The Gift of Feedback
Image Description: The word “Feedback” spelled out in fabric letters against a reddish wood background. Image used with permission by Frank Liborius Hellweg from Pixabay
I had originally intended to write about feedback in March. Then the pandemic hit and it felt like there were other things that needed to be addressed. When many creative people and their families are facing threats to their livelihoods and lives, writing about feedback seemed a bit off-tune from the times.
Even as 2020 has been tragic, challenging, exhausting, depressing, and frustrating, it has also been a year of feedback to ourselves about what is meaningful in our lives. Many people -- perhaps you -- have experienced a renewed love for and approach to creative practice, either as something that can be done with all that extra time at home, an outlet to deal with existential angst, a fun family activity, or as one of the few things within our control in a time that feels beyond our control.
And so I return to the idea of feedback -- and its twin sister accountability -- as I write the last Creative Resilience blog entry of 2020. There are many forms of feedback out there.
Interested in lots of creative experimentation? The medium can be a form of feedback related to our own temperament and preferences.
Are you a person who prefers working collaboratively with other people or do you make more progress working alone? Do you thrive thinking through concepts visually, aurally, or through the written word? Do you like to tinker with things until you get them to work? Or do you want to do things that can be accomplished quickly? As one example, I love to paint and draw, but have discovered that I am too impatient with watercolors to produce anything but muddy colors and cannot keep inside the lines of coloring book illustrations (check out this one I did recently for an office holiday party activity). I’m a big believer in trying out different things. And an even bigger believer in sticking with the ones that give you joy and potential for development.
Image Description: A coloring book page of a winter scene with a cozy house in the woods with flowers, trees, berries, and snowflakes. The author has no patience for coloring pencils so instead used paint and added a dark starry sky, snow on the ground, and the words “2021 resolution COLOR OUTSIDE THE LINES.”
Having trouble getting started or feeling stuck? Perhaps it’s time for a coach?
Sometimes we face feedback of feeling overwhelmed by where to start or feeling like we can start but never finish projects. That is where a coach can be helpful. A few years ago, I participated in a series of game design coaching sessions with creativity coach Roxanne Jarrett. I made a great deal of progress through this process on a game I had been toying with -- no pun intended -- for more than a decade.
As I was preparing this blog entry, I asked Roxanne more about the role of a coach when it comes to creative practice. For her, the role of a creativity coach is not to give a struggling artist direction. “I think everybody knows where they want to go, “ says Jarrett, “My role is to ask leading questions, so that the person can acknowledge and admit and declare where they want to go. I try to be a calming presence and an encouraging presence. If someone wants to write a five page essay, I might ask them to talk about some of the things they’d like to include, and then ask them to start by writing three sentences. Break down the steps into achievable chunks. As you move up incrementally or move forward incrementally, you'll actually experience a series of small successes that build a momentum that leads you to finishing a monumental project.”
My role is to ask leading questions, so that the person can acknowledge and admit and declare where they want to go.
Image Description: Headshot of Roxanne Jarrett.
Need a check on your goals throughout the creative process? Accountability groups can be an engine for progress.
I read a lot of books this year about the creative process. One of my favorites was Michelle Meek’s The Mastermind Failure Club: A Self-Empowerment Guide for Artists, Filmmakers, Writers and Other Creative Entrepreneurs (it’s free and a very quick read). Mastermind Groups are not a new concept; early 20th century business self-help author Napoleon Hill referenced these peer-to-peer advice groups as ways to build successful businesses strategically. Since artists often operate in entrepreneurial ways, Meek builds on the concept of the Mastermind Group by also incorporating the concept of failure with members reaching to achieve seemingly impossible goals and using the power of peers and regular check ins to help propel those goals forward. She even outlines how to start your own group.
A variation or expansion of Mastermind Clubs are time-based challenges. These offer the combination of a support group and a focus on shorter-term goals - achievements that can be made within a certain timeframe. While these can often be used as a form of accountability (and, let’s be honest, competition) for the sorts of typical things of new year’s resolutions like working out or losing weight, time-based challenges can be applied to creative ventures as well. Goals can be the same (think of NaNoWriMo, the one month novel-writing challenge and its many offshoots) or they can be different but specific with check-ins and milestones (some of my filmmaking colleagues swear by 90-Day Challenges where a group of 6-10 people all keep each other motivated and accountable as they take on progress with editing or distribution goals).
