How to Influence Others with Effective Feedback

How to Influence Others with Effective Feedback

How to Influence Others with Effective Feedback

It’s fair to say that communication is imperative and determines the quality of our lives. This is the reason that more and more people are learning NLP because they want to improve their communication skills. They want to improve their results in life and NLP opens up a world of possibilities. In this article I’m going to share with you some of the NLP trade secrets  around the issue of feedback. If you are a manager, a team leader, a coach, a trainer or even a parent you are routinely required to deliver and (interestingly) respond to feedback. Aside from the roles I’ve highlighted above, as individuals, we are constantly getting feedback from other people, which allows you to monitor how it’s going – IF YOU PAY ATTENTION TO IT.
 
Feedback is important, both giving and receiving it and there’s a really effective and influential model we teach in our NLP trainings that allows people to easily change their behaviour. Of course by changing their behaviour they change their results in life. This model of feedback comes from a project that Wyatt Woodsmall was involved with when he worked with US Army to teach officers how to give new recruits effective feedback. Here’s the feedback model that works.
 
What they discovered in terms of delivering influential and effective feedback was as follows.
 
1. Ensure that you give feedback within 5 minutes of the specific behaviour. The reason being is that the Conscious Mind can logically handle delayed response but the Unconscious Mind responds best to immediate feedback and it links the feedback to the behaviour.
 
2. Tell them exactly what they did well. In fact, ONLY tell them what they did well, “You did this well and you did this well” – be very specific & detailed on the behaviours that worked.
 
3. The next step is to tell them what they could do even better next time or what they could do differently next time that would make it even better. The key in this step is to make NO reference to what didn’t work. Focus on the positive and what the person (or group) could do to enable them to get an even better result.
 
By the way this isn’t seeing things through rose tinted glasses or “positive thinking” what you are doing with this model is actually training the mind to focus in on and reinforce positive behaviours. If you tell someone what didn’t work – you are focusing on that which did not work.
 
4. The final step in our effective feedback model is to give the person an overall positive comment. For example: “That was a really, clear and concise presentation.” Or “I was really engaged by what you were doing.” Or “You are really good at this, great job!”
 
 The critical finding from the project and this model is that:
 
If you actually tell someone they did something well, they will do more of it.
 
So in the future when you are in a position where you are managing, coaching, training or parenting ensure you use this model as the intention behind the feedback is for the person to get magnificent results.
 
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