Observation Feedback Quotes

You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn't very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren't good, the parts that aren't yours. It's called feedback, and it's the most direct route to learning about your own vision. It's also called doing your work. After all, someone has to do your work, and you're the closest person around.

Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.

One thing that helps is to remember that feedback, like truth, is not absolute. Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others. (p.83)

Breaking Free Activity #15 It can be difficult to make a direct link between your caretaking behavior and the emotional pukes which inevitably follow. Observe the ways you hurt the people you love. •Do you make cutting remarks or hurtful "jokes"? •Do you embarrass them in public? •Are you frequently late? •Do you "forget" things they've asked you to do? •Do you criticize them? •Do you withdraw from them or threaten to leave? •Do you let frustration build until you blow up at them? Ask the significant others in your life to give you feedback about your caretaking and emotional pukes. This information may be hard to hear and may trigger a shame attack, but it is important information for breaking out of the victim triangle.

We are part of a feedback loop that links our conscious acts to the conscious response of the field. In keeping with Heisenberg’s implication, the universe presents the face that the observer is looking for, and when she looks for a different face, the universe changes its mask.

One thing that helps is to remember that feedback, like truth, is not absolute. Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others. The information is revealing and potentially uncomfortable, which is why all of us would rather offer feedback to those who welcome it.

Despite never once being cited by HR for discriminatory practices, or being known as a sexist, Google fired James for sharing his paper. Not only was James fired but he was publicly shamed for reporting on existing research, research which to any reasonable observer, is non-controversial. James made the ultimate mistake. He failed to understand the request for feedback was an empty one, that critical consideration of all sides of an argument was undesirable, even anathema to the cause.

Since Lyster and Ranta reported their findings, many more observation studies of corrective feedback in second or foreign language classrooms have been carried out. Some of them report similar results—that recasts are the most frequently occurring type of feedback and that they appear to go unnoticed by learners. However, others report that learners do notice recasts in the classroom. Below, two studies are described in which learners were observed to notice and to respond to recasts provided by their teachers.

The purpose of Shamrock’s formula is simple: to get real and continuous feedback about what they know and what they don’t know from every angle. It purges out the ego that puffs us up, the fear that makes us doubt ourselves, and any laziness that might make us want to coast. As Shamrock observed, “False ideas about yourself destroy you. For me, I always stay a student. That’s what martial arts are about, and you have to use that humility as a tool. You put yourself beneath someone you trust.” This begins by accepting that others know more than you and that you can benefit from their knowledge, and then seeking them out and knocking down the illusions you have about yourself.

The basic unit of analysis in face-to-face communication is the feedback loop. For example, if you were given the task of describing an interaction between a cat and a dog, you might make entries like: "Cat spits, ... dog bares teeth, ... cat arches back,... dog barks,... cat—" At least as important as the particular actions described is the sequence in which they occur. And to some extent, any particular behavior by the cat becomes understandable only in the context of the dog's behavior. If for some reason your observations were restricted to just the cat, you would be challenged by the task of reconstructing what the cat was interacting with. The cat's behavior is much more difficult to appreciate and understand in isolation.

The browser was sick with user-generated opinions and misinformation. I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next. It wasn’t just me. Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to. Wherever I traveled on the internet, I saw my own data reflected back at me: if a jade face-roller stalked me from news site to news site, I was reminded of my red skin and passive vanity. If the personalized playlists were full of sad singer-songwriters, I could only blame myself for getting the algorithm depressed.

There were also many cases of feedback between physics and mathematics, where a physical phenomenon inspired a mathematical model that later proved to be the explanation of an entirely different physical phenomenon. An excellent example is provided by the phenomenon known as Brownian motion. In 1827, British botanist Robert Brown (1773-1858) observed that wen pollen particles are suspended in water, they get into a state of agitated motion. This effect was explained by Einstein in 1905 as resulting from the collisions that the colloidal particles experience with the molecules of the surrounding fluid. Each single collision has a negligible effect, because the pollen grains are millions of times more massive than the water molecules, but the persistent bombardment has a cumulative effect. Amazingly, the same model was found to apply to the motions of stars in star clusters. There the Brownian motion is produced by the cumulative effect of many stars passing by any given star, with each passage altering the motion (through gravitational interaction) by a tiny amount.

Here’s another example. One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness has its greatest effect in situations of “high conflict”—where there are two sets of considerations, one near and one far, that are in opposition. So, suppose that you are a successful professional comedian. The world thinks you are very funny. You think you are very funny. If you get drunk, you don’t think of yourself as even funnier. There’s no conflict over your hilariousness that alcohol can resolve. But suppose you think you are very funny and the world generally doesn’t. In fact, whenever you try to entertain a group with a funny story, a friend pulls you aside the next morning and gently discourages you from ever doing it again. Under normal circumstances, the thought of that awkward conversation with your friend keeps you in check. But when you’re drunk? The alcohol makes the conflict go away. You no longer think about the future corrective feedback regarding your bad jokes. Now it is possible for you to believe that you are actually funny. When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes.

