Why Seeking Feedback Is So Important

Whether you have failed in a job interview and want to know why, you are looking for customer opinions through the use of a 360 degree feedback template on your blog or you want to simply know what skills you need to work on after giving a presentation or something similar, feedback is vitally important in how you move forward in many walks of life.

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Many people make the mistake of thinking that feedback should only be sought when things have not gone to plan but in fact, regardless of whether things are positive or negative, seeking out feedback is vital, and here is why.

Highlighted Weaknesses and Strengths

If you were asked to list your strengths and weaknesses, they would probably vary greatly from the opinion of someone else. Seeking feedback can help you to better understand where these strengths and weaknesses are so that you can work on improving those things that you are not so good at, and working even harder on maintaining the strengths which you already have.

Confidence

If you are being turned down for job roles or your business is not exactly going in the direction that you might like, your confidence can easily take a knock. Seeking out feedback either personally or about your products can help you to understand what isn’t right and fix it instead of having a general feeling of failure. Confidence is so important in many areas of your life and without feedback telling you what and why things have gone wrong, you may struggle to bounce back.

Breaks Down Opinions

Many of us will have a general idea of how think things are, both in business and personally, and it can be difficult to shake these notions from our minds. What feedback often does, is completely reshape the way we think about something or even a person or group of people. Take customer surveys for example, without them, businesses may just keep trying to forge a certain path without actually realizing that this isn’t what the customer wants.

Strengthen Yourself

Listening to, and working on feedback which you may have received is a great way to strengthen your resolve and show that you can change for the better. Nobody likes to hear criticism, regardless of how constructive it is, but sometimes it is necessary to hear it. The test for yourself will be how well you react to feedback which has been given to you, and what you will do with this information going forward. The same thing goes for positive feedback, if you are the type to let this feed your ego then you will be choosing a bad route and instead you should be humble about such feedback and have the mindset to maintain such strengths.

If you run a company or you are seeking to find out from your friends, clients, peers, colleagues or previous interviewers exactly what they think, you should create an environment for them to give you feedback, no holds barred. It is then up to you to listen to the information which they give you, and use it appropriately.