection: examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain. Nat Rev Neurosci 13, 421–434 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3231
Harter, James. Great Manager Important Habit. Gallup Workplace.  (May 20, 2023). https://www.gallup.com/workplace/505370/great-manager-important-habit.aspx

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