Will those insights be tested,or simply used to justify the status quo and reinforce prejudices? When I consider the sloppy and self-serving ways that companies use data, I'm often reminded of phrenology, a pseudoscience that was briefly the rage in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists would run their fingers over the patient's skull, probing for bumps and indentations. Each one, they thought, was linked to personality traits that existed in twenty-seven regions of the brain. Usually the conclusion of the phrenologist jibed with the observations he made. If the patient was morbidly anxious or suffering from alcoholism, the skull probe would usually find bumps and dips that correlated with that observation - which, in turn, bolstered faith in the science of phrenology. Phrenology was a model that relied on pseudoscientific nonsense to make authoritative pronouncements, and for decades it went untested. Big Data can fall into the same trap. Models like the ones that red-lighted Kyle Behm and black-balled foreign medical students and St. George's can lock people out, even when the "science" inside them is little more than a bundle of untested assumptions.

Will those insights be tested, or simply used to justify the status quo and reinforce prejudices? When I consider the sloppy and self-serving ways that companies use data, I'm often reminded of phrenology, a pseudoscience that was briefly the rage in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists would run their fingers over the patient's skull, probing for bumps and indentations. Each one, they thought, was linked to personality traits that existed in twenty-seven regions of the brain. Usually the conclusion of the phrenologist jibed with the observations he made. If the patient was morbidly anxious or suffering from alcoholism, the skull probe would usually find bumps and dips that correlated with that observation - which, in turn, bolstered faith in the science of phrenology. Phrenology was a model that relied on pseudoscientific nonsense to make authoritative pronouncements, and for decades it went untested. Big Data can fall into the same trap. Models like the ones that red-lighted Kyle Behm and black-balled foreign medical students and St. George's can lock people out, even when the "science" inside them is little more than a bundle of untested assumptions.

all teachers in the content-based French immersion classes they observed used recasts more than any other type of feedback. Indeed, recasts accounted for more than half of the total feedback provided in the four classes. Repetition of error was the least frequent feedback type provided. The other types of corrective feedback fell in between. Student uptake was least likely to occur after recasts and more likely to occur after clarification requests, metalinguistic feedback, and repetitions. Furthermore, elicitations and metalinguistic feedback not only resulted in more uptake, they were also more likely to lead to a corrected form of the original utterance. Lyster (1998) has argued that students receiving content-based language teaching (where the emphasis is on meaning not form) are less likely to notice recasts than other forms of corrective feedback, because they may assume that the teacher is responding to the content rather than the form of their speech. Indeed, the double challenge of making the subject-matter comprehensible and enhancing knowledge of the second language itself within content-based language teaching has led Merrill Swain (1988) and others to conclude that ‘not all content teaching is necessarily good language teaching’ (p. 68). The challenges of content-based language teaching will be discussed further in Chapter 6.

In the modern world, we often find ourselves in the unnatural position of meeting someone who knows little or nothing about us. That can add a little pressure to the occasion, and it may add more if your mother was prone to saying “You get only one chance to make a good first impression!” You may find yourself scanning the person for feedback so intensively that you start seeing things that aren’t there. A social psychology experiment from the 1980s makes the point. A makeup artist put realistic-looking “scars” on the faces of the subjects, who had been told that the purpose of the experiment was to see how a scar affected the way people reacted to them. The subjects were to have a conversation with someone, and the experimenters would observe the reaction. The subjects were shown their scars in a mirror, but then, right before their social encounter, they were told that the scar needed a bit of work; moisturizer would be added to keep it from cracking. In fact, though, the scar was removed. Then the subjects headed out to their social encounters with a warped idea of what they looked like. After the encounters, they were debriefed: Had they noticed their conversation partner reacting to the scar? Oh yes, many of them said. In fact, when they were shown video of the conversation partner, they could point to these reactions. Sometimes, for example, the person would look away from them—obviously averting their eyes from the scar. So again, a feeling—an uncomfortable feeling of self-consciousness—sponsors a kind of perceptual illusion, a basic misreading of the behavior of others.

But if the same man is in a quiet corner of a bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.2 Here’s another example. One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness has its greatest effect in situations of “high conflict”—where there are two sets of considerations, one near and one far, that are in opposition. So, suppose that you are a successful professional comedian. The world thinks you are very funny. You think you are very funny. If you get drunk, you don’t think of yourself as even funnier. There’s no conflict over your hilariousness that alcohol can resolve. But suppose you think you are very funny and the world generally doesn’t. In fact, whenever you try to entertain a group with a funny story, a friend pulls you aside the next morning and gently discourages you from ever doing it again. Under normal circumstances, the thought of that awkward conversation with your friend keeps you in check. But when you’re drunk? The alcohol makes the conflict go away. You no longer think about the future corrective feedback regarding your bad jokes. Now it is possible for you to believe that you are actually funny. When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes. This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their sober self—without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.” But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations. That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self. So who were the Camba, in reality? Heath says their society was marked by a singular lack of “communal expression.” They were itinerant farmworkers. Kinship ties were weak. Their daily labor tended to be solitary, the hours long.

In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.

Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.