While a one-on-one accountability buddy can work (I referenced my own in an earlier blog post), they may be more of a unicorn to find since you need to find a match in temperaments, commitments, and the ways you each need to give and receive feedback.
Need a reality check? Bring your work-in-progress (and your bravery) to a critique session.
Have you reached a point with your work where you know something may not be working but you are too close to it to know quite what that might be? It may be time for a critique session. While this doesn’t suit every art discipline, it can be particularly helpful with ones where structural changes may be feasible - writing, stageplays, films, and prototype designs suit critiques particularly well.
Getting feedback in this way can be terrifying. You have lived and breathed your work for a long time. Now a group of people you may know and people you may not are coming to spend a brief period with your work and then offer their thoughts on it...thoughts that can be affected by their own life experiences, preconceptions, and personal preferences. If you are getting feedback from other artists, their feedback may reflect how they would have created your art. If you are getting feedback from non-artists, they may not have the shared language or shorthand of your artform. There are a few rules of thumb I recommend for those sharing work that can make the experience most useful:
Listen > Speak: This is a unique opportunity to get a reality check on your art before it is out in the “marketplace.” In the nervousness that often accompanies this experience, some artists can get in their own way by babbling, overintroducing, downplaying, or defending. Keep your remarks to a minimum and spend the rest of the time listening to what your audience has to say. This is also why I would often recommend having someone else facilitate the critique session. That leaves you to focus on the feedback and take notes.
Critique is not Criticism: Critique is not about an audience tearing your art to pieces (though, if you lean sensitive, it can sometimes feel that way). A well-facilitated critique session should bring out what is resonating positively with your audience and what is confusing or challenging them.
Listen for patterns: Invariably your audience will disagree on things. That’s actually a great thing because it is showing that something in your work is engaging them. However, you might get frustrated trying to decide whose advice to take. Instead, listen for patterns. If several people mention that a particular part of your novel or film is confusing, don’t worry as much about what they recommend you do as that they found it confusing. The diagnosis may be more important than the prescription.
Find balance between your artistic vision and this reality check. You might also drive yourself crazy trying to change your work to everyone’s tastes. Having facilitated a lot of critique sessions, I have found that, while the majority of those in the audience (both artists and laypeople) can provide helpful feedback, there are always a few who come with an axe to grind, themes that are peripheral but not central to your art, or a soliloquy disguised as feedback. Don’t let them suck all the air out of your artistic vision.
Breathe after feedback. Speaking of air, you need some fresh air after experiencing a critique session. Put your notes away. Do something unrelated to that work for a week or two. Then come back to it. The feedback that was beneficial will rise to the top. The pattern review will help you come to your own path of how to resolve issues. And your work and your stomach will be the stronger for it.
A Vision Board can be the ultimate reminder to yourself
If you had asked me several years ago about vision boards, I probably would have laughed in your face. They felt like something out of The Secret, a woo-woo pseudo-solution for the gullible. But then this skeptic tried one of my own. I clipped images and words from magazines, old calendars, and postcards. Then I took the ones that spoke the most to me about what I wanted to focus on for the coming year and pinned them to a bulletin board which I then proceeded to place in front of my computer so I would have no choice but to look at it almost every day.
Image Description: The author’s 2020 vision board which includes a collection of images and inspirational sayings, some of which she describes in the next paragraph.
It became a centering force for me. Having it right beyond my eyeline of my home office desk, I would look up at it regularly as a reminder of what was most important to me for 2020: writing my book, making time and space to relax and read, having perseverance and a success mindset, having an oasis, traveling, and learning from everything. Guess what? As we approach year’s end, I have pretty much kept on top of 90% of the things on the vision board. I even found ways to safely travel to see America - through local day trips and watching media of places I long to see. As we are about to begin a new year, I will take down this board and create a new one to envision what I’d like 2021 to be for me. Once a skeptic, I am now sold on the value of vision boards as another tool for accountability.
For myself, this has been a year of new beginnings. A new job. New hobbies like birding and cooking. Most of all, I experienced a renewed love and approach to creative practice and sharing tools and ideas on how to do so with resilience with others. I hope that you are also finding new ways or reigniting old ways to express yourself that will carry you into this new, hopeful, and creative year.
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