influence Archives - Zamai Banje

Tag: influence (page 1 of 2)

Corrective Feedback - The Best Form of Feedback

April 7, 2024 / 0 Comments

Corrective Feedback: Give and Receive the Best Form of Feedback

Have you ever worked really hard on something, only to get a shrug or a simple “good job”? This is because most people lack corrective feedback.

We’ve all been there. But what if there was a way to get feedback that actually helps you improve? If you’re serious about rapidly enhancing your skills and achieving your goals, you need the best form of feedback. The kind of feedback that not only points out what you’re doing wrong but shows you how to fix it.

This article will show you exactly how to do that.

You’ll learn the different types of feedback, how to get the best kind of feedback, and how to use mistakes to your advantage.

Corrective Feedback – The Best Form of Feedback

The Importance of Feedback

The ability to gain immediate feedback on your performance is essential for your rapid growth.

Feedback is the information that aids in understanding what has happened. Feedback often works best when it provides useful information that can guide your future learning. To be the best at your work, you must be sensitive to which feedback is useful and tune out the rest.

This means you must always seek the best form of feedback when others choose work with little or no feedback at all.

The Best Feedback Starts by Sharing Your Work

Share your work to gain immediate feedback.

By exposing your work to others for inspection, you will gain unique perspective and insights on making your work better.

Now here are the forms of feedback you should know about.

The Three Forms of Feedback

There are three types of feedback depending on the context it was given.

Outcome Feedback (Are you doing it wrong?)

This feedback tells you about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse (e.g., Getting an A or F in an exam). This type is often easiest to get.

Informational Feedback (What are you doing wrong?)

This feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it. This kind of feedback is easy to obtain when you can get real-time access to a feedback source (e.g., a computer programmer and errors)

Corrective Feedback (How can you fix what you’re doing wrong?):

This is the best kind of feedback to get.

Corrective feedback shows you not only what you’re doing wrong, but how to fix it. This kind of feedback is often available only through a coach, mentor or teacher. And sometimes, it can be provided automatically if you’re using the right study materials.

The best feedback is informative and usable by you when received.

How To Always Get Corrective Feedback

To consistently receive corrective feedback, you can follow these strategies:

Seek out coaches, mentors, or teachers: Having a mentor or coach who is an expert in the field you’re learning can be invaluable. They can observe your work, identify areas for improvement, and provide specific guidance on how to correct mistakes and enhance your skills.
Utilize interactive learning materials: Look for resources that incorporate quizzes, answer explanations, or interactive exercises that point out mistakes and offer solutions.
Participate in peer review or study groups: Join or form study groups or peer review circles where members can provide feedback on each other’s work. This collaborative approach allows you to receive constructive criticism and learn from the perspectives of others.
Practice self-reflection and self-assessment: Develop the habit of critically evaluating your own work. After completing a task or project, review it with a critical eye and try to identify areas for improvement. Then, research or seek guidance on how to address those areas.
Request detailed feedback: When receiving feedback from others, whether it’s a teacher, mentor, or peer, explicitly ask for specific, corrective feedback. Instead of general comments, request that they point out what needs to be improved and provide suggestions on how to correct it.
Implement feedback and track progress: Once you receive corrective feedback, make a conscious effort to implement the suggested improvements. Track your progress over time to see how effectively you’re incorporating the feedback and improving your skills.

Lastly, Let Your Mistakes Guide You

Take mistakes seriously, but never personally.

Always be wide open to every bit of information you receive about your work. Then develop the habit of attending to your errors right away. Don’t wince or don’t close your eyes. Look straight at these errors and see what happened, and ask yourself what you can do next to improve.

Your mistakes are the guideposts you use to get better.

March 3, 2024

Productize Yourself: Become The Best at What You Do

“PRODUCTIZE YOURSELF: Productize has specific knowledge and leverage. Yourself has uniqueness and accountability. Yourself also has specific knowledge. So you can combine all of these pieces into these two words.”

This term Productize Yourself is popularized by the Angel Investor – Naval Ravikant. Naval is an investor, who invested early in companies like Uber or Notion. He is also an entrepreneur, co-founding AngelList.

As a product manager, I’ve always been fascinated by this concept and in recent times, I decided to take a deeper look at this notion of productizing yourself.

What does it Mean to Productize Yourself

Productizing yourself means that you must figure out what you’re uniquely good at and apply as much leverage as possible. It’s like taking the best of what you are and packaging it in a way that creates value for others. This concept is common in entrepreneurship, freelancing, consulting, and personal branding.

And you can apply this concept to yourself today.

Productize Yourself

Start with Leverage

Making impact and building influence requires leverage.

To Leverage is to use ‘something’ to its maximum advantage. In this context, that ‘something’ is yourself. How can you fully optimize your skills, knowledge, and experience?

And there are many ways to build leverage.

Leverage can be built through labor or capital. However, these kinds of leverage are gifts from other people. For labor, somebody must follow you. To obtain capital, someone must give you money, assets to oversee or equipment.

Yet, there is a new form of leverage.

Leverage with Code and Media to fully productize yourself

These include books, media, movies, and codes. With this new form of leverage, you can easily package your knowledge with the intention of making it simple to duplicate and distributing them to everybody without having to pay significant additional expenses. Naval called them ‘products of no marginal cost of replication’.

This is the perfect strategy for productizing yourself.