If teachers perceive the sole purpose of observation to be to receive judgmental feedback, we've created a scenario in which the principal is working hard to engage in summative assessment and teachers feel frustrated by the lack of formative opportunities for growth.

Every week, take a quiet hour to reflect on recent critical events—conflicts, failures, opportunities you exploited, observations of others’ behavior, feedback from others. Consider how you responded, what went well, what didn’t, and what might be more effective in the future. Never cancel this meeting—it’s crucial.

I think mentoring is simply an inborn passion and not something you can learn in a classroom. It can only be mastered by observation and practice. I also realized that most mentees select you, and not the other way round. The mentor’s role is to create a sense of comfort so that people can approach you and hierarchy has no role to play in that situation. The mentee has to believe that when they share anything, they are sharing as an equal and that their professional well-being is protected, that they won’t be ridiculed or their confidentiality breached. As a mentor you have to create that comfort zone. It is somewhat like being a doctor or a psychiatrist, but mentoring does not necessarily have to take place only in the office. For example, if I was travelling I would often take along a junior colleague to meet a client. I made sure they had a chance to speak and then afterwards I would give them feedback and say, ‘You could have done this or that’. Similarly, if I observed somebody when they were giving a pitch or a talk, I would meet them afterwards or send them an e-mail to say ‘well done’ or coach them about how they could have done better. This trait of consciously looking for the bright spark amongst the crowd has paid me rich dividends. I spotted N. Chandrasekaran (Chandra), TCS’s current Chief Executive, when he was working on a project in Washington, DC in the early 1990s; the client said good things about him so I asked him to come and meet me. We took it from there. Similarly urging Maha and Paddy to move out of their comfort zones and take up challenging corporate roles was a successful move. From a leadership perspective I believe it is important to have experienced a wide range of functions within an organization. If a person hasn’t done a stint in HR, finance or operations, or in a particular geography or more than one vertical, they stand limited in your learning. A general manager needs to know about all functions. You don’t have to do a deep dive—a few months exploring a function is enough so long as you have an aptitude to learn and the ability to probe. This experience is very necessary today even from a governance perspective.

One of the methods that he and Bowie used on Low was the “Oblique Strategies” he’d created with artist Peter Schmidt the year before. It was a deck of cards, and each card was inscribed with a command or an observation. When you got into a creative impasse, you were to turn up one of the cards and act upon it. The commands went from the sweetly banal (“Do the washing up”) to the more technical (“Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation”; “The tape is now the music”). Some cards contradict each other (“Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities”; “Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics”). Some use Wildean substitution (“Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do”). And several veer towards the Freudian (“Your mistake was a hidden intention”; “Emphasise the flaws”). The stress is on capitalising on error as a way of drawing in randomness, tricking yourself into an interesting situation, and crucially leaving room for the thing that can’t be explained—an element that every work of art needs. Did the Oblique Strategy cards actually work? They were probably more important symbolically than practically. A cerebral theoretician like Eno had more need of a mental circuit-breaker than someone like Bowie, who was a natural improviser, collagiste, artistic gadfly. Anyone involved in the creative arts knows that chance events in the process play an important role, but to my mind there’s something slightly self-defeating about the idea of “planned accidents.” Oblique Strategies certainly created tensions, as Carlos Alomar explained to Bowie biographer David Buckley: “Brian Eno had come in with all these cards that he had made and they were supposed to eliminate a block. Now, you’ve got to understand something. I’m a musician. I’ve studied music theory, I’ve studied counterpoint and I’m used to working with musicians who can read music. Here comes Brian Eno and he goes to a blackboard. He says: ‘Here’s the beat, and when I point to a chord, you play the chord.’ So we get a random picking of chords. I finally had to say, ‘This is bullshit, this sucks, this sounds stupid.’ I totally, totally resisted it. David and Brian were two intellectual guys and they had a very different camaraderie, a heavier conversation, a Europeanness. It was too heavy for me. He and Brian would get off on talking about music in terms of history and I’d think, ‘Well that’s stupid—history isn’t going to give you a hook for the song!’ I’m interested in what’s commercial, what’s funky and what’s going to make people dance!” It may well have been the creative tension between that kind of traditionalist approach and Eno’s experimentalism that was more productive than the “planned accidents” themselves. As Eno himself has said: “The interesting place is not chaos, and it’s not total coherence. It’s somewhere on the cusp of those two.

Each algorithm is a feedback loop, taking an action, observing the resulting conditions, and taking another action after that. Again, and again, and again. It's an iterative process, in which the algorithms adjust themselves and their activity on every loop, responding less to the news on the ground than to one another. Such systems go out of control because the feedback of their own activity has become louder than the original signal.

