Knowing your pillars are essential for creating success in our lives and understanding work-life balance. Monday was the first session for the new business dads pathway. The first session is to get clear on our pillars and build the feedback we need.
The key is understanding your pillars, what you get out of them, and what you need to put into them.
I get business dads to write down and take time to fill out their pillars. By doing this, we can build out a vision, understand the values (more of values here) and ultimately identify their purpose.
As one business dad mentioned:
“By completing the pillars exercise, I now understand what to focus on and, more importantly, what not to focus on.”
If you are interested in a pillar sheet, drop me a message or email [email protected].
Feedback
The second part of the first session on the pathway is feedback.
Feedback in professional sports always happens; it’s needed to support performance and help the athlete improve. This is the same for business dads, but getting feedback can be difficult and requires openness. We must be willing to accept feedback, even if it is hard to hear.
Learning to ask for and receive constructive criticism can help you develop your skills and build greater self-awareness. It enables you to understand how we’re doing on a day-to-day basis.
The two ways that I strongly encourage business dads on the pathway are to get feedback.
Self Feedback Review
Self-feedback is essential in developing our skills. This involves reflections and understanding what works, what doesn’t and why it may not have worked. It helps you understand how to make improvements for the future.
The simplest way to do it is taking 5-10mins at the end of the day to ask the following question to yourself.
- What went wrong today?
- What went well today?
- How can I improve?
Three-level Feedback
The Three-level Feedback is a way of receiving feedback from friends, family and colleagues. This enables you to get an overall understanding of how your actions have impacted others. It contains the same three questions as above:
- What went wrong today?
- What went well today?
- How can I improve?
You ask three people to give you honest feedback every two to three weeks for 2-3 months. It’s a fantastic process as it enables you to create actions and movements to improve. It is in addition, it’s a tremendous self-awareness review.
Once you have completed the self and three-level review, the next step would be to look at one event that happened, positive or negative, and achieve a reflective practice. The tool I get business dads to use is Gibb’s Reflective Practice.
Graham Gibbs developed Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle to structure learning from experiences and also feedback. It presents a framework for examining experiences and, given its cyclic nature, lends itself particularly well to repeated experiences. This is important when getting consistent feedback, allowing you to learn and create an action plan from things that either went well or didn’t.
It covers six stages:
- Description of the experience or situation
- Feelings and thoughts about the experience
- Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad
- Analysis to make sense of the situation
- Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently
- Action plan for how you would deal with similar problems in the future or general changes you find appropriate.
Check out my video here, where I look at how to build feedback into your day.
Understanding your pillars and creating the continuous feedback you need will help make better performance in those pillars. It’s not easy to ask for or receive feedback, but it can be done with practice and commitment. You will improve as a business dad if you are willing to learn and grow.
Drop me a message or email if you want to chat about the business dads pathway.
Lee