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10 Tips for Taking Feedback Like a Pro
How to make your clients feel heard while maintaining your creative integrity
Feedback.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the word we use to describe receiving notes from a client about a piece of creative work can also be used to describe the ear-shattering sound of a howling guitar.
If you operate in a professional creative context outside the arts then you know that making work is only half the story. Certainly as demanding, if not more so, is trying to amend that work to please the people who commissioned it while still preserving its intrinsic creative value.
Your skill at receiving feedback will determine how long, how successful, and how fulfilling your creative career is — however much we’d like to pretend that this isn’t so.
So here are 10 tips for how to take feedback in a way that will make you the first person your clients want to work with, while also ensuring that you don’t spend the rest of your career feeling like a worthless skivvy at the mercy of an utterly unpredictable and wrathful client god.
1. Be an active listener
You know that hoary, old piece of folk wisdom: We have two ears and one mouth, so why do we make so much use of the latter and so little use of the former? Really listening to what someone is saying is tough. Our brains think at four times the speed we process speech, so very often when someone is speaking to us, we’re not actually listening. Instead, we’re thinking about what we’re going to say in response. If you can train yourself to slow down and actively listen to what your client is saying without prejudging where they’re heading, you’ll surprise yourself — and them! Become an active listener and pretty soon you’ll be able to hear the subtext of what they’re saying, even if it is buried deep beneath opaque phrases like “brand stance” and “mandatory deliverables.” Active listening is a skill. Practice it.
2. Ask why
Your number one, A-priority job when your client asks you to make a change is to understand why. If they want to try a different opening shot in your rough cut, then of course you can do that. It’s not a problem. But before you make…