Tiger, what are you doing out here hitting balls at three a.m.?” “It doesn’t rain very often in Northern California,” replied the kid who went on to become one of the most successful golfers in history. “It’s the only chance I have to practice hitting in the rain.” You might expect this kind of diligence from the best athlete in his field. What is fascinating is how narrow the exercise’s scope was. He wasn’t practicing putting or hitting from a sand bunker. He spent four hours standing in the rain, hitting the same shot from the same spot, pursuing perfection in an intensely specific skill. It turns out that’s the best way to learn. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has studied the acquisition of expert-level skill for decades. The conventional wisdom is that it takes ten thousand hours of effort to become an expert. Ericsson instead found that it’s not about how much time you spend learning, but rather how you spend that time. He finds evidence that people who attain mastery of a field, whether they are violinists, surgeons, athletes,144 or even spelling bee champions,145approach learning in a different way from the rest of us. They shard their activities into tiny actions, like hitting the same golf shot in the rain for hours, and repeat them relentlessly. Each time, they observe what happens, make minor—almost imperceptible—adjustments, and improve. Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation.

The judges believed Uber and Lyft to be more powerful than they were willing to admit, but they also conceded that the companies did not have the same power over employees as an old-economy employer like Walmart. “The jury in this case will be handed a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes,” Judge Chhabria wrote. Judge Chen, meanwhile, wondered whether Uber, despite a claim of impotence at the center of the network, exerted a kind of invisible power over drivers that might give them a case. In order to define this new power, he decided to turn where few judges do: the late French philosopher Michel Foucault. In a remarkable passage, Judge Chen compared Uber’s power to that of the guards at the center of the Panopticon, which Foucault famously analyzed in Discipline and Punish. The Panopticon was a design for a circular prison building dreamed up in the eighteenth century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The idea was to empower a solitary guard in the center of the building to watch over a large number of inmates, not because he was actually able to see them all at once, but because the design kept any prisoner from knowing who was being observed at any given moment. Foucault analyzed the nature and working of power in the Panopticon, and the judge found it analogous to Uber’s. He quoted a line about the “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” The judge was suggesting that the various ways in which Uber monitored, tracked, controlled, and gave feedback on the service of its drivers amounted to the “functioning of power,” even if the familiar trappings of power—ownership of assets, control over an employee’s time—were missing. The drivers weren’t like factory workers employed and regimented by a plant, yet they weren’t independent contractors who could do whatever they pleased. They could be fired for small infractions. That is power. It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself. Its posture is not entirely cynical, though. The technology world has long maintained that the tools it creates are inherently leveling and will serve to collapse power divides rather than widen them.

Getting to market fast allows you to start getting the feedback you need to improve it. Any product that you’ve carefully refined based on your instincts rather than real user reactions and data is likely to miss the mark and will require significant iteration anyway. The ideal is a tight OODA loop—observe, orient, decide, act—over and over again. Speed really matters, and launching early lets you climb the learning curve to a great product faster.

Confidence spark Set aside some time to write about a work issue that has been bothering you but hasn’t been addressed. Get clarity as to what’s really going on. Who is involved? Why are you upset? Do you have a concern about speaking up? Does this remind you of a similar situation from your past? Share your observations with a supportive friend and get some feedback. Agree to

User research, observations, surveys, and customer feedback are all tools that you can harness to better explore the problem from a user standpoint.

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. —Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook VP of user growth

In a speech at Stanford, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former VP of user growth, told the audience, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created [at Facebook] are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”135 When asked about his children’s online habits, he added, “They’re not allowed to use this shit.

SELF-AWARENESS STRATEGIES 1.​Quit Treating Your Feelings as Good or Bad 2.​Observe the Ripple Effect from Your Emotions 3.​Lean into Your Discomfort 4.​Feel Your Emotions Physically 5.​Know Who and What Pushes Your Buttons 6.​Watch Yourself Like a Hawk . . . 7.​Keep a Journal about Your Emotions 8.​Don’t Be Fooled by a Bad Mood 9.​Don’t Be Fooled by a Good Mood, Either 10.​Stop and Ask Yourself Why You Do the Things You Do 11.​Visit Your Values 12.​Check Yourself 13.​Spot Your Emotions in Books, Movies, and Music 14.​Seek Feedback 15.​Get to Know Yourself under Stress

The mindful eating approach, on the other hand, involved cognitive defusion. People are taught to defuse their thoughts as “merely thoughts” and place mental distance between themselves and their thoughts. A defusion response to the thought of needing chocolate would involve simply observing the thought (I notice I’m having the thought that I need to eat some chocolate) and thanking one’s mind for the thought (Thanks, mind).4782 A “mindbus” metaphor is used, in which people are taught to imagine themselves as the driver of a bus and their thoughts as mere passengers.4783 You visualize yourself taking control as you stop the bus and let off the negative passengers. Thanks for the feedback, folks, but this is my bus.

Remember that feedback, like truth, is not absolute. Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.

