Without feedback, we can not be objective about our own work.   With feedback, our work becomes more.  It broadens.  It deepens.  It grows and takes on meaning beyond our limited perspective.  When we receive, orient ourselves to, and incorporate feedback we enrich the product of our activities.  It’s not just about work.  This applies to our inner lives as well.

Once I got past my bubble bursting with recent feedback from a couple of readers of my manuscript and proposal, I reflected on what was said.  Once I oriented myself to my vision for publishing my series, it became clear that the feedback, bubble bursting and rewriting is exactly what I need.  Once I got over myself, I started punching the keyboard keys with enthusiasm again.  A sense of bettering myself and my work sprang up from within.  Really listening to the feedback and taking action allowed a connection to more than myself to emerge.

Isn’t this the case for any endeavor of ours?  It’s frightening to reveal ourselves.  We fear being picked apart, criticized and even shunned.  What we get from putting ourselves out into the open is always different from we anticipate.  Sometimes it’s not as bad.  Sometimes it’s not as good.  It all depends on our hubris going into the opening up of ourselves to the world.

“If we don’t communicate with the outside world – to gain information for knowledge and understanding as well as matter and energy for sustenance – we die out and become a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world.”
Frans P.B. Osinga in Science, Strategy and War