You can locate your audience by searching the internet and social media platforms. And you can use the internet to express yourself uniquely, grow a business, provide value, and make people happy. Any specialized interest can be pursued online, provided you’re the best at it.

All you need is your phone (or a computer) —you don’t need anyone’s permission.

If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts – Naval Ravikant

Be Credible and Accountable

Intentions don’t matter. Actions do – Naval Ravikant

To get the best of your leverage, you must establish credibility and accountability.

Credibility is risky because you have to do everything in your own name. On the other end, accountability has two drawbacks. It enables you to accept responsibility for successes and bear the consequences when things go wrong.

But imagine this…

You’re waiting for the chance to shine when something new comes along that requires your set of skills. Meanwhile, you have built your brand on LinkedIn, on X and by constantly sharing your knowledge. You took some risks to establish your reputation. When it’s time to seize the opportunity, you can do so by applying as much leverage as you possibly can.

That’s what being accountable will help you.

You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time. – Naval Ravikant

And here is the last step.

Be Authentic to truly Productize Yourself

No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most. – Naval Ravikant

There will always be competition out there.

Finding your unique skill set and being authentic are the keys to breaking free from the competition trap. No one will be able to compete with you because you love what you do, so you know how to do it better.

The good news is that, despite our individual differences, everyone excels at being themselves.

Remember this as well…

Make your most important decisions when you are determining what is right to do and who is best to collaborate with. The real secret to making major improvements in both your financial and personal relationships is staying committed and positive in the long term.

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true. – Naval Ravikant

February 26, 2024

Positive Leader: Avoid These Mistakes to Truly Change People

The role of a positive leader is to coach, guide and inspire others.

To perform this role excellently, a leader’s job often includes changing your people’s attitudes and behavior. And there are mistakes you must avoid in performing this role of positively influencing people for good.

Positive Leader: Avoid These Mistakes to Truly Change People for Good

These suggestions being shared are from the book – How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Over 30 million copies have been sold worldwide, and even recommended by Warren Buffet. Carnegie’s book is full of timeless wisdom and insights that you can use to bring out the best in your relationships.

Now, here are the mistakes you must avoid in exhibiting positive leadership:

MISTAKE #1: Starting with the criticism and fault-finding.

To be a positive leader, you must avoid criticizing the people who look up to you.

If you must find faults, begin with praise and honest appreciation. It is always easier to listen to unpleasant things after we have heard some praises of our good points. This makes your leadership more friendly and constructive to those around you.

Avoid the mistake of starting with condemnation and destructive criticism.

MISTAKE #2: Directly calling attention to the mistakes of others.

To be a positive leader, you must call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.

Many people begin their criticism with sincere praise followed by the word ‘but’ and ending with a critical statement. You can easily overcome this by changing the word ‘but’ to ‘and’. This is a more effective way to correct mistakes of other people.

By doing this, you can constructively criticize others and not get hated for it.

MISTAKE #3: Not talking about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.

You can expect anybody to instantly understand your perspectives, your judgment, your initiative on specific matters.

This is why you must first share your lessons learned when you found yourself in similar situations It is easier to listen to a list of your shortcomings if the one giving you criticism starts off by genuinely admitting that they are far from perfect as well.

Talk about your own mistakes first.

MISTAKE #4: Giving direct orders instead of giving suggestions.

Most leaders make the mistake of giving the people the opportunity to do things in their own way.

Always give suggestions, not orders. Ask them questions to get their perspectives on how they can perform the stated tasks. Not only does asking questions eventually make your order more appealing, but it also frequently encourages the creative thinking of the people you ask. If they were involved in the decision that led to the issuance of the order, they are more likely to obey it.

Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.

MISTAKE #5: Making the other person feel foolish and ashamed.

Do not say or do anything that diminishes someone in their own eyes.

Even if you are right and the other person is wrong, you only destroy their dignity and self-esteem when you humiliate and publicly embarrass people. This in turn negatively influences how people will view your leadership and impact you want to make. Don’t be a sadist.

Always let the other person maintain their social standing and reputation in the eyes of others.

MISTAKE #6: Refusing to celebrate the improvements of others.

The abilities of people wither under criticism and blossom under encouragement.

Make people feel seen and appreciated. Everybody likes to be praised, and when the praise is specific, it comes across as sincere – not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good. This is how you inspire others to achieve success.

Praise the slightest improvement and celebrate every improvement.

MISTAKE #7: Assuming people will always have a bad reputation.

As a leader looking to influence people positively, seek to give everyone a good name.

If you want to improve a person in a certain aspect, act as though that particular trait was already one of their outstanding characteristics. Declare this to them openly and they will double their effectiveness because of your positive belief in them.

Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

MISTAKE #8: Making it difficult for people to correct their mistakes.

Encourage people freely.

Express your belief that the other person can make the necessary corrections. Remind them time and time again that they have a natural gift for this quality. When you do this, that person will practice continually to excel.

Use encouragement and make the fault seem easy to correct.

MISTAKE #9: Forcing the other person to do what you suggest.

Make people glad to do what you want.

Forget about the benefits to yourself and concentrate on the benefits to the other person. When doing this, don’t promise anything that you cannot deliver. Be sincere.

Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

That’s all.

It is important to note that these suggestions shared in this article will work only when they come from your heart. This is not a bag of tricks. It’s a new way of life.

If you will inspire and positively influence people with whom you come in contact to a realization of the hidden treasures they possess, you can do far more than change people.

You can literally transform them.