One thing that helps is to remember that feedback, like truth, is not absolute. Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others. The

Appearance Like it or not, appearance counts, especially in the workplace. Dressing appropriately and professionally is a minimum requirement when applying for a job. Do whatever you can do to make a favorable impression. Dressing appropriately is a way to say that you care about the interview, that it is important to you, and that you take it seriously. It also says you will make an effort to behave professionally once you are with the company. Keep in mind that you are owed nothing when you go on an interview. But behaving professionally by following appropriate business etiquette will nearly always gain you the courtesy of professional treatment in return. The following ideas will help you be prepared to make the best impression possible. In previous exercises, you have examined your self-image. Now, look at yourself and get feedback from others on your overall appearance. Not only must you look neat and well groomed for a job interview, but your overall image should be appropriate to the job, the company, and the industry you are hoping to enter. You can determine the appropriate image by observing the appearance and attitude of those currently in the area you are looking into. But even where casual attire is appropriate for those already in the workplace, clean, pressed clothes and a neat appearance will be appreciated. One young photographer I know of inquired about the style of dress at the newspaper he was interviewing with; informed that most people wore casual clothes, he chose to do the same. At the interview, the editor gently teased him about wearing jeans (she herself was in khaki pants and a sports shirt). “I guess your suit is at the cleaners,” she said, chuckling. But her point was made. Making the effort shows that you take the interview seriously. Second, you should carry yourself as though you are confident and self-assured. Use self-help techniques such as internal coaching to tell yourself you can do it. Focus on your past successes, and hold your body as if you were unstoppable. Breathe deeply, with an abundance of self-confidence. Your goal is to convey an image of being comfortable with yourself in order to make the other person feel comfortable with you.

Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.” To reap the full benefits of OKRs, feedback must be integral to the process. If you don’t know how well you’re performing, how can you possibly get better? Today’s workers “want to be ‘empowered’ and ‘inspired,’ not told what to do. They want to provide feedback to their managers, not wait for a year to receive feedback from their managers. They want to discuss their goals on a regular basis, share them with others, and track progress from peers.” Public, transparent OKRs will trigger good questions from all directions: Are these the right things for me/you/us to be focused on? If I/you/we complete them, will it be seen as a huge success? Do you have any feedback on how I/we could stretch even more?

All dynamic societies founded their success on two production processes that unfolded in parallel: the manufacturing of a surplus and the manufacturing of consent (regarding its distribution). However, the feedback between the two processes grew to new heights in the Age of Capital. The rise of commodification, which also led to the flourishing of finance, coincided with a subtler, more powerful, form of consent. And here lies a delicious paradox: consent grew more powerful the more economic life was financialized. And as finance grew in importance, the more prone our societies became to economic crises. Hence the interesting observation that modern societies tend to produce both more consent and more violent crises.

Exhibit 2.1: Behaviors Driving Teaming Success Speaking Up: Teaming depends on honest, direct conversation between individuals, including asking questions, seeking feedback, and discussing errors. Collaboration: Teaming requires a collaborative mindset and behaviors—both within and outside a given unit of teaming—to drive the process. Experimentation: Teaming involves a tentative, iterative approach to action that recognizes the novelty and uncertainty inherent in every interaction between individuals. Reflection: Teaming relies on the use of explicit observations, questions, and discussions of processes and outcomes. This must happen on a consistent basis that reflects the rhythm of the work, whether that calls for daily, weekly, or other project-specific timing.

Offering input only when problems arise may cause people to see you as unappreciative or petty,” observe the authors of Giving Effective Feedback (Harvard Business Review Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 2014).

Over lunch, Csikszentmihalyi and I talked about children. A little kid’s life bursts with autotelic experiences. Children careen from one flow moment to another, animated by a sense of joy, equipped with a mindset of possibility, and working with the dedication of a West Point cadet. They use their brains and their bodies to probe and draw feedback from the environment in an endless pursuit of mastery. Then—at some point in their lives—they don’t. What happens? “You start to get ashamed that what you’re doing is childish,” Csikszentmihalyi explained. What a mistake. Perhaps you and I—and all the other adults in charge of things—are the ones who are immature. It goes back to Csikszentmihalyi’s experience on the train, wondering how grown-ups could have gotten things so wrong. Our circumstances may be less dire, but the observation is no less acute. Left to their own devices, Csikszentmihalyi says, children seek out flow with the inevitability of a natural law. So should we all.

In other words, the learner plays a more active role in learning in an emotionally and socially supported environment, creating knowledge, while the teacher’s role is somewhat passive, guiding learners in the knowledge creation process. In pedagogy, this scenario is referred to as a dialectic teaching-learning process. As we can see, the dialectic approach has a deeper and critical focus to learning, while the didactic approach is more likely to produce a surface approach to learning. In the dialectic approach, the delivery is so paced and toned that the learners are in a more emotionally and socially comfortable position to engage in reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation stages of the Kolb’s cycle. We can also see student-centred learning from another important point of view: it is possible that individual students get more attention from the teacher to possibly get individual feedback and individual issues addressed for more purposeful learning and development. Also, the teacher gets to know students individually based on the discussions they engage in, thus getting to know their personality traits, as widely referred to by psychologists, so that appropriate personalised feedback can be provided. This learner-centred approach accommodates for a more authentic learning experience for each student, and at the same time, it caters for a more authentic evaluation of individual students.

