This has been a journey for me in my professional career, and a lesson brought home to me in my dance class last night. It appears I have come a long way since I was 12. :)

It was an adult jazz class. It started off well. Warm up, tick. Isolations and body rolls, tick. Stretching and limbering, tick. Then, on to the performance part of the class – the routine. We learn it section by section. Section one goes well. The moves are easy, funky, and I’m loving it. Section two, the pace picks up but I keep up. I’m connected to the music and my body. I am at one with the routine. And then, slowly but surely it begins to go downhill from there. Section three and four are not beyond my technical ability but the pace increases and I fall behind. I can’t remember the steps, I start to miss bits, then I become confused. I’m officially lost. 

Do you work with that person? You know the one. The one who always picks holes in your work, points out errors or rejects your ideas offhand. Well you’re not alone.

If hours of youtube bloopers and blunders videos are to be believed, it appears that humans love to take great delight in others’ misfortune. We love a good laugh at someone else’s expense; usually secretly glad it’s not us. Most people try to avoid mistakes and looking silly, particularly in a professional setting, as they fear it will detract from their reputation and, on a deeper level, cause shame and embarrassment.

More and more people are swamped at work. With companies restructuring, merging, and downsizing, many professionals are ending up with more than one job, more than one boss and more pressure to get everything done, regardless of shrinking capacities and competing priorities. 

Our reputation is important. People use it as a guide to short cut their thinking about who we are, what we are capable of and how they will interact with us. These reputations are not always accurate, but they are always there, for better or worse.   

Some people waffle, some speak in circles, and others simply hijack the conversation with their own agenda. It can be hard to enter a conversation knowing you have some important ideas to cover, only to walk away disappointed and frustrated, yet again, because the conversation got derailed, and you were left to book another meeting time to try again. 

We know how important feedback is for growth. It is the breakfast of champions after all. But what happens when we want feedback; we ask for feedback; but we don’t get quality feedback?