In my previous post, I discussed the first few pages of Quiet Leadership. Again this book has continued to amaze me. The section that really spoke to me is that leaders focus on accentuating the positive. He discussed how much time the majority of us spend being rough on ourselves and beating ourselves up. Even more telling is the fact that the majority of people the majority of the time do not react positively to negative feedback. David Rock even suggests that we only probably get five minutes of positive feedback a year.
What really struck me was the science behind how our inner voice can prevent us from doing our best. Every person needs positive feedback to help allow our mind to quiet the fear and self-doubt so we can have our best performance. I fell in love with these questions and am pondering how to adapt them in my work.
- What did you do well and what did you discover about yourself as a result?
- What were the highlights of this project and what did you learn?
- What went well and would you like to talk about how to do more of this?
- What did you do well and what impact do you this had on everyone else?
The reason I love this is because as my own worst critic and really don’t need help to reflecting on the mistakes. I need someone to help me focus on positives and help drive me to repeat the things that work.
My reading habits are unique and I tend to read about 3-5 different books at a time. During this time, one of my other books is Feminist Fight Club by Jessica Bennett. Her part two really spoke to me. She discussed how so many women have a constant deluge of negative self-talk and how we may sabotage ourselves in the work place. We down play our successes by humble bragging,shifting credit to others or feeling like an impostor.
I bring this up because as educators we are helping to create the inner voice of our students. We need to help create the habits of positive self-talk and celebrating successes. We also need to model habits that we would want our students to have It is time for us to own our success and focus on creating more successes. As leaders in school, it is important make sure that we are giving our teachers continuous positive feedback to help teachers become even greater.
I am challenging myself to start giving more specific positive feedback to others and to myself. It’s time to create a revolution of positive feedback.