Three significant processes which took place in the 20th century have completely changed our view of reality: Firstly, the understanding that the world is random and has an inherent component of uncertainty, which doesn’t stem from a lack of information. Quantum theory has taught us that the world at its very base includes components which don’t have certain properties in advance, and that they only appear at random for no reason. Secondly, the understanding that a system which includes components affecting each other is highly sensitive to initial conditions. Chaos theory has taught us that we can never accurately define initial conditions, and so any observation of reality is approximate and will never allow us to accurately predict how the system will develop moving forward. Thirdly, the understanding that nature includes systems which can process internal and external information and develop into very high levels of order, without the need of a planning or overseeing agent. Such systems are based on three principles: random or semi-random movement of components, transmission of information between components (communication, synchronization, physical contact) and feedback between the components and the system itself. The combination of these three principles causes the development of emergent order and organization in the entire system.

The mixed martial arts pioneer and multi-title champion Frank Shamrock has a system he trains fighters in that he calls plus, minus, and equal. Each fighter, to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against. The purpose of Shamrock’s formula is simple: to get real and continuous feedback about what they know and what they don’t know from every angle. It purges out the ego that puffs us up, the fear that makes us doubt ourselves, and any laziness that might make us want to coast. As Shamrock observed, “False ideas about yourself destroy you. For me, I always stay a student. That’s what martial arts are about, and you have to use that humility as a tool. You put yourself beneath someone you trust.” This begins by accepting that others know more than you and that you can benefit from their knowledge, and then seeking them out and knocking down the illusions you have about yourself.

A significant issue they observe is that students’ learning opportunities are restricted when uniformly low expectations are held for student learning or when a teacher’s feedback is either indiscriminant or absent.

I deconstructed what we actually do when we're successful in being wise. The fuel tanks... that contain the propellant that enables you to accelerate at any time are: Recognition of success. Knowing when you've met or exceeded goals, and why... Positive self-talk. This is the psychologically healthy step of generalizing your victories and isolating your defeats, and looking at obstacles as challenges to be overcome and not problems that will sink you. Healthy feedback intolerance. We should listen to those we respect and have asked for advice, and not be battered like a ball in a pinball machine by every random piece of feedback (almost all of which is to benefit the sender, not you). Appropriate avatars. Who are the exemplars we most admire, and how can we emulate the traits that cause us to hold them in such esteem? A dynamically growing skill set. We should be learning daily through our efforts, our coaching of others, our investment in our own development. Social cue adeptness. The ability to understand from your observation and listening what is appropriate behavior or an appropriate response in wildly divergent environments and circumstances. Judgment. The ability to discern between fighting for a principle and surrendering cordially to a matter of taste, and acting appropriately on all occasions.

Teaching academic writing to Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) students is crucial early in their academic journey and should continue throughout their program. Here's a breakdown: Foundation Level (First Year): Introducing basic academic writing skills at the onset helps students develop a strong foundation. This includes understanding essay structure, proper citation methods (APA, MLA), and critical reading and writing skills NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 2. Core Nursing Courses: As students progress into core nursing courses, integrating academic writing into these subjects is beneficial. Assignments related to evidence-based practice, research papers, case studies, and reflective writing can aid in linking theoretical knowledge to practical application through writing.NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 3 Clinical Practice Integration: Incorporating writing assignments that reflect on clinical experiences or patient interactions helps students articulate their observations, reflections, and professional development, enhancing their communication skills.online class help services Advanced Nursing Courses: In advanced years, focus on more complex academic writing, such as scholarly articles, thesis or capstone projects, and literature reviews. This phase aligns with deeper research and specialization within nursing fields. Continuous Improvement: Encourage ongoing improvement by providing resources, workshops, and feedback on writing. Additionally, revisiting and reinforcing academic writing skills periodically ensures students maintain and enhance these crucial abilities.nursfpx.com By introducing and reinforcing academic writing skills across various stages of the BSN program, students develop proficiency in communicating their ideas effectively, a skill essential for their future practice, research endeavors, and professional growth.

Instead of using one exam as the primary summative assessment, he told teachers to use multiple formative assessments along the way—assignments, discussions, observations, and conversations—to inform semester grades. Instead of focusing on getting a grade on a specific exam, he wants students to focus on doing interesting work and teachers to focus on providing meaningful feedback throughout the semester.

Second, sexually selected traits may be shaped through reproductive mate choice, directly favoring sex with an individual who displays particular traits. Mate choice need not be conscious, rational, or deliberative. Mate choice refers to both conscious and unconscious processes that may be either psychological, physiological, or both (Miller, 1998). In the ultimate sense, mate choice occurs whenever an organism shows a higher likelihood of mating with an individual by virtue of that individual’s perceivable traits. If the sexually favored trait is heritable, the trait will be passed on to offspring. If both the trait and the preference for the trait are heritable, a positive feedback loop called “runaway sexual selection” may develop, such that in subsequent generations both the preference for the trait and the trait itself become more pronounced. If the selected traits consistently occur in one sex and preferences for the traits occur in the other sex, then sex differences in the trait tend to develop. For example, mate choice by female stalk-eyed flies has led to males evolving much longer eye-stalks, because males with longer eyestalks are preferred, whereas males show no preference for females with long eye-stalks. Usually, the sexual ornaments favored by mate choice carry useful information about the bearer’s genetic and phenotypic quality, but they are also aesthetically pleasing and attractive to the observer (Waynforth, Delwadia, & Camm, 2005). The attractiveness of the trait is due in part to the adaptations of the displayer and to the adaptations of the beholder (Symons, 1995).

Sudden change is of a different order than feedback or evolution. Observe the whirlpools below a waterfall. For many seasons the eddies stay in the same place no matter whether the water is high or low. Then, suddenly, one more stone falls into the basin, the entire array changes, and the old can never be reconstructed.

Another example of how quantum physics brings the subject back into science is Henry Stapp’s interpretation of the quantum Zeno effect, a phenomenon in physics where repeated observations of a radioactive particle can prevent it from decaying in the usual, predicted manner. Stapp extends this to argue that the deliberate application of mental effort or intention holds in place our brain’s “template for action,” which then produces the brain states that subsequently generate experiential feedback.20 As a result, Stapp contends that we live in “a universe in which we human beings, by means of our value-based intentional efforts, can make a difference first in our own behaviors, then in the social matrix in which we are imbedded, and eventually in the entire physical reality that sustains our streams of conscious experiences.”21 This theory presents a new understanding of ourselves and our place in nature, and raises important sociological and philosophical issues that, according to Stapp, “extend far beyond the narrowly construed boundaries of science.”22

Workshops operate on the golden-rule policy: do for others as you want for yourself. Your fellow classmates will see from your comments what kind of feedback to give no matter how much of a push the instructor gives. Another way to think about questions and possibilities is that it’s about why and how. Instead of saying you liked this or didn’t like that, make an observation about the style or conflict or plot, etc., and ask the author what she meant.

Artificial intelligence expert Roger Schank has an observation about this: He notes that while computers are organized around managing and accessing data, human intelligence is organized around stories.2

When people are in the grip of a threat response, they’re less capable of absorbing and applying your observations.” The best way to make your feedback heard is to make the listener feel safe, and to show that you’re saying it because you care about her and want her to succeed. If you come off with even a whiff of an ulterior motive—you want to be right, you’re judging her, you’re annoyed or impatient—the message won’t get through. This is why positive feedback is so effective. Just ask any preschool teacher or pet owner, and they’ll tell you that recognizing what’s going well is more likely to change behavior than only pointing out mistakes. Saying, “Hey, I thought that thing you did was awesome,” reinforces what you’d like to see more of without being threatening.

Secure bases are sources of protection, energy and comfort, allowing us to free our own energy,” George Kohlrieser told me. Kohlrieser, a psychologist and professor of leadership at the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, observes that having a secure base at work is crucial for high performance. Feeling secure, Kohlrieser argues, lets a person focus better on the work at hand, achieve goals, and see obstacles as challenges, not threats. Those who are anxious, in contrast, readily become preoccupied with the specter of failure, fearing that doing poorly will mean they will be rejected or abandoned (in this context, fired)—and so they play it safe. People who feel that their boss provides a secure base, Kohlrieser finds, are more free to explore, be playful, take risks, innovate, and take on new challenges. Another business benefit: if leaders establish such trust and safety, then when they give tough feedback, the person receiving it not only stays more open but sees benefit in getting even hard-to-take information. Like a parent, however, a leader should not protect employees from every tension or stress; resilience grows from a modicum of discomfort generated by necessary pressures at work. But since too much stress overwhelms, an astute leader acts as a secure base by lessening overwhelming pressures if possible—or at least not making them worse.

John Schmitt, a co-author of a critical Marine Corps Gazette article in 1989, described the new complexity of war this way: “War is fundamentally a far from-equilibrium, open, distributed, nonlinear dynamical system highly sensitive to initial conditions and characterized by entropy production/dissipation and complex, continuous feedback.”146 With that observation in mind, how the Army creates adaptability must also evolve as the service deals with the complexity of 4GW. Schmitt’s work with complexity theory as it applies to war can also be applied to the education and training of leaders.

Having developers share responsibility for the quality of the systems they build not only improves outcomes but also accelerates learning. This is especially important for developers as they are typically the team that is furthest removed from the customer. As Gary Gruver observes, “It’s impossible for a developer to learn anything when someone yells at them for something they broke six months ago—that’s why we need to provide feedback to everyone as quickly as possible, in minutes, not months.

K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has studied the acquisition of expert-level skill for decades. The conventional wisdom is that it takes ten thousand hours of effort to become an expert. Ericsson instead found that it’s not about how much time you spend learning, but rather how you spend that time. He finds evidence that people who attain mastery of a field, whether they are violinists, surgeons, athletes,144 or even spelling bee champions,145 approach learning in a different way from the rest of us. They shard their activities into tiny actions, like hitting the same golf shot in the rain for hours, and repeat them relentlessly. Each time, they observe what happens, make minor—almost imperceptible—adjustments, and improve. Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation.

Children who have a wider range of instant heart response have a more efficient feedback system, and this increased efficiency helps them regulate their emotion state: their heart speed up more when they are excited, and slow down more when they are calm Conscious contemplation takes at least half a second, so anyone who even tries to think about how to return a serve will end up endlessly watching the ball fly by. Their goal is not necessarily to be first but to be just right. An unwanted message might lead us to make a decision too quickly, even if we do not realize it. The greatest comedians are masters of delay most of us could become better communicators without changing a word we say - just by saying some of those words a little bit faster The two most important elements of a relationship are chemistry and compatibility, and a photo won't help you with either Time-based theory of conflict, derived from Sun Tzu, in which the crucial insights for a fighter come in stages: first, observe the rapidly changing environment; second, orient yourself based on these observations, process the disorder, and understand when and how your opponent might become confused; third, decide what to do; and finally, act quickly at just the right moment, when your opponent is most vulnerable. active procrastination is smart: it simply means managing delay, putting of projects that really don't need to be done right away passive procrastination is dumb, equivalent to laziness. This group says proscrastination might be a good or bad, depending on how much effort we put into it.

Gotta go pee first." Nina veered to the toilets. Of course, Ellie knew the reason Nina had to go to the bathroom before they started their short walk to the restaurant- not to pee, but to touch up. Outside there was a whole new crop of people for Nina to present herself to. Ellie didn't mind Nina's preoccupation with her looks. Nina used her beauty like a talent. If her personal presentation looked like a piece of art, it was only natural that people would enjoy looking at her. Ellie made her way to Icky's by crossing the street and turning down Mabon Road. As Ellie walked, she prepared herself for lunch with Nina. She guessed, correctly, that people wondered why Nina kept her so close. Nina was a magnet. Men wanted to marry her, or at the very least, sleep with her. Women wanted to be like her and hoped a little of Nina's casual self-confidence would somehow transfer onto them. But Ellie, being a keen observer of human nature, knew exactly why Nina felt the need to have Ellie in her life. With Ellie, Nina talked and talked about herself and her life, never asking Ellie for her opinion or feedback. It was as close as Nina could possibly get to being by herself, which Ellie suspected she preferred over everyone else's company. Ellie supposed this should bother her, but somehow it didn't. She was amused by Nina's outrageous self-love, but Ellie also knew Nina's friendship forced Ellie into human interaction, which she knew was good for her. Nina was always inviting Ellie to openings or parties. They had even vacationed together in Cabo San Lucas one year.

Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.

we suggest that observers rely primarily on anecdotal feedback during walkthroughs.

But the better you are at asking the right questions, engaging in the right observations, eliciting ideas and feedback through networking with the right people, and running experiments, the less likely you are to fail.

How often do they come to you with helpful suggestions—without you having to ask? How often do they knock on your door and sit down to shoot the breeze or give you a heads-up about a development that may affect you? How does the floor traffic around your desk compare with other colleagues? Are you a popular item, or are you beginning to gather dust on the shelf? If you get even the vaguest sense that there is an imaginary “Do Not Enter” sign outside your office, you’ve just become a little smarter about what you must change. When the issue is negativity, I prefer this form of observational feedback to mere monitoring of speech patterns.

Why is this? How can experience be so valuable in some professions but almost worthless in others? To see why, suppose that you are playing golf. You are out on the driving range, hitting balls toward a target. You are concentrating, and every time you fire the ball wide you adjust your technique in order to get it closer to where you want it to go. This is how practice happens in sport. It is a process of trial and error. But now suppose that instead of practicing in daylight, you practice at night—in the pitch-black. In these circumstances, you could practice for ten years or ten thousand years without improving at all. How could you progress if you don’t have a clue where the ball has landed? With each shot, it could have gone long, short, left, or right. Every shot has been swallowed by the night. You wouldn’t have any data to improve your accuracy. This metaphor solves the apparent mystery of expertise. Think about being a chess player. When you make a poor move, you are instantly punished by your opponent. Think of being a clinical nurse. When you make a mistaken diagnosis, you are rapidly alerted by the condition of the patient (and by later testing). The intuitions of nurses and chess players are constantly checked and challenged by their errors. They are forced to adapt, to improve, to restructure their judgments. This is a hallmark of what is called deliberate practice. For psychotherapists things are radically different. Their job is to improve the mental functioning of their patients. But how can they tell when their interventions are going wrong or, for that matter, right? Where is the feedback? Most psychotherapists gauge how their clients are responding to treatment not with objective data, but by observing them in clinic. But these data are highly unreliable. After all, patients might be inclined to exaggerate how well they are to please the therapist, a well-known issue in psychotherapy. But there is a deeper problem. Psychotherapists rarely track their clients after therapy has finished. This means that they do not get any feedback on the lasting impact of their interventions. They have no idea if their methods are working or failing—if the client’s long-term mental functioning is actually improving. And that is why the clinical judgments of many practitioners don’t improve over time. They are effectively playing golf in the dark.11

The researchers concluded that failure is “ego threatening, which causes people to tune out.” Further support for this explanation came from the fifth study, where participants observed others take similar tests—rather than taking them themselves. This time they learned equally from the failures (and the failure feedback) as from the successes. Without the ego threat, the shortcomings of failure feedback were erased. It seems we’re pretty good at learning from other people’s failures! In real life, however, we often don’t hear about them.

Transformative teaching harnesses social cognitive theory to promote observational learning and modelling behaviours, allowing students to learn from their peers and role models, enriching their understanding and enhancing collaborative learning